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Why We Post? The Anthropology of Social Media

April 23, 2016 by ellenandjim

FelinesBack

Dear friends and readers,

I know I’ve mentioned before a Future Learn course I followed for some weeks, a sort of anthropological, sociological and psychological study of people’s behavior on the Internet, especially on mass social media. Its unusual candour, open-mindedness and insights into an ever increasingly part of our lives seems to be well worth sharing with others on the Net (as well illustrations from a book of poetry about cats, Fe-lines — we often use cats to stand in for us and reflect our relationships with others comically). A brief description.

I was chary when I “signed” up fearing I would hear the usual tirades against how everyone on the Net is missing out on social life, how trivial or overwrought what is put on the Net is. Jill Lepore actually blamed the Internet for the rise of Trump — if all of us couldn’t natter on, he would not have gone as far as he has. Or it has transformed human nature, is debasing us, making us lose essential humanness. As it was (according to the professor) once said of codexes (all these people burrowed in books), or the phone

But no. The professor doing it takes the Internet seriously and studies what is happening on it in terms of itself, in terms of the culture it has become part of, how individuals’ lives are now intersecting with this new form of communication. He has 9 students and they spend 2 years some 15 different places where they are studying the culture anthropologically (one in the UK). Much of the commentary and explanation is multifaceted and the conversations of professor and students feel real. One of the most startling findings was that in many traditional cultures, the first time someone felt free and able to have liberty to have a conversation with someone else in private was one-on-one emails on the Net. At long last they escaped surveillance, especially girls.

The central argument is the Internet is another new extension of life, a new form of attainment. It used to be interpersonal communication came in two basic forms: one-on-one conversations, on the phone, by letter; even in larger parties and groups the place people could talk of themselves was in small groups of two or three. Or the person was watching a mass media, TV, listening to radio, going to movies, and had no opportunity to talk back except on a phone where he or she could address a indeterminately large number of people unknown to him or her. Now we have scalable socialability and we can talk back, express ourselves. We can do this one-on-one on emails. In small groups address as many as a hundred or few hundred people (listservs, webrings, group blogs, closed face-book communities); we can address thousands (face-book, twitter). Or we can revert just to reading magazines, newspapers, and videos dished up to us in which we have no immediate say — though we may write of it later and groups of people doing so may influence the next video.

In the early days of the Internet, it used to be early on people met as strangers sharing intense interests and felt exhilaration to find like souls for the first time. Listservs, message boards, compuserv provided that. Some face-book pages still do but the problem there is the audience is too large and so you are in too impersonal a space. The etiquette of writing short messages (like post cards) is inhibiting. Also blogs — individual blogs are a godsend still as a form. There one can be brave — in some countries one may end up in prison; in Saudi Arabia a man has been flogged 59 times (he was sentenced to a 1000) and is in prison for a long time to come for disagreeing with the regime. In western democracies (if you post from such a place, as I do) ordinarily, nowadays what we increasingly see is people making visible their social groups on the Net (through say group blogs).

FelinesFront

Nowadays what we see on the web replicates social life off, more and more conformity. Selfies are ways of presenting the self as social, getting awards and so on — they suggested selfies are a form of social policing. It may be a blog is politically radical, and some do not socially conform (I do not altogether), but increasingly bloggers and people who post are integrated somehow into the physical communities of their lives.  Nowadays people are making visible their social connections in the outside world. I see that in the use of group blogs. They are also policing themselves as fewer and fewer use pseudonyms.

People who have been successful in social life who are what I call all about having careers and make that what shapes their life and decisions at first tried to downgrade the internet; in the book on the English, the Why We Post crew show how in England (not all cultures) every effort was made to keep the two aspects of life — let’s call it — separate and still pretend to.  To me or what I’ve observed is people who allow their career goals to control what they do or say have switched and don’t look at Internet as a different sort of space and communication anymore. They don’t profess to ignore it. But if such people come onto the Net and “establish a presence” on social media, they behave here the way they do in outside life — and they come here to network. Yes they perform. Advertise themselves or their books. That’s why having  an author in a group read is worse than useless for many — it’s counter-productive. Life on the Net is still freer in list-servs because the communities are small, few people, often closed — you can replicate that elsewhere (face book has a mechanism for making just such a community).

An interesting reality they said; what matters is the content we post. It does matter. The platform or venue is paid far too much attention to. They show that a group of people and individuals post the same content on different platforms. What we study and relate to is that content. Why We Post suggested it used to be we related to the outside world content as part of a mass audience reading the select elite in the media or one-on-one (phone, letter), now we can relate to different numbers of people and different ways and affect content. I’ve always thought this and it’s been true from the beginning. People from the beginning judged you by your content.

SmilingfacesEurope

A curious side effect of following this Future Learn is I for the first time figured out what the “like” button on face-book means. It does have a kinda precise meaning. It’s the existence of these other emoticons, which it seemed to me did not seem to add varieties of response somehow, that gave me my clue. Well “like” means I approve of this sort of message, or I approve this message. If to a person you know well enough “like” can mean: I approve of you making this message or this sort of message. Then all the other emoticons become versions of this — they are intensifiers. They are a form of announcing what is socially acceptable to the liker and all those liking this sort of message or this message or this person making it. Or they say I disapprove of the content of this message — that’s what the dislike message means. When it means I disapprove of the messenger for making this message or the content of the message, then one of the two people might “unfriend” one another. Gentle reader, you may say, well, duh? didn’t you know all this before? I didn’t.

SHerbertPreRaphaeliteCat
Susan Herbert’s Pre-Raphaelite cat

An interesting angle is gender. The researchers said that if you ask people what they post about beyond family, friends, books, they might say politics. But if you look at what they call politics, it’s often about gender: they are discussing what it is to be a man and defining it, or a woman and defining and trying to control that. I’ve long known from reseach I did a long while ago a website made by a man looks different from a website made by a woman. A man will use comic pictures of himself at the same time as he tells far less of his private life. A woman uses dignified pictures, pictures that cannot be laughed at, and at the same time tells about her private life far more: husband, children. Even on academic websites. See my paper on Women in Cyberspace.

womenwritingwomenslives

Now the course goes to the different regions to study social media, this time from an area with many Kurds in Turkey, and a place near Chennai in India. They said they were looking at gender roles and politics, but it was the same story: people on social media using their real names have a drive to social conformity. I did read of the ways girls are kept in and controlled in Turkey, and some of it reminded me of the way the girls were treated in the film Mustang. Another interesting passing comment was that many people in India work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week and how miserable this makes them. They have no time for a life. “Learners” were asked to monitor what they see on face-book according to a scheduled plan. One learner said that he saw little conversation on face-book or twitter, just assertions of points of view. They suggested fake identities in games give people a way of escaping social conformity.

I found that women far more post images of lovely paintings or flowers or pretty things in their houses. The purpose of these is to cheer themselves up and to cheer others. Both genders post equal amounts of postings where they are expressing some private troubles (not too private, things like coping with a new job, but I’ve also seen women post when a husband or partner leaves them or dies and their terrible struggles afterward, usually couched in an today’s achievement vein, but the reality is there). Men show themselves working in the world far more, and send URLs to discourses of interest in their profession. Women are shoring up their relationships; men are showing what they are doing, what opportunities and tasks however small they are coping with.

I critiqued the course too: I agree with the fundamental thrust of this course that cyberspace is replicating the realities of real space, I feel there ought to be more time given to people coming onto the Internet simply to express themselves. Not to triumph over someone else (when a statement not meant that way is taken that way and someone else triumphs, the person is hurt and reacts back), but to reach out to express thoughts that may not be common, deep feeling ones. These are found on blogs, sometimes listservs. Are not blogs social media? So I suggest the insistence on staying with places like face-book is producing a foregone conclusion for this course which does not reflect the whole reality of the Internet. The people described as escaping their communities by yourselves most of the time cannot act on their new relationships which are so far away, but it may be that’s not what’s envisaged (if longed for). Just to put out into the world another kind of self.

As to fake identities in games (as a way to escape social conformity) the identities are often stereotypes, the things done in the games fleeting competition. I don’t speak of the porn sites, sites for violence. No one of this high-minded group spoke of porn site or sites where people play out violence. They avoided the criminal, sexually exploitative and aggressively commercial aspects of the Net today.

Felinesmiddle

I was bothered by the narrow way the group limited the areas or venues on the Net they studied closely. At first I felt I was learning a lot when they demonstrated how important the Internet has become to literally millions of lives, intimately, for daily social functions the person chooses; and then when they showed the strong social conformity that goes on nonetheless. Fifteen different countries of participants were being studied. But what has happened is what is preferred is the lowest common denominator and so-called what “most” people do. Rousseau argued convincingly there is no such thing as a general will. So if most hardly write words at all, that’s what they are looking to – -though on their own accounting many post privately to friends or in closed groups they can’t look at. How about the millions who may not post little essays (as I and others here may do) but say a paragraph or two a day. They don’t look at list-servs, blogs, web-rings. It’s as if they don’t want to see the creation of new identities through writing and other selves in these different cyberspace places.

These cyberspace places that are new or different from old venues approximate genres outside the Net too. I’d say a posting to a listserv is like a letter to a group. A message to face-book is a postcard. The blog’s name comes from weblog, a daily log of actions on the web and in reaction to the web: all blogs are at some level diaries.

Since coming onto the Internet and adjusting and discovering — say later 1990s I have wondered how I existed before I had it — I feel through writing I exist in ways I cannot any other and I was never given a place to exist this way before. I was never given anywhere I could write. As a person who is socially awkward in the physical world and has had far more social experience on the Net than I ever did before, I’ve come to exist for the first time here. This may seem an extreme statement, but I’ve known women who told me they felt they didn’t exist during the time they had no outside paid job to go to and stayed home with their children. Their invisibility outside their home was to them a form of erasure; they weren’t achieving anything in the eyes of others, shopping, chatting outside was not enough. I’ve never felt quite that but I do know that I want to have contact with the world, be in the world in order to have a fully human life. Think of the people who told the students that the first time they felt or understood what it was to have a private experience was here on the Net.

Ellen

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Posted in cats, cyberspace, life-writing, US social culture | Tagged Future Learn, social media | 10 Comments

10 Responses

  1. on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 ellenandjim

    I would not say, Ellen, that I didn’t exist before the net, but I agree that it does allow people to find congenial companions, even if only virtually. I remember how alone I used to feel having no one to talk to about books when I was a teenager back in the 1980s. That said, I also find myself often longing for the pre-Internet days because since I work from home and am constantly bombarded with emails and phone calls from clients, I remember how the limits on communication before that allowed one to have more privacy and there were boundaries drawn about what were reasonable working hours. Now no one thinks a thing about calling me on Sunday afternoon about work things or sending me a dozen emails on Saturday, and many want to text me, which I have successfully refused to begin to do to this point, so the Internet is definitely a mixed blessing.

    I will agree that listservs are much more conducive to community than
    Facebook groups – too many people join, and there is a lot more bullying
    in some of the groups that I’ve seen.

    Tyler


    • on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 ellenandjim

      I tell in the blog that I knew someone who said she felt she didn’t exist when she didn’t have an outside job to go to, and was home with her children all day, seeing no one but them or a few neighbors. It was not enough to go shopping or chatting with others over the day: she had to be inside some organization somehow achieving or doing things that “led” somewhere.

      I guess my idea of being alive is much less external.

      When Jim was first offered a cell phone from his place where he worked, he didn’t want it. He felt that was an invitation to tether him, he’d be on call 24/7 or at least 8/7.


      • on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 pm04 ellenandjim

        Hi Ellen,

        How Jim felt is how I felt – I used to have a pager for work and hated it. I refuse now to get a cellphone – I probably will eventually – but I am putting it off as long as possible.

        But the Internet itself I am very grateful for. I could not work from home and do what I love doing without it – nor would I be able to market my books to an audience outside of Upper Michigan. And I do have many friends I have never met in person or even spoken to on the phone who I communicate regularly with on the Internet, including this group, for which I am very thankful.

        Tyler


  2. on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 Diane

    If find it difficult to imagine going back to a world where we could not “talk back,” as in this comment! How did we live. I most enjoy, eg, the New York Times comments: so intelligent, informed and corrective. I do spend more time alone as more of my work has migrated to the internet, but I also love the freedom it provides. I have been so very enriched by relationships and knowledge from the web that I can hardly imagine life without it. We at the beginning of a medium as revolutionary as the printing press and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.


    • on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 ellenandjim

      Here’s an interesting intermixing: how several medias exist at once: when we read papers on line they are often set up as scrolls and so we return to the way medieval people read texts. At first some people might print out the scrolling text, but nowadays we all read texts as codexes as well as scrolls and all the other ways texts are digitalized too.


  3. on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 ellenandjim

    Catherine Crean: I like that theory. I wonder how our “caveman” ancestors told stories. Did they sit quietly and listen? I doubt it.

    The pictures of bards are of someone in the center, maybe playing an instrument and all sitting round but consider Victorian novels where when one sits in the center the others talk. Or 18th century practices of putting on tableaux and plays with all participating.


  4. on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 am04 Diane

    I also like the cat pix!


  5. on April 23, 2016 at 11:25 pm04 ellenandjim

    Tyler, I’ve been out much of the day, and crazily (madly) I agreed to teach or lecture for a third time this week. Not for gargantuan sums, not even paid, but I’ll go out to dinner with the professor beforehand. It got me back to Austen, reading Lady Susan, and reminded me of how much I respect her. All the social media around her makes me forget and even downgrade her in reaction to the hagiography and some of these awful sequels so hyped. I know the professor through two listservs we are both on, subscribed to.

    But I wanted to say now back at my “post,” I didn’t do enough justice in my blog to how much real friendships have meant to me since the middle 1990s. I said I feel alive and in way I was connecting it simply to be able to speak to others on topics. We are all so proud and don’t want to admit how much we need other people, much less how isolated many of us in the US are — all sorts of centrifugal forces, a lack of public transportation, differing cultures, and a point of view which endlessly moves are part of this. I was disappointed in the course because it’s anthropological perspective made it so general so you couldn’t get at this level of new experience: friendship which does not depend on geography or time constraints. Yes we don’t know things about one another we will in an instance upon seeing one another and in a while (couple of days) really visiting with one another, but a writing self is a real self, realer or different and satisfying in ways the physical face-to-face or phone (to me the worst kind of communication as it’s intense and yet we don’t see one another clearly) can’t be.

    This listserv has been important to me since the middle 1990s. It doesn’t matter where our platform has been. I like that idea of the Future Learn crew: it’s the content, not the venue that matters. Myself I have felt the venue does shape it. For example, as Tyler said previously or another time, face-book is too big, too impersonal, too unmoderated to give the same experience of the listserv. I’ve watched their group reads: mostly summaries and the person running it sends along URLs to the kind of thing one might read in a newspaper or edited journal.

    I marginalized this point of view probably because the course did — but it is very important for many. The traditional culture people who said they experienced privacy with others for the first time were speaking to this kind of experience. Congeniality, compatibility, shared interests, points of view outside power relationships.

    Ellen


  6. on April 25, 2016 at 11:25 am04 Kat

    Ellen, what a fascinating course. I’m not on Facebook, so the postcard elements and likes are very strange to me. I turned off the likes at my blog at one time, but still learn from stats that I get a certain number of them (invisible apparently).

    It seems so trivial, and the idea that it is policing and approving culturally correct thoughts makes sense. The other day a commenter rebuked me for using the “f” word. I am sorry to have offended her but since I’m not HBO, constantly using it, I didn’t feel it mattered that once. That’s the kind of thing that I suppose upsets people. I said I’d bear it in mind next time. But, heavens, if Henry Miller could use it so can I.

    I do agree the listserv is among the most important things on the Internet.


    • on April 25, 2016 at 11:25 am04 ellenandjim

      I’m trying another one: the power of social media. At first I thought it would be about technology, but it might be about life on social media. I’ll report back.

      I am not sure they were right when they argued platform or venue didn’t count: it seems to me the kind of matter you can post and the reactions to it are different on different social media. Listservs cause more fights because the content is read as letters to a group of people in public and people react personally, while the same content on a blog is seen as someone’s diary entry (even if written for a professional mainstream or radical publication). You might have had a stronger reaction against the word “fuck” on a listserv, but the person could not maintain you had written or should have written it with her in mind. Similarly twitter and face-book differ: I much prefer the latter because people talk to some extent of themselves, contextualize their remarks by their lives. Everything is set up to do that, all questions on your timeline. So I feel I have something to go with to understand their postcards. You can write more at length nowadays but the etiquette is short essay at most (very short). Professors who used to intimidate me by their careers show up in old shorts, with their dog or cat, doing ordinary things (like me). Twitter is the most impersonal place I’ve “tweeted” on but there I keep up with my daughters as I know the background to their tweets. It’s a place where people relate through personal content or more principled reactions to impersonal content. I follow people I don’t know well at all but who I’ve heard of — celebrities “perform” there. Also politicians. I follow Amanda Vickery because she posts URLs to good essays she has read during the day.

      It might be to some listservs are not appealing because they like to remain on more shallow or “safe” ground with others. I admit I am looking for friends, and friendships of different intensities or kinds (“scaleable socialability” as Why We Post has it), so the listserv where there is a personally-shaped conversation about books (which I love) is irreisistible when the group are congenial.



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