Facebook: Divine or Mundane? (Part 2)

Some more highlights from the ongoing discussion with Daniel Miller at the OAC. These comments build on my previous entry with a focus on the use of Facebook and the web in memoriam.

See my previous blog post and read Daniel's reply for context.

I agree, Facebook can give rise to new social dramas and activities due to its efficacy on a number of levels, which does initially strike us as being brand new. But to me its "newness" is more because of the old things that it combines in new-ish ways.

This is still a fresh and only marginally constructed argument for me. Apologies if it appears disjointed, but I am taking advantage of this forum to float some new ideas. I certainly agree that the degree of change Facebook has fostered is worth sitting up and taking notice of. Yet I believe that there are two points of continuity - rather than disjuncture - worth keeping in mind to make sense of its novelty: first, its relationship to earlier (and lingering) manifestations on the web, and secondly, to offline sociality. I'll continue with the example of mourning to illustrate.

FB is not the first - and is presently not the only - site on the Internet where memorialization has taken(takes) place. Apparently, this is common now in Second Life and WoW, Myspace, etc, and I have memories of it from Livejournal, IRC and websites in the late 90s/early 2000s. I argued earlier that, overall, the web has characteristics that are ideal for co-optation for religious-like activities, including memorialization. Those features include potential permanence of text and imagery, speed and democratic access, design and aesthetics, ease of construction of memorials and pages that can be dynamic and amended by many. Other characteristics are particularly important for what they share with offline equivalents, like wakes, funerals, newspapers, scrapbooks and posters: co-presence, collaboration and record-keeping.

In the late 1990s, when people still made personal websites by entering basic HTML on Geocities and "guestbooks" were proto-Facebook "walls", scrawling personal messages, eulogies and obituaries in memoriam was fairly common behavior. "Web rings" linked individual pages to a broader network, where mourners could share their memorials. I remember a pet memorial web ring in particular from the late 1990s. Web rings never had Facebook's built in connectivity – this was enabled by evolved design infrastructure later on – but it shows that the early web (Web 1.0) was not merely comprised of people shouting into the dark all alone. People specifically sought to link up their individual creations to something bigger (back to Keith's post above), to give them lasting presence. This was especially the case with memorials.

Creating an interactive "page" (shrine or monument) to memorialize a loved one is therefore not new to the web. I made some when I was in school and, more recently, I saw a standalone page that a web designer had made dedicated to his baby daughter who died a year earlier. He had accumulated many images and messages from friends, family and other inspired international visitors sharing similar stories of loss. At the time, I noted that the timestamps on the messages revealed that once the father (who had designed the page) had added a link to his new Facebook profile, the condolences had mostly been ported to the new platform, but both the standard website and the Facebook page continue to co-exist, with bursts of activity around the anniversaries of the child’s birth and death.

This shift to Facebook – not just for mourning, but for a lot of activities – is where I find a great deal of significance. People have chosen to transport their extant activities to this new, and increasingly ubiquitous, platform. Mourning on Facebook adds one especially noteworthy element akin to, but well beyond web rings: Facebook comes with a built-in, active and captive audience. The barrier between participant and spectator is broken down even further.

Whereas I see the earlier and contemporaneous versions of memorials on single-author websites as personal micro-dramas, perhaps the key is that Facebook more easily turns them into macro-dramas. And, in line with Web 2.0 breaking down barriers to user participation by eliminating the need for specialist coding knowledge, more people can contribute without much effort. Nevertheless, it is still largely close friends and family who participate in the elaborate and ongoing memorialization.

Finally, that Facebook does all these things now doesn't obviate the need for the "old way" of doing it, even if it can heighten the intensity of the mourning. People regularly turn their homes, walls, bodies, clothes, towns and cities into memorials dotted with shrines, candles, imagery, midnight vigils, notes, messages. I risk repeating myself, but it would seem more unusual to me if humans did not avail themselves of every potential use of Facebook and the Internet to extend their mourning practices in meaningful ways in line with our emotional need to express our remorse and remembrance as we feel that our loved ones deserve. Facebook is not a place apart; it's a part of where many people live.

Update: New addition(s) after the jump.

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Facebook: Divine or Mundane?

An intriguing discussion is underway right now (Nov 1-12) over at the Open Anthropology Cooperative, in response to Daniel Miller's working paper An Extreme Reading of Facebook. For archival purposes, I'll paste my contributions here. This is actually the first time in a long time that I have discussed some of the things in my PhD thesis (submission in under 2 weeks!). I will expand on a lot of these ideas soon, but I present a few thoughts here in line with Miller's three "extreme" propositions about Facebook:

1) That Facebook radically transforms the premise and direction of social science.
2) That Facebook is a medium for developing a relationship to god.
3) That Facebook, like Kula, is an ideal foundation for a theory of culture mainly because Facebook and Kula are practically the same thing.

What do you think? Don't forget to visit the discussion forum to see the intervening posts and to add your own two cents.

My posts:

Daniel, thanks for your thought-provoking paper and for embracing our relaxed forum by advancing these new and relatively extreme propositions.

I want to stay with the idea of community for the time being and offer some fodder for comparison. From 2007-9, I conducted fieldwork on Internet use in a small town in northern Catalonia. Facebook was rather sparse on the ground there when I arrived, but became more relevant towards the end of my research and I focus on several case studies of Facebook usage patterns in my PhD thesis (Urban Firewalls: place, space and new technologies in Figueres, Catalonia). I am planning to share much of this elsewhere on this site in the near future, so what follows is merely cursory.

In particular, I'd like to address the contention that Facebook (or Facebook-related behavior) may be responsible for a resurrection of classical ideas of community; or at least, that Facebook may be bundled up with a resurrection of "community" via it and other mediated channels that offer enhanced networking capabilities. I share your and Postill’s (p.4) assessment that care must be used by analysts when referring to the slippery concept of "community" and the related semantic nightmare, so I appreciate your trying to move beyond it. You use Alana as a localized example of what community can mean, and I think this is where we can continue to find importance in the concept.

In Catalonia, I found a great deal of discussion about community and, especially, a perceived lack of "community" sentiment among residents in the city of Figueres. The main cause, people argued, was recent immigration (an increase from 7 to 27% of the population made up of foreign migrants in less than 8 years) and a concurrent decline in public sociality, which they linked together alongside a general feeling of fragmentation and disengagement. This fear over a potential or ongoing loss of community by the majority Catalan population was in some ways greater than the evidence to support it, but in other ways, it simply fulfilled its own prophecy.

In connection with this, people often used Facebook and other web forums as a platform to argue that something needed to be done to fix the situation; to bring community back to the city. In my thesis, I address how attempts were made to mobilize Facebook members to these ends via various forms of local activism that traversed online and offline channels. More significant in my view is that in discussing local community on/via Facebook, city residents were literally confirming, debating and re-writing what it means to have community and how to resurrect it.

Of course, young people depicted small town life there as oppressive and old-fashioned (not unlike Alana), whereas older people saw it losing integrity and values. This is nothing new anywhere. But both young and old(er) participants online and younger and older residents in the city were all saying virtually the same thing about this lack of community. Facebook turned out to be an ideal platform for people to talk about these things and to maintain ties with others with whom they already shared a sense of closeness (family and friends).

Meanwhile, only a tiny minority of the city as a whole actually had Facebook accounts, but parallel and identical conversations about community were taking place in my offline interviews, on the street and in offices and schools and pubs. This has led me instead to the conclusion that Facebook is not so extreme as to be likened to a deity or a model for culture itself; rather Facebook is another (contiguous) place. Sometimes it's a town hall meeting, sometimes it's a party, or a political rally, or an after-school hangout, etc. So can Facebook resurrect community? Its potential to do so is contingent upon localized understandings not only of what community is, but how to achieve it, and who gets included/excluded. Viewed from specific places, Facebook is only one part of the story.

[...]

Daniel, In Keith's review of your book Stuff, he notes that your recent work has drawn on data from throughout your career to shed light on new debates. I recall that both the dynamics of Kula and of religion appeared in another context in The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater) and it seems like a natural progression to take them further now, given the confluence of many new channels available on the web at present, usefully encapsulated in Facebook as archetype.

Religion (like Kula, as Keith also notes) is fairly analogous to many parts of online social behavior that combine elements of the unknown, the transcendental, and a public presentation of the self via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other avenues for self-flagellation that more and more come to resemble a "confessional". During my fieldwork, I definitely understood among my informants a sense of needing to constitute oneself "as a moral being" (according to local and cultural norms) on Facebook and the web in general. Although this was unanimously a-religious, it was often imbued with other symbolic forms of worship, like nationalism and sport.

The key features of the web itself – its openness, ease and multiple channels of communication, speed of sharing news and data, and general in-between-ness of place and time – lends itself to being co-opted for religious-like activities. It is therefore no surprise that Facebook does the same. (As an aside, I once wrote a paper as an undergrad comparing the Internet to millenarianism. It was mostly in fun, but all the tell-tale signs were there.)

One area which seems to be getting some attention now is funerary and mourning rituals online, with Facebook and other social media accounts of the deceased converted into sites of prolonged mourning or shrines. In life, SNS users construct elaborate reflections of their corporeal selves in their profiles, and these live on, preserved, as an open channel after death. For many, continuing to post to a Facebook profile of a dead friend or relative is no more or less efficacious than leaving flowers or saying a prayer beside a tombstone. (See here and here for more).

Fame, audience, friendship, mourning – none of these are new on the web any more than they are new to people. What follows may seem to be an extreme assertion in itself, but Facebook doesn't really do anything especially new or especially better than its earlier and contemporaneous incarnations on the web, it just does it all at once and perhaps faster/with less effort. It's a combination of email, instant messaging, chat, photo-sharing, status updating, presence-casting, life-streaming, gaming, etc. Once we see Facebook for what it is – mundane rather than special – we can better understand how it morphs into interesting things well beyond its technical parameters.

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The End of an Era?

Insider technology news - with its detailed web-trend tracking and analysis - can be responsible for somewhat misleading predictions about fundamental changes in the very fabric of Internet space and time, such as the designation of Web 2.0 and the social web as "new eras" in communication. Such grandiose terminology suggests a drastic break with the past, rather than emphasizing continuity or overlap in the shape or form of new media and related trends. At the same time, however, insider tech blogs are great venues for putting new web start-ups into perspective, at times paradoxically free of the idealism inherent in both popular media (Twitter, case in point, ad nauseam), and social research.

In the end, the so-called "social web", web-of-the-people, etc., is still subject to industry swings and financial roundabouts, which inevitably outweigh both permanence and innovation in equal measure. User-generated content and social networking are popular buzz words that highlight egocentricity in every day Internet use, thus enticing swarms of anthropologists, but user behavior is only one side of the Web 2.0 coin. I venture to say that changes in techie reality happen at a pace much faster than those in the social sciences, and, as we try to get a handle on new media as they blow up, the industry has moved on. For instance, while MySpace has become a prolific stomping ground for Internet anthropologists, the techies seem ready to wipe their hands and turn up their noses: "Like an ’80s rock band, MySpace’s time has come and gone" (see below) and "MySpace is dead - the Internet is growing up" (RWW).

For anthropologists, new media is about socialization, communication, bonding, age-relative culture or sub-cultures, networking and interpersonal relationships. For insiders, the social web is a marketplace. The new prediction therein is that the only market left for massive social networking sites is divided into niches or designated corners in which they can sustain a profit:

"Folks, what we are seeing is an end of general purpose, broad social networking. Finally, after nearly two years of us saying so, social is now simply part of the web fabric".

The funny thing is, anthropologists came to the same conclusion, but by mostly different means ... and over a decade ago.


Full article from GigaOM:

With MySpace Changes, a Social Networking Era Ends

The legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra is rumored to have said about a restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.” That is precisely how I feel about MySpace, which apparently has a lot of visitors, especially in the U.S., where it is marginally ahead of Facebook, but no one I know actually uses it.

Things are only going to get tougher — Google’s deal with News Corp is going to end soon, and with it a steady spigot of cash will be turned off for a service that is struggling to grow revenues. Like an ’80s rock band, MySpace’s time has come and gone. And nothing reflects that more than the exits of MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his long-time cohort, President Tom Anderson. DeWolfe ran the company from 2003, helped sell it to News Corp for $580 million in 2005 and later helped negotiate a $900 million advertising deal with Google. Since then, MySpace has lost its buzz to Facebook (which is in turn losing that buzz to Twitter). It attempted to become an app platform, but that hasn’t worked out as well. Being a media entrepreneur, I have religiously studied Rupert Murdoch’s career. At the first sign of diminishing returns, Murdoch puts a media entity up for sale, and tries to swap his tin mine for one producing gold. He tried to do that when he attempted to pawn off MySpace to Yahoo.

The clock has been ticking on MySpace and its executives. Earlier this year, COO Amit Kapur and two other long-time MySpace employees left the company because they couldn’t get the contracts they wanted. Their exit was spun by News Corp. After reading various accounts of DeWolfe’s exit, you can see they left Chris out to dry — something I find particularly distasteful.

Regardless of his exit, there is a strategy in place that could turn MySpace into a decent enough money maker: MySpace Music. By looking to social network’s musical roots, MySpace executives realized that they could build the MTV of the broadband generation. Combining text, audio, video, and social abilities with its audience, MySpace can thrive as a niche yet lucrative musical destination. A lot has to go right for that to happen, though. I have outlined a long list of reservations about MySpace Music.

Back in November 2008, Kevin Kelleher noted, “Social networks spent too much time trying to build audiences without building a solid business model.” With a recession raging and the advertising market in a slump, the social networks have to figure out business models — fast. For MySpace it could mean capturing music industry dollars. MySpace wouldn’t be the first social network looking for niche riches. Hi5, a San Francisco-based social network that’s popular outside of the U.S., recently cut half of its workforce and is said to be pivoting into becoming a social gaming destination. Others are going to soon follow. Folks, what we are seeing is an end of general purpose, broad social networking.

Finally, after nearly two years of us saying so, social is now simply part of the web fabric. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recognized that and since then has been pushing hard on Facebook Connect, which is a simple authentication method that also allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. With over 200 million Facebookers, Mark has somewhat of a future.

DeWolfe should take this unceremonious exit as a blessing in disguise. Or as Yogi would say, “It gets late early around here…”

[emphasis added]

[Edit: Yet another end of an era ...]

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