Come Together

Convergence—the coming together of things that were previously separate—is a defining reality of twenty-first century media. Established media industries struggle to deal with the shock of the new—a proliferation of competing platforms, a reconfiguration of audiences, and a digital context in which media products can be shared, copied, and remixed by millions. At the same time, assumptions and precedents from the twentieth century persist in the shaping of policy and regulation, in debates about censorship and subsidy, in struggles over intellectual property and access.

What kinds of things are converging? At the first level, we can think of the coming together of the so-called three Cs of convergent media—content, computing, and communications. Apple’s iPhone, which is not a phone so much as a state-of-the-art touch-screen computer that will also make phone calls if you really want it to, is a good example of this aspect of convergence. Partly in response to these possibilities and partly driving them, we also see the convergence of media organizations through merger, acquisition, and alliance—Google buys Blogger then YouTube, News Corporation acquires MySpace, and Microsoft and Yahoo! flirt with each other while their share prices burn.

Together, these convergences have made possible a new digital media environment that operates in real-time on a global scale. And these convergences make possible in turn other shifts in the media environment—the convergence of different kinds of media texts (the comic that becomes a game that becomes a film that becomes a ringtone), the convergence of professional and non-professional (as in citizen journalism), and the convergence of personal communication with public media.

Facebook is a key example of this last kind of convergence, of a blurring of the lines between one-to-one and mass communication. It’s what we see going on in our own Facebook activities every day, but it’s not yet well-understood, and it has big implications—not least for our privacy and reputations.

A Two-Way Street

Until recently, most media theory has assumed a broadcast model of communication, in which information is sent in only one direction—a model in which media organizations are the only ones who get to produce content and the only ones who make decisions about how and when it is made available. However, more and more, audiences are able to make decisions about how and when to access media content—using a device such as TiVo or an iPod to customize our viewing schedule, waiting for the DVD box set, or downloading the complete latest season of True Blood using BitTorrent to watch in one weekend binge. In this kind of situation, we’re not really able to exercise control over the production of the content, but we are able to exercise a degree of control, a degree of choice, over its distribution—the where and when and how of media consumption.

More and more, audiences have (admittedly limited) scope to register preferences and opinions with news organizations (rating stories, pushing the red button). When you text your vote to American Idol, that’s a very different kind of communication to the broadcast experience of the twentieth century. It’s the opposite, in some ways—now, the information is being generated by the audiences and sent to the media company. And what they do with that information once you submit it is not always knowable.

And more and more, audiences can find avenues to produce and share their own media images and texts, and to collaborate with others in organizing and co-ordinating creative projects. The people we somehow persist in calling ‘audiences’ are often hard at work creating, remixing, and swapping content. Instead of being slumped on the couch in front of the TV, more and more people are busy making media.

We’re uploading photos to Flickr from our mobiles, posting mashed-up videos on YouTube, collaborating on music playlists at Spotify, writing book reviews at Amazon, fixing up daft mistakes in Wikipedia, sharing links on Twitter. We can archive our lives in real time through blogs, through photo and video sharing websites, through status updates and tweets. We can digitize everything that matters to us—our pasts, our work, our interests, our loved ones. We can archive how these develop, as they develop. Most of us may have fewer opportunities to contribute to the media environment than, say, Rupert Murdoch, but we’ve never had so many such opportunities as we do now, and the long-term cultural and social consequences of this are not yet clear.

In a Manner of Speaking

To see how this matters, and how it relates to Facebook, it helps to distinguish between some different ways of communicating. First, think of face-to-face interaction or daily conversation—the kind of interaction you had at the café yesterday (or would have had, if only you hadn’t had your iPod on). This kind of interaction is two-way, involves people who are present in the same location at the same time, and affords certain cues to enhance communication (things like tone of voice, body language, gesture, and facial expression).

Second, think of the different kind of interaction we can have through means such as instant messaging, email, phone calls, or letters. These are also two-way, but the participants are not present in the same location, and there may be a time difference too (I can answer your email when I feel like getting round to it, and that might take days or weeks; it’s harder to get away with that in face-to-face conversation). This second kind of interaction also makes use of a medium of some kind, such as paper or phones or computers. And it gives us fewer cues, which means we need to provide extra information for context—things like: Dear Sir/Madam, ☺, ‘Hi, it’s me’, and so on.

And third, think of the kind of communication we have with TV. This is the kind we all learned to think of as ‘media’ back in the twentieth century—TV, cinema, newspapers, recorded music, radio, magazines. These send messages in one direction only—you can yell at that jerk on the news, but he can’t hear you. And they’re open to pretty much anyone, so long as they’re able to pay for and read the newspaper or switch on the TV set. The really striking thing about this stuff, the thing we take for granted, is that this kind of communication is made up of messages that are addressed to nobody in particular.¹²

One reason why Facebook’s so fascinating is that it mixes up the personal message with the message sent to nobody in particular. In my opening examples, the messages from Barack Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Texts From Last Night and—sadly—the city of Paris weren’t sent to me personally. They were just going out to anyone who had signed up to get them. We’re used to seeing the US President address the nation through a one-way medium like television; now he can do it through Facebook too (and while I can add a comment which he’s too busy to read, or endorse the post by clicking the ‘like’ button, that’s about as two-way as it gets).

But my other examples—status updates from Camille, Steve, Andrew, Joshua, Jason, Elaine—aren’t quite personal messages either. Each of them has at least one hundred people on their friends list. So to whom are their status updates addressed? Here again the personal and the public are blurred. In my own case, sometimes when I update my status, it’s going out to nobody in particular. Other times, it’s going out to a particular sub-set of people on my friends list—those that I know watch a certain TV show I like, for instance. And on rarer occasions, my status is really addressed to a particular individual, one whom I expect to see it and to get the reference, even though I could have sent an email instead.

Status Anxiety

So what kinds of interaction does Facebook offer? One basic tool offered by Facebook is the ability to exchange one-to-one messages with friends, in a format essentially identical to web-based email services such as Gmail. This is a straightforward example of two-way private communication—except that it’s not unusual to send someone a message in this way only to have them reply by writing on the more visible ‘wall’ area of your page, thus opening up the conversation to what may be a much wider audience, depending on what privacy settings are applied to the wall in question.

At the top of each user’s profile page is their current ‘status’. Originally intended to indicate whether one was ‘busy’ or ‘available’, the status update has instead developed into a haiku-like art form, in which users express themselves to their chosen audience. Those with access to a profile are able to comment, bringing a conversational dimension to what is otherwise a broadcast presentation of self. The same applies to items that a user might choose to post on their wall or share with specific friends (such as YouTube videoclips, links to other websites, or photographs), which can draw comments from other users that again blur the distinction between one-to-one interaction and messages addressed to no one in particular.

Then there’s the ability to join groups or identify oneself as a fan of a particular celebrity, artist, product, or service. While some groups can become active tools for political mobilisation, many others function rather more like choosing an outfit to wear. If I join a higher-education-focused group such as ‘Keep Your Fucking Hand Down in Lectures and Shut Up. No One Cares’ (263,171 members at the time of writing) or declare myself a fan of ‘Not Being on Fire’ (1,020,808 fans and climbing), then this is to register a preference, demonstrate a state of mind, communicate a viewpoint, perhaps only in a way that resembles picking a T-shirt for the day—but to whom am I making these gestures?

Facebook is a space in which one-to-one communication (for example, me and my real-life friend Steve saying hi by exchanging private messages) meets the broadcast model (for example, me posting an old Funkadelic music video for anyone on my friends list to watch). But, crucially, Facebook is also a space in which that distinction is challenged. If Steve says ‘Hi’ on my wall, then all of my Facebook friends list can see it—what else might he say that they could all see? If my real-life friend Gillian posts to my wall a picture of her little boy Louis on his first day at school, then everyone on my friends list can see it.

And here we have to ask—who, precisely, are they? It’s more than just a list of real-life friends, relatives, and colleagues, although it’s that as well. It’s more complicated than that—on Facebook, ‘friend’ is a metaphor. In my own case, there are people there whom I’ve never met in the offline world, but with whom I share an online connection of some sort. A couple of them are people with whom I have made contact because they have read my first book. Others are people with whom I have been involved in some academic context or another, meeting at conferences or sharing in journal issues. There are some ex-students. There are even one or two people there whom I actually dislike, either personally or professionally—it often seems more diplomatic or politic to accept the friend request than to ignore it.

But once they’re on there, they’re on there. Unless I hide them from my news feed—a crude binary option: in or out?—then what I see on Facebook doesn’t distinguish between someone I’d trust with my life and someone I wouldn’t recognize in the street. They all converge on my news feed. And I don’t know about you, but I find that the people whom I don’t really know often tend to be the most active on Facebook. Which means they’re people I hear about every time I log on. They’re tweaking their status. They’re sharing ironic links. They’re tagging me in notes that share twenty-five things about themselves that I don’t want to hear. They’re challenging me to beat their score in quizzes built around in-jokes that I’m not in on. They’re sending me sarcastic gifts.

Show and Tell?

Is this personal communication? Or is it the sending of messages to nobody in particular? How do we negotiate these distinctions in a convergent media environment? This matters, because the online environment is an area in which people’s private lives can become public instantly. It’s not always clear, even to ourselves, how public we intend our interactions on social network sites to be—and other people might take that decision on our behalf, with what can sometimes be unexpected consequences.

Some examples: holiday photos of Britain’s top spy, the head of MI6, appeared in newspapers after his wife posted them on her Facebook page (‘You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit’, the Foreign Secretary told the BBC, ‘that’s not a state secret’). Or consider Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy—Knox is now known the world over as ‘Foxy Knoxy’, after reporters mined details, including that nickname, from her online profiles. Or consider the Dartmouth professor who made the mistake of posting on Facebook that she was writing her lecture on ‘modernity’ for the next day using Wikipedia as her main source—a student took a screenshot and posted it to the college newspaper website, from where it circulated very widely.

Or consider Ms. Ashley Alexandra Dupré, an aspiring singersongwriter who was outed as a prostitute implicated in the scandal that claimed the career of now ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer. As part of their coverage of the Spitzer story, the UK Guardian newspaper actually assigned their rock and pop critic to review some songs Ms. Dupré had written and posted on her MySpace page, and published his review in the main section of the daily paper—he awarded her tunes two stars out of five, in a redefinition of the expression ‘adding insult to injury’.

This blurring of public and personal raises enormous ethical dilemmas. Two groups of people who’re having to face these dilemmas already are employers and job applicants. There have been widely-reported cases of people losing jobs because messages they had intended to be private turned out to be public. In a ground-breaking trampling of privacy rights, the City of Bozeman, Montana, attempted in 2009 to carry out background checks on job applicants which involved requiring them to supply not only the usernames for their social network site profiles but also—get this—their passwords.

Such dilemmas also confront journalists. Some news organisations (such as Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC) now have ethical guidelines for the use of material found on social network sites. But others, such as the Sunday Express newspaper in the UK, treat private individuals’ profiles as equivalent to press releases. In February 2009, this paper ran with a disgraceful front-page splash headlined ‘Anniversary Shame of Dunblane Survivors’. This concocted non-story revealed social and personal details from the profiles of teenagers who had survived the 1996 mass-shooting in which Thomas Hamilton murdered sixteen small children and one adult at a primary school in the Scottish village of Dunblane. The Sunday Express story implied that the normal teenage behavior of those in the story (chatter about parties, drinking, boyfriends and girlfriends, the occasional fight) somehow made them unworthy of having survived the massacre. As well as taking the standards of the UK tabloid media to a new trough, this incident highlights the risks of a communications environment in which none of us can ever be entirely sure just how private a digital message is.

Facebook challenges a lot of what we thought we understood about media and communication, and about questions of privacy and visibility. It demands that we think through an ethics of online communication. Who gets access to the material that we generate when we use Facebook? What are they allowed to do with it? How do we as individual users treat the material created by our friends? These are questions that aren’t going to go away—if anything, they’ll become ever more pressing, as the basic principles of social networking take root beyond the walled gardens of sites like Facebook.