Tales from Facebook

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652108, 9780745652092
• eBook ISBN: 9780745637877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Facebook is now used by nearly 500 million people throughout the world, many of whom spend several hours a day on this site. Once the preserve of youth, the largest increase in usage today is amongst the older sections of the population. Yet until now there has been no major study of the impact of these social networking sites upon the lives of their users. This book demonstrates that it can be profound. The tales in this book reveal how Facebook can become the means by which people find and cultivate relationships, but can also be instrumental in breaking up marriage. They reveal how Facebook can bring back the lives of people isolated in their homes by illness or age, by shyness or failure, but equally Facebook can devastate privacy and create scandal. We discover why some people believe that the truth of another person lies more in what you see online than face-to-face. We also see how Facebook has become a vehicle for business, the church, sex and memorialisation.

After a century in which we have assumed social networking and community to be in decline, Facebook has suddenly hugely expanded our social relationships, challenging the central assumptions of social science. It demonstrates one of the main tenets of anthropology - that individuals have always been social networking sites. This book examines in detail how Facebook transforms the lives of particular individuals, but it also presents a general theory of Facebook as culture and considers the likely consequences of social networking in the future.

Part I

Twelve Portraits

1

Marriage Dun Mash Up

For a moment my eyes are diverted from the screen to glance outside the window where, in the middle distance, hovers a red bird-feeder like a mini-spaceship. The movement that caught my attention was the ubiquitous bananaquit with its yellow belly. It was soon followed by the even brighter green honeycreeper. These feeders are common in Trinidad and if you are lucky in the morning you may spy the iridescent purple-blue of a hummingbird. The birds here rival a coral reef in their strong palette. It’s hard sometimes to concentrate on the screen in front of me since this office is set in the midst of a cocoa estate near the centre of the island. The large clear windows are intended to give a panoramic view of the surrounding environment. Earlier in the day I spotted an iguana, complementing the sighting the day before, in the forest, of an agouti which looks like a cross between a rat and a hog.

These days I am more likely to examine such wildlife through my television screen in London, viewed on nature programmes where the content typically oscillates between one species eating another alive and two of the same species mating. Today, by contrast, the natural environment is looking quite tame and sedate, while here on the screen I was about to bear witness to the ferocious tearing apart of something else. Sitting here, I was to watch unfold in front or me the evidence that Facebook can destroy someone’s marriage. As time went on, I was to become increasingly convinced by the person seated next to me that it was not just a question of Facebook revealing or portraying this destruction, but that ultimately it was Facebook itself that was doing the deed. Facebook was separating him from the mother of his child.

None of this was in the least bit anticipated when I turned up that morning. The conversation was supposed to be about the role of Facebook in the marketing of the cocoa estate. This was part of Marvin’s job as project manager, until the estate could earn enough to appoint a full-time marketing manager. Marvin had been explaining how in the last two years the estate website, which had been up and running for some years, was being steadily replaced by a focus upon Facebook. This was not always a simple progression since Facebook had its limitations. It was a poor medium for viewing a newsletter since you still can’t upload a pdf. So at present he needed these Facebook friends of the estate to migrate from Facebook through to the website and thence the newsletter. But at least for the Trini friends, contact increasingly came through Facebook itself. As he explained it, for Trinidadians, Facebook seemed to be replacing the entire internet as the only channel they were likely to actually use for either commercial or personal purposes.

That was fine for Marvin. He liked the idea that someone would ‘friend’ the Facebook group site he had set up for the project and would immediately be registered on his computer. He could then quickly respond more personally, sending messages to see if the new friend was willing to have a little chat. Mixing the personal with work was often the most effective way of promoting the business, since Marvin, aged around 30, was very personable. I am not a great judge of men’s physical appearance, but I would have guessed that most women found him highly attractive. His face was a mixture of friendly with intense. When he contacted a new Facebook ‘friend’, especially a woman, he would display his best profile photograph and start to chat with them on the IM (instant messenger) facility within Facebook or alternatively on Windows Live Messenger (MSN). For international friends whose decision to friend the site indicated a keen interest in chocolate, he would suggest a visit to the estate, explain about accommodation, travel packages. This tourism side of the business was starting to become a serious complement to cocoa production. Even if they never came to Trinidad, it gave them that personal relationship to the product itself. He had so far put up six photo albums and a video clip and was encouraging visitors to send in their favourite photos to add to the website.

So what was I doing there? I was in Trinidad researching the impact of new media on international communications, especially divided families. Together with my colleague, Dr Mirca Madianou, I had already been to the Philippines to look at how domestic workers in the UK parent their children across the other side of the world. Trinidad was our comparison site. Mostly, we were becoming interested in the way people used a multiplicity of communication channels that we call ‘polymedia’ and in the relationship between these. But I had reached a point in my research when I was beginning to be tempted by a separate research project, devoted solely to Facebook. One reason lay in the number of times I had heard recently that Facebook was starting to become an important component of economic activity such as clothes retailing. My conversation with Marvin seemed to confirm this buzz in the Trinidad air. I recalled being in Trinidad ten years previously. Then, too, everyone was convinced that, whatever you were in the economic food chain, you should be present on the internet. Otherwise you were bereft of an essential sign of modernity. That commitment to the future was a necessary part of the public image of a successful company. Today, Facebook seemed to have that same quality. You needed to be there; it was the first place Trinis looked to.

There were other grounds for being here in particular. It was after all a cocoa estate, and I am passionate about high-quality chocolate. As it happens, central Trinidad is established as amongst the highest quality cocoa producers in the world, especially the nearby Gran Couva estates, famous for the French fine chocolate maker Valrhona. Trinidad cocoa is usually mixed with lesser blends to improve them. It is expensively available in pure form. I had been in a hugely pleasurable relationship with this stuff for years. But you cannot actually buy high-quality chocolate in Trinidad. The final processing tends to happen in countries such as France which is also where it is marketed. What you can see here is the process of cocoa production, collecting and roasting. Then there is ‘dancing the beans’ to help remove the outer coverings, analogous to the better-known traditions of treading grapes in the Mediterranean. A little video clip of dancing the beans was one of the highlights of the estate’s marketing strategy. Since you couldn’t actually buy chocolate there, it was another culinary indulgence that drew me back to the cocoa estates. My favourite fruit in the world, a fruit which, to the best of my knowledge, has never even been graced with a name, is the white pulp that surrounds the cocoa beans within the pods. Slightly acidic, a bit like mangosteen. I completely adore the stuff. But the only way one can find it is by breaking open a fresh pod at a cocoa estate, where it is merely regarded as a waste product from the process. An encumbrance to getting to the bean itself, it is something to be danced off.

So having gorged myself on cocoa pulp, I had turned to the research that was justifying my presence there. I had been happy to chat at length with Marvin about Facebook and marketing. It was just happenstance that being there for such an extended period meant that I was also able to observe a quite unexpected occurrence. It had been lurking in the background but was increasingly coming to my attention as Marvin appeared more and more distracted. Eventually he reached that state where he wanted and needed to discuss what was happening, even to this perfect stranger who was sharing his office and admittedly prompting and encouraging the exchange.

Marvin was one of those for whom Facebook is almost coterminous with the working day. In the evenings at home with two children, he has little time to go online, but his job and the emphasis on online marketing means he remains close to the internet whenever he is at work, either in his office with a PC or another part of the site with a laptop, or even when travelling between them or around the estate, generally thanks to his BlackBerry. As long as he is at work, he has this compulsion and excuse to never be offline. And while he is online, Facebook is always either in the foreground or background. He has 620 friends and, unusually for a Trinidadian, relatively few of them are family. This is partly because he comes from a nearby village and is the first from this background to go to university. Most of his family don’t have computer access, let alone the additional laptop. Most especially, they don’t have a BlackBerry which is the accessory for wealthier Trinidadians these days. The core of his extensive friends list is the women who used to go to one of the same series of schools he attended. He claims that this is because women in Trinidad are more avid users of Facebook than men, which was already becoming clear from my research.

From that perspective, there was already something distinctly odd about Marvin’s usage. He just never seemed to employ his phone for voice, but almost always for IM (instant messaging). Similarly, the most active part of his computer is MSN where I could see around 50 people on his list whose simultaneous presence online was automatically indicated. He isn’t texting either. I had rarely noted such devotion to IM as a medium. It bugs me until, just before we finished, the penny dropped.

However much time Marvin spends on Facebook, there is one person he knows who spends even more time on it, and that is his wife. What’s more, she doesn’t just spend this time on her account: she spends much of it on his Facebook account. She monitors everything he does. She wants to know who this new friend is, how he knows her and what she means to him. Of course he comments on their photographs, everyone in Trinidad does, but she interrogates all such comments. The problem is that he is a man who spends much of the day on Facebook. He is frequently engaged in communication with women, and nearly every single such act is an inscription, something she can trace, interrogate and become anxious about. To his mind, this is now tantamount to being stalked by his own wife, leading to endless repetitive justifications following accusations, day after day. This has turned into an obsession, a relentless pursuit that has worn him down. Recently he has been thinking seriously about calling it a day and separating from the woman who, however much he loves her, is driving him to distraction. But today was the day when she pre-empted any such intent.

He has tried to deal with this stalking in various ways. On occasion he has even gone through the call log on her phone just to show her what it is like to be on the receiving end of such intrusions. But that doesn’t work: ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she snorts. He responds ‘Well, I have nothing to hide either.’ It doesn’t help. Neither does the idea of privacy settings or passwords. So far from keeping him distanced from her prying, such actions are taken as incendiary proof that he does have something to hide, that there is a crisis here. Inevitably, it just makes the situation worse.

Marvin’s take on what is going on is quite clear. He has two children, one by a previous ‘babymother’, another by his wife. He doesn’t want this relationship to end; he claims he still loves her. He claims that the problem that is defeating them both ultimately rests in the technology itself and, most especially, in Facebook. This is Trinidad, partners will be jealous, and, in truth, partners will often have reason to be suspicious. Fears and anxieties about what Trinis call horning are part and parcel of relationships in Trinidad. But that’s the point: they always have been; there is nothing new in that at all. For an anthropologist to say it is part of a culture is not to make any judgement. It is simply to acknowledge that this has been a constant aspect of people’s lives and expectations for generations. But, prior to Facebook, these other men or women generally lurked more as vague threats in consciousness. They were not visible as they are now, sitting there with their provocative photographs, their innuendo or even more explicit flirting in their comments. Then there is the extent of their own sites that seems to invite stalking. Now they surround you, present in their hundreds, sending ‘gifts’ of flowers and puzzles, adding ambiguous status updates and news items. Facebook puts these other women in your face. It creates this world in which you can so quickly and easily do more than just obsess about them. You can act on your obsession by hunting them down, scrutinizing their profiles, looking for clues that link them to your partner. It is just too easy, too relentlessly present. One click takes you from your friends to his friends. And the results can never be reassuring, an end to anxiety. Each scratch of the screen’s surface creates more irritation and the desire to scratch deeper, and around you are further swarms that threaten.

Nor was it at all difficult to understand Marvin’s wife’s particular concern. I had already picked up on the way Marvin used himself to embody chocolate in this marketing. As a result, yes, there did seem to be a whole lot of women out there in Sweden, Canada and the UK who would be in IM contact with him about chocolate, and then maybe about travel and accommodation. I couldn’t say or know what might follow. On the neighbouring island of Tobago, sex tourism by white women looking for black men was overt and common and seemed to have easily taken over from previous times when the gender relationships were reversed. But then was I just following the rather febrile logic of his wife as he portrayed it to me in detail? I have no idea to what extent there was a sexual aspect or intention here, either on these foreign women’s part or on his. It’s just that I could understand why his wife might become obsessed by this.

What was rather more evident was the underlying issue of friending with respect to his Trini contacts because this was taking place in front of my eyes. However concerned Marvin was with his work and with his marriage, he was still carrying on IM conversations with persons who popped up on the screen as we talked. True to the picture that was forming, the main IM conversation taking place at this point was with a glamorous young woman – as it happens, not one of those he went to school with. Currently, she is a flight attendant and is chatting from her hotel room in New York between flights. There is no mistaking the flirtatious undertone to her conversation. It’s so cold there in New York. She is so looking forward to seeing him again; she needs some warmth. She is mocking him: ‘Oh, you won’t have time for me when I come back to Trinidad next month.’

Still he proclaims his own innocence, he blames Trini women:

‘Yeah . . . and that is true because she has been asking me to take her out; she has been asking me to see her. And because of the relationship, I don’t want to do it. But at the same time, I don’t want her to get totally annoying. Because a lot of girls, if they are not getting through to the guy they like, they would totally sever the relationship. They don’t . . . being friends alone is not good enough. If they like you, in that way. If they like you more than a friend, being a friend with them, or attempting to be a friend with them will not work. Happens all the time with me. They find me attractive. They want to get with me. They want to at least explore the option. If I keep turning them down, which is what I have been doing. And I don’t think this is going to last long with this girl because she seems to want to know – what have I been doing? When can I see you? Nothing happened, I mean can’t we just be friends? But a part of me wants to see her. I don’t want to compromise my relationship with my wife.’

The trouble is that, at the same time he is spinning out this defence of his behaviour, it’s still pretty clear that the man is also flirting. By this stage, I had realized why it was that he had this phone which never rang to voice because he had just admitted this to me. IM is the only medium his wife can’t check up on, that isn’t logged in the way voice calls are, or texts are, or Facebook updates are.

There was a critical question in my own mind, one I simply couldn’t decide upon. Was Trinidad in some ways doomed to this very problematic consequence of Facebook, by comparison with all other countries, by a mere happenstance, a semantic coincidence? A mix-up of words that in and of itself was perhaps contributing to the breakup of this and other relationships? The issue lay in the meaning of the very word friending or to friend. Because Trinidad is the one country where this is a very old and much-employed term, used a century before anyone had heard of Facebook. In Trinidadian dialect, to friend means to have sex with someone, and most of all it meant that one was in a relationship other than marriage. As with other Caribbean islands, much to the despair of the church, people rarely married until they could afford a house together. Prior to that, it was expected that a girl should have a baby to demonstrate her adulthood, and that a man should be a babyfather for much the same reason. The children of these children would be looked after by the older generation, typically their grandparents or great-aunts. The system had always worked well. Young, biologically fit girls, gave birth. Older women, who had done with partying, looked after the children. In some ways there was a better logic to this than the assumption in Britain that the biological mother had to be the cultural mother. But such young, unmarried couples would typically be described as in a friending relationship.

Friending, though, did not necessarily end with marriage. There is also a rich vocabulary in Trinidad for what the French call a mistress but in Trinidad is called a deputy or an outside woman. The issue with Facebook is less whether it increases complex and multiple relationships than whether it makes them more visible. Reading the novelist Emile Zola, it is clear that, even in France, there was a historical difference between having a discreet mistress and having her live openly in one’s house.

I suspect that for the more sophisticated urban Trinidadian today, none of this ambiguity followed. They had largely ceased using the word ‘friending’ in that fashion. But both Marvin and his wife come from villages near the cocoa estate and represent unusually successful children from such rural areas. In their milieu, the word ‘friending’ is still employed in its traditional guise. Every time his wife notes that a woman has friended him on Facebook, there is this ambiguity in the language itself.

Within Facebook, there is a parallel form of semantic ambiguity. It lies not in the words to friend but rather in the term relationship. That word has changed its connotations in pretty much the opposite direction. Previously relatively innocuous – but now? Is it possible to say one is in a relationship with someone without implying a sexual content? Has this too become simply a coy way of saying you are having sex with someone? And is it any surprise that when people look at each other’s profiles in Trinidad, the thing that they are always alert to is any change in the relationship status that is posted so conspicuously on the profile of every Facebook account?

So the dram...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• By the same author:
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• PartI: Twelve Portraits
• Part II:The Anthropology of Facebook