The Particular Signifi cance of Social Networking Sites for Anthropology
The study of digital anthropology juxtaposes two terms. Anthropology is tradition-ally associated with the study of custom and tradition in small-scale societies rather than with the cutting edge of modernity. Then there is the digital, which, by contrast, seems to ratchet up the speed of social change and represents the epitome of rapid transformation. It is no surprise that social networking sites (SNS), the very latest of the major digital media, seem also to have been the fastest in terms of their abil-ity to become a global infrastructure. The fi rst mass usage of SNS was probably that of Cyworld in Korea in 2005, but the best known is the rise of Facebook from an instrument for connecting students at Harvard University to become, within six years, a site used by half a billion people. Facebook has seen recent growth areas in countries such as Indonesia and Turkey and is heading towards older rather than younger persons.
If the rapidity of the development of SNS seems antithetical to anthropology, then their substance seems to suggest close affi nity. After all, the very term social networking could have been a defi nition of an anthropological perspective as against, for example, that of psychology. Anthropologists refused to study persons as mere individuals, but, as in the study of kinship, an individual was regarded as a node in a set of relationships, a brother’s son or sister’s husband, where kinship is understood to be a social network. In contrast to anthropology, sociology was principally con-cerned with the consequences of an assumed decline from this condition as a result of industrialization, capitalism and urbanism. Still, many of today’s most infl uential books in sociology—such as Putnam’s (2001) Bowling Alone, Sennett’s (1977) Fall of Public Man and works by Giddens, Beck and Bauman—remain clearly within this dominant trajectory. In all such work, there is an assumption that older forms of tight social networking colloquially characterized by words such as community or neighbourhood are increasingly replaced by individualism.
Furthermore within sociology there has been an increasing interest in the idea that these individuals are best understood as networked. So the idea of social networking
Social Networking Sites • 147 matched the developments in theory associated with Castells, Granovetter and Wellman (though probably not Latour, who uses the idea of a network for the rather different purpose of incorporating nonhuman agency). Castells made dramatic claims about the rise of the Internet and how ‘Our societies are increasingly struc-tured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self’ (1996: 3). Over three volumes, Castells (2000) presented what he termed the ‘network society’, though the main focus was on presumed linkages between new information technologies and new forms of political economy, governance, power and globalization. Coming after the fashion for postmodernism in academic theory, these developments in network-ing were seen as further extensions of an assumed individualism and fragmentation in modern life.
The theorist who has done the most to keep open the dialogue between online and offl ine forms of sociality has been Barry Wellman (Boase and Wellman 2006).
In his case, it is location-based networking such as neighbourhoods and community that have been, in some measure, replaced by Internet-based networking. Research suggested that online networking may foster a renewal of some degree of offl ine sociality in new residential settlements (Hampton and Wellman 2003). A further in-fl uence was the work of Granovetter (1973), who suggested that sometimes people’s weaker and more distant ties could be highly signifi cant—not just their immediate, strong ties. This seemed important for Internet communities which were often partial and transitory.
Postill (2008) provides an anthropological critique of this work (see also Woolgar 2002), urging caution in using the older terminology of community and neighbour-hood, but also noting the increasing fetishism of the term network arising from this new sociological subdiscipline of social network analysis. Instead (as in this vol-ume), he favoured a more nuanced and contextualized ethnography of the many different social fi elds in which people engage on—for example short-term activist-related political collectives that emerged from his fi eldwork in a Malaysian suburb.
This view was supported by Miller and Slater (2000), who had criticized Castells but also argued that Internet-based networks were too dispersed and partial to equate with these older forms of sociality.
The premise of this chapter, however, is that SNS correspond neither to the so-ciological work of Castells and Wellman on networks nor to the critiques of Postill, Miller and Slater. Rather, SNS have turned out to be something much closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship stud-ies. The critical points made by Postill, Miller and Slater followed evidence that Internet networks tended to be specialist and partial, associated with specifi c inter-ests. By contrast, SNS are, in several important respects, quite the opposite of the earlier Internet. On Facebook, peer-to-peer friendships were joined by family and kin-based networks and, in some cases, also saw the dissolution of the distinctions between home and work (Broadbent 2011), thereby bringing together in one place what had been separate networks. As such, SNS challenge the fundamental premise
that separates sociology from anthropology: that the overlapping social relationships that were foundational to anthropological study inevitably decline towards the more separated-out networks that are central to sociology.
A similar problem arises with the idea of networked individualism as fostered by Castells and Wellman. To preempt my second case study on usage by migrants, a recent article by McKay (2011) demonstrates the fl aws in such arguments. McKay has been working for many years with people from the northern Philippines and with their dispersed migrant families. She notes how those who remain in the Philippines often juxtapose their presentation of themselves on SNS with old black-and-white historical photographs of kin. In addition, they use photographs of old buildings from the local town or iconic photographs from collections made about the Philippines in older times. They recognize that when a family member in the diaspora comes to their site, they have to represent not just an autonomous individual, but a node within an extended and ancestral family and site. McKay theorizes that these extensions, using the work of Strathern (1996) and Melanesian concepts of personhood, are pre-mised on entirely different concepts of the person from the individualism presumed by Wellman.
From this evidence we may construct a larger argument. Instead of focusing on SNS as the vanguard of the new, and the rapidity of its global reach, it may well be that SNS are so quickly accepted in places as such as Indonesia and Turkey because their main impact is to redress some of the isolating and individualizing impacts of other new technologies and allow people to return to certain kinds of intense and interwoven forms of social relationship that they otherwise feared were being lost.
SNS have, then, an extraordinary ability to return the world to the kinds of sociality that were the topic of traditional anthropological concern and, as such, are hugely important to contemporary anthropology and the future of the discipline. As sug-gested in the introduction to this volume, we have most to learn from the normativity quickly imposed upon these technologies.
Studies of SNS
The fi rst attempt to create a more systematic engagement with SNS was probably that of danah boyd building on her initial thesis work on platforms such as Friendster.
Her review (boyd and Ellison 2007) of the history and range of SNS has become even more important now that journalistic treatments (and the infl uential fi lm The Social Network) seem to be simplifying that history as though there was some inevi-table trajectory that led towards the current dominance of Facebook, based on the particular personality and vision of Mark Zuckerberg. By contrast, boyd shows that Facebook arose alongside a whole slew of SNS and that much of what subsequently developed was more happenstance than intention. SNS could migrate quickly from their intended base and their intended function. So a US site such as Orkut could end
Social Networking Sites • 149 up as the main SNS of Brazil, and a dating site such as Friendster could evolve into a very different genre that dominated SNS usage in South East Asia. At least initially, movement was rapid between SNS, most conspicuously in the rise and decline of MySpace, whose impact was less on sociality per se than on new ways of disseminat-ing music to mass audiences. Cyworld was already almost ubiquitous amongst South Korean youth by 2005 and remains dominant there. So the triumph of Facebook may not refl ect any particular superior functionality, but merely the overwhelming desire of everyone to be on the same site combined with a unique ability to spread through emulation. Just as US colleges took to Facebook in emulation of its origins at Harvard, so I could observe, over the course of 2009 to 2010, how Facebook took over from Friendster in the Philippines, principally based on the prestige of early adoption in key Manila universities.
Recent anthropological work, including that of boyd, Heather Horst and Mimi Ito (Ito et al. 2010), looks at more general use within friendship circles of teenag-ers in the United States, while Gteenag-ershon (2010) has documented the importance of Facebook in relationship breakup amongst US students. All such work contributes to what has probably become the single most sustained discussion of the implica-tions of SNS, which was predicted in the title of boyd’s (2008) article, ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck’. The argument was that the ideology behind Facebook, where the default was complete openness, had led users into a level of public exposure that was both unintended and could have quite problematic consequences (especially for children; see Livingstone 2008, 2009). Questions arose as to whether individuals’
relationships could be threatened by the evidence of who else they spent time with, or whether having fun misbehaving at a party could result in being refused a job, as employers inspected applicants’ Facebook pages. The ultimate threat was the ex-posure of children to sexual predation. As anthropologists have noted, SNS simply do not correspond to more traditional oppositions between a public sphere and the private (boyd 2007; Gershon 2010). Rather, SNS such as Facebook tend to refl ect an aggregate of an individual’s private spheres, the previously dyadic contact with each friend or relative co-present in the same space. This is not at all the same as broadcasting to a more general public, though the latter may be fostered in the more journalistic style of Twitter.
There is a singularly important trajectory from the work of anthropologists who are focused on issues of privacy and exposure in private and intimate life to the in-creasing concern with the same conundrum about exposure and privacy in respect to politics. The point is evident in the contrast between two recent high-profi le books about SNS. The Facebook Effect (Kirkpatrick 2010) starts with a story about how a Facebook site became the catalyst for a popular movement in Colombia, mobilizing ten million people in street demonstrations, which curbed the violence and kidnap-ping by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement. By contrast, Morozov (2011), in The Net Delusion suggests that the claims made for Twitter and Facebook in facilitating the
Green protests in Iran were wildly exaggerated. He suggests that there is rather more evidence that these media represent documentation that can be used by repressive regimes for locating and suppressing dissent (see Postill, this volume). Similar issues arise on the development side of anthropological work, where SNS have been instru-mental in relief efforts ranging from typhoons in the Philippines to earthquakes in Haiti—but, again, we lack the ethnographic evidence to properly assess such claims.
Case One: The Comparative Anthropology of SNS
One would expect that a major part of any anthropological contribution to the study of SNS would be that of cultural relativism, based on the assumption that differ-ent regions gradually appropriate SNS through processes of localization to emerge as specifi c to the cultural concerns of that region. A classic argument of that kind, though not strictly related to SNS, was Humphrey’s (2009) study of Russian chat rooms. She notes how many users view their avatars and other aspects of their online presence in a singularly Russian manner. As one of her informants puts it, ‘The ava-tar is not designed to demonstrate the person’s face. It should convey the inner state of the person, his soul, one might say, or the condition of his soul’ (40–1). The ana-logy, familiar from Russian literature, is that ordinary life is a suppression of the true inner being of the person, which lies deep in the soul and which is both profound and expressive. Viewing these avatars as somehow closer to that inner being and capable of the more direct expression of powerful emotions suggests that online activity ac-cords with what has been taken as quintessentially Russian (compare Miller 2011:
40–52, on the idea of Facebook as the book of truth).
As already noted, notwithstanding all the current attention to Facebook, the fi rst signifi cant establishment of SNS was Cyworld which was ubiquitous amongst South Korea youth by 2005. Studies by Hjorth (2009, 2010) and others (e.g. Qiu 2009) suggest that many features of this and other East Asian SNS closely refl ect the un-derlying cultural priorities of those regions. For example, in Cyworld, one’s friends and contacts are subject to a series of circles from the closest to the most distant.
This seems to be modelled on the same idea of concentric circles as defi ned within Korean kinship. East Asian sites also tend to use a genre of the ‘cute’, which is seen as a kind of warm domestication of what otherwise might be experienced as the colder edge of new technologies. SNS such as QQ in China show more concern with the development of an avatar than the mere representation of the user and have tighter integration of gaming. Far more money tends to be spent on the ‘interior decoration’ of such sites, all of which suggests that there are elements which may be distinctly regional.
After using anthropological relativism to establish regional difference, we are then in a position to engage in the comparative analysis of SNS. The potential is evi-dent in the work of Stefana Broadbent (2011, also this volume), who has developed
Social Networking Sites • 151 the concept of attention. Synchronous communication such as instant messaging or phone calls demand immediate attention from one’s correspondent, and this claim to attention raises various issues of power and control. By contrast, Facebook is one of the least engaging and demanding channels. Being a semipublic act, a post-ing is not to anyone in particular and so doesn’t require or demand the attention of any other particular correspondent. The signifi cance of Broadbent’s point becomes much clearer through her comparison of Facebook and Cyworld. If in Cyworld you agree to be a Cy-ilchon—a very close relation—then you are socially bound by expectations of immediate reciprocity to comment on each other. Most people have fewer than twenty Cy-ilchons. So Cyworld comes with the demands for attention and the burdens of intense sociality that are what make media such as e-mail and instant messaging feel a bit like work, even when they are used for leisure communication.
This is in clear contrast to Facebook.
This stage of comparative studies is based on noting the differences between re-gions with respect to their particular dominant SNS. But the possibility of making such comparisons might seem negated by the rise of Facebook at the expense of all other alternative SNS. Once Facebook becomes globally ubiquitous, then the only way we can retain the insights of comparison is by focusing instead upon the regional differences of the use of Facebook. So, for example, we can still address Broadbent’s issue of attention by noting that, in the Philippines, there seems to be much more pressure to respond to postings by friends than there is in the United Kingdom.
At the same time, there are dangers in any claim to localized difference. For example several commentators have suggested that Facebook is some kind of ema-nation or refl ection of the neoliberalism of the contemporary US political economy, and that Happy Farm, the most popular SNS-related game in China, differs from the Facebook equivalent, Farmville, because stealing crops is an integral element in the former but not the latter. The presence of stealing is claimed to show the ambivalence felt in China towards capitalism as represented in the game. But it would be just as easy to argue that China today is far less ambivalent about capitalism than most other regions. Arguments about comparison and regional localism need to be based on more sustained analysis of wider contexts of usage rather than glib assertions that SNS must embody the entire political economy of their context.
In our earlier study of the Internet in Trinidad (Miller and Slater 2000), we argued for a larger dialectical analysis. Most studies at that time understood their brief as documenting processes of globalization and localization. So they might have writ-ten an account of what happens to the Internet when it becomes appropriated by Trinidadians. But we argued that there simply was no such thing as the Internet per se. Rather, the Internet was that which people engaged in online in some particular place. We should not privilege US or UK usage as the Internet, which could be equally exemplifi ed by each and every place. With respect to any given region, we could only document what the Internet is through its use by Trinidadians, or what Trinidadians had become thanks to the Internet. A similar argument is implied by
the very way Trinidadians talk about Facebook. Quite often the site is referred to as either Fasbook or Macobook. In Trinidadian dialect, to be fas is to try and get to know another person rather too quickly, as compared to the accepted etiquette. To be maco is to be nosy, constantly prying into other people’s private business. Since both of these terms are seen as particularly characteristic of Trinidadian behaviour, there seems to be a natural affi nity between the propensity within the infrastructure of Facebook itself and the cultural inclination of Trinidadians. A leading historian of Trinidad told me a story about how, when the Caribbean islands were considering coming together in a united political entity in the late 1950s, they decided against
the very way Trinidadians talk about Facebook. Quite often the site is referred to as either Fasbook or Macobook. In Trinidadian dialect, to be fas is to try and get to know another person rather too quickly, as compared to the accepted etiquette. To be maco is to be nosy, constantly prying into other people’s private business. Since both of these terms are seen as particularly characteristic of Trinidadian behaviour, there seems to be a natural affi nity between the propensity within the infrastructure of Facebook itself and the cultural inclination of Trinidadians. A leading historian of Trinidad told me a story about how, when the Caribbean islands were considering coming together in a united political entity in the late 1950s, they decided against