Media and Technology Through Three Lenses

Applying the three perspectives to one case means asking what a new communication platform accomplishes for social stability, whose position it protects, and what its use means to the people adopting it.

Take a video-sharing platform reaching global popularity within a few years. The functionalist question, from Soc 1703, asks what the platform accomplishes: a shared cultural reference point and an outlet for productive and leisure activity that functionalists read as socially stabilizing. The conflict question, from Soc 1705, asks whose position the platform protects: the company controlling its algorithm decides whose content reaches the largest audience, concentrating influence in ways that echo the ownership pattern Soc 1705 names, while creators in lower-bandwidth regions face a real access barrier the platform does not equalize. The interactionist question, from Soc 1707, asks what using the platform means to the people on it: a creator building a curated persona constructs an identity through the platform's own symbols, distinct from any offline self. None of the three lenses settles whether the platform is good for the communities using it; each reaches a different part of the mechanism.