That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
One morning at the end of June 2015, having finally managed to make it to a decent beach for the first time in several years, I saw a young woman taking pictures of herself in her swimming costume with her iPhone, standing half-submerged in the water. Aware of the harsh critiques of young women’s choices around how they represent themselves visually, and how the omnipotence of the smartphone camera has revealed new issues within that debate, I looked on and wondered what this young woman’s own opinion of those issues would be. Was she taking control of her own representation, objectifying herself, or just having a nice time? Now didn’t seem like the time to ask, and nor was I sure enough of my broken Italian. While I was struck by the intense concentration with which she posed for shot after shot, indifferent to the other people on the beach bearing witness to her digital self-portraiture, as a smartphone user myself I found the seeming nonchalance with which the device was handled in such close proximity to the water far more alarming. I didn’t realise you could do that! Still unaccustomed to how beach culture had evolved to include smartphones, I quietly hoped her phone was insured for water damage and went back to my reading, realising I was the odd one out.
As innocent as a few self-portraits or “selfies” gleefully taken on a beach during a hard-earned holiday might seem, some people take far greater risks than having to lie to an insurance company in order to get their phone replaced because they accidentally dropped it in the Mediterranean trying to get that perfect shot. That same year, 2015, more than thirty people died around the world in various predicaments while trying to take selfies. In 2016, it only took until the end of June to reach the same number. Many of the people who have been killed taking selfies have been in the developing world, where the culture of “risk” avoidance has developed less quickly than the culture of smartphone usage, and access to dangerous but impressive selfie-taking areas such as railway tracks, the habitats of unpredictable wildlife, and tall, climbable structures is less restricted. Whether it is up to your waist in sea water or with an oncoming train visibly speeding towards you, the juxtaposition of the person taking the selfie with an exotic, unusual, or far-fetched background is exactly what makes the shot worthwhile and gives it its meaning. Impending danger in the background is only one type of emotional context in which to take a selfie. Other emotionally salient contexts are also common. Numerous teenagers have been criticised in the press for taking selfies at sombre sites such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland or the memorial at the site of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. So many people have taken selfies at funerals, for example, that for a while there was an entire blog devoted to capturing them. When the blog’s editors decided to cease posting in December 2013, their final post featured former US president Barack Obama taking a selfie with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British prime minister David Cameron at Nelson Mandela’s memorial ceremony at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg. Former US president George W. Bush also took a selfie with U2 singer Bono at the same event. That same week, thousands of miles away, a tourist in Brooklyn, New York was widely criticised for taking a selfie as a man was attempting to throw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. Having been watching the unfolding situation for a few moments, she reportedly then photographed herself as officials attempted to talk the man down to safety behind her — successfully in the end. In September 2014 in Ankara, Turkey, a police official took a selfie showing in the background another desperate man moments from leaping to his death from a suspension bridge. The fact that such cases have tended to receive public outcry shows that we have not shaken a sense that some things perhaps shouldn’t be recorded in this way, yet they continually happen anyway, which suggests a degree of tension or ambivalence about such actions. There is almost something desperate about our desire to perform online. In April 2016, when mentally ill man Seif El Din Mustafa hijacked a Cairo-bound flight and diverted it to Cyprus, passenger Ben Innes approached the hijacker to take a selfie with him, subsequently sharing the bizarre image online to great acclaim. That Innes was a health-and-safety auditor whose job was presumably to point out risk in exchange for money only makes the story more hilarious and bizarre. The desire to use images of yourself in unusual or salient contexts can even get you arrested. In 2016, domestic violence fugitive Mack Yearwood was so pleased to have been named “Wanted of the Week” by the police department in the town of Stuart, Florida, that he posted a copy of the genuine “wanted” poster as his own Facebook profile picture, eventually leading to his arrest. Even if not a “selfie” as such, it is instructive to note just how strong the desire to share images of ourselves that will somehow impress or shock can be.
As authoritative selfie-taking expert Kim Kardashian, author of Selfish (a coffee-table “book” consisting only of her selfies), once said: “I think it really takes about 15-20 selfies that someone takes on their phone before they post the right one.” Similar to the numerous films in which a character holds up a recent daily newspaper to show that they are still alive, showing yourself in a given visual context is a way of emphasising your connection to a particular moment. Breanna Mitchell, one of the people shamed for taking a selfie at Auschwitz, told the press that she had shared the image in memory of her late father, who had had a love of history. You may be seeking validation, showing unity, making an homage, or it may simply be “cool,” but these different purposes all have in common that they make your appearance in that location at that time into something performative. The fact that people are willing to go to such lengths to get the “right one” tells us that their motivations must be strong enough to challenge the normal reservations over decency or taste, or safety for that matter. Facing possible death on a train track, being at Nelson Mandela’s memorial ceremony next to Barack Obama, looking “fly” in your swimwear on a beautiful Italian beach, or having a quiet but nonetheless highly public moment of “homage” at a former concentration camp all confirm this in different ways.
One can’t necessarily assume that all of these images are intended to be uploaded to social media or shared publicly, of course, and in some cases the capturing of such images may well have been for strictly private record, as Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie at Mandela’s funeral with Cameron and Obama — which never surfaced — seems to have been. The data suggest, however, that most selfies are for sharing with a wider group of people via the internet, like George W. Bush’s selfie with Bono at the same event, which was posted to image-sharing platform Instagram. Over three hundred million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, and 95% of young adults admit to having taken at least one such picture of themselves. It is even possible to take animated selfies, which have become a regular feature of media-sharing app Snapchat.
A bit like how Gulliver’s Travels is often abridged for children to only include his visit to Lilliput, the story of a selfie’s appearance on a social network is just one small event in a longer story, which doesn’t start with the snapping of the picture or stop at the successful distribution of the image to its intended audience. The full story highlights some of the broader issues with social media, and to illustrate this, we can take the posting of a selfie from the beach mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter and fictionalise based on real-life data to show where the story might go next.
Let’s say some hours after posting your selfie, you can’t sleep. You check your phone again and it’s 4am — the bright bluish screen of the device illuminating your face in an otherwise dark room. Not knowing what else to do with yourself and feeling that immediate sleep is unlikely, you open the Facebook app out of habit. How many more “likes” has the latest photo you just posted received? Has it reached a hundred yet? Why not? Has your current partner, who may be soundly asleep beside you, “liked” it yet? Why not? Did s/ he really not like it? Is it because you might have put on weight, or are starting to get crow’s feet? Perhaps you could never ask him/her directly, but you may very likely have wondered such things. We can go further still: Perhaps somewhere far away in another time zone, an old friend, who is suffering from depression, sees the photo in her news feed as she logs onto her Facebook for the fourth time in twenty minutes, looking for… she doesn’t really know what. As she closes the web browser to end her Facebook session, the social network has not given her whatever she was looking for, and she feels more despondent and empty than ever. Elsewhere, a worker in the Philippines, hired by a firm subcontracted by Facebook Inc., has also seen the picture as part of a review process to make sure it conformed with the social network’s “community standards.” These workers are sometimes paid as little as one dollar per hour — sadly not a fiction (Webster, 2012).
Later that summer, let us continue to imagine, Facebook launch an advertising campaign for their social network, using real photos shared to the site, licensed from their users’ profiles, including the shot you uploaded. Your likeness appears alongside others on billboards in London, Paris, New York, São Paulo, Rome, and other world capitals. To complete the narrative and provide some pleasing circularity, a friend, recognising you in the ad, takes a picture of this ad, posts it on Facebook, and tags you in it. You might be outraged by the usage of your likeness in this way, but permission for this type of usage has been repeatedly if unwittingly assented to every time you use Facebook, since this is when you agree implicitly to their terms and conditions of usage, which include the granting of a worldwide, non-exclusive license to use any of your content for any purpose. According to Facebook’s terms and conditions of usage, the only way you could have prevented this happening was to delete the precious selfie from Facebook. The story of a standard selfie, it would seem, is not a particularly happy one. When selfies are shared, they are published onto pre-existing networks that are controlled by powerful, distant entities, but which reproduce and interact with the dynamics of existing social relations so that you won’t notice. Your selfies and other materials are stored in privately owned databases whose owners grant themselves permission to use them in whatever way they choose, including in advertising. Social media platforms will mix your selfie in with content from other users, and provide a quantitative measure for others to leave feedback on each item in real time in the form of “likes,” “shares,” or “retweets,” simultaneously providing the platform’s owners with valuable real-time metadata and content analysis on every image, link, movie, or other media item, and providing the user with instant validation (or not).
As much as selfies have become the focus of adventurous social-science academics and sardonic newspaper columnists alike, posting content — including self-portraits — to social media platforms is actually of secondary importance when compared with the consumptive use of social networks; that is, the viewing of and interaction with media content posted by other users, and that is where the main focus of any analysis should lie. As many as 25% of users say that they never post any updates on Facebook, according to Pew Research Center. Similarly with Twitter, 40% of users log in but never tweet. These users are nonetheless active, and form part of the audience for whose benefit selfies, along with most other status updates, tweets, and other content, are posted. On average, iOS and Android smartphone users spend 17% of all their time on their phones in the Facebook app, and 14% in a web browser such as Chrome or Safari for all other mobile web browsing.
The effects of social media use are pretty wide-ranging, and study after study shows that our satisfaction with life, body security, social relationships, and overall psychological wellbeing are negatively affected by the consumptive use of social media platforms, and improve quickly when we stop using them. Scientific studies are of course only one form of “evidence,” and are often too positivistic in how they handle (or ignore) social constructs, but they can still contribute a lot to a broader analysis without requiring that we embrace all their assumptions. A 2014 study found that increased time using Facebook’s photos functionality specifically (as opposed to the platform’s other functionalities) was correlated with increased body dissatisfaction and self-objectification in US teenage girls (Meier & Gray, 2014). A 2015 study found that following larger numbers of strangers on Instagram predicted increased depressive symptoms in young adults. Amongst those following the highest percentages of strangers, “more frequent Instagram use had direct associations with greater depressive symptoms” (Lup, Trub & Rosenthal, 2015). One survey found that as many as 66% of teenage girls using Facebook claim to have been bullied via the platform, 19% via Twitter, and 9% via Instagram (Steinmetz, 2014). Another study in 2009 found that Facebook “may be responsible for creating jealousy and suspicion in romantic relationships” (Muise, Christofides & Desmarais, 2009), and yet another found that “the longer people have used Facebook, the stronger was their belief that others were happier than themselves, and the less they agreed that life is fair” (Chou & Edge, 2012). Research has also shown that use of social media is likely to make you less happy generally, or in more scientific language, causes an acute decline in “subjective emotional wellbeing.” A 2013 study of Facebook by Ethan Kross and colleagues, based mostly at the psychology department at the University of Michigan, is especially prominent in this research. Although the methodology of this study — texting people five times a day to ask them quantitative questions about where their emotions and social media use fall between one hundred, “a lot,” and zero, “not at all” — leaves a lot to be desired, the results and analysis presented do show a significant causation: People go on Facebook, and subsequently feel emotionally worse as a result in the next two-to-three-hour period, and increasingly dissatisfied with their lives over the course of the two-week study. “Facebook use predicts declines in the two components of subjective wellbeing: how people feel moment to moment and how satisfied they are with their lives,” the study says. “The more participants used Facebook, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time” (Kross et al, 2013). More recently, a 2016 study by psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine similarly found that social media were “significantly associated with increased depression” (Lin et al, 2016). Without having spent the time trawling through cyberpsychology journals, many people will feel these effects, particularly in the case of emotions, without being fully aware of their causes and associated behaviours, but that is all the more reason to take such effects seriously, rather than discount them.
The effects of our consumption of social media are not only psychological either. We are also physiologically affected by social media, and especially the devices via which we access them. As of April 27th 2016, 54% of Facebook users use the platform only via a smartphone, and according to Buzzfeed’s own industry insights (2014), US adults aged eighteen to thirty-four spend an average of five hours and twelve minutes per day on their smartphones. Many readers will at least be able to imagine checking their phones in the middle of the night as in our story above, and possibly entering the Facebook app or Twitter app, but these devices are far from salubrious. The compulsive checking of social media, email, or other media from a smartphone can interfere with our sleeping patterns if it occurs before or during sleep hours. Whether you are checking for likes on your Instagram selfie, witty Tweet, or sarcastic Facebook post, studies show that if you do this in the middle of the night or up to an hour before going to bed, your sleeping patterns can be significantly disrupted. One such study “indicates that during laboratory exposure to 884 MHz wireless signals, components of sleep believed to be important for recovery from daily wear and tear are adversely affected” (Arnetz et al, 2008). Other research suggests it is not only the electromagnetic waves from your smartphone that interfere with your sleep, but also the frequency of light emitted by the blue pixels that are part of the RGB screen, so much so that “an average person reading on a tablet for a couple hours before bed may find that their sleep is delayed by about an hour” (Holzman, 2010). In version 9.3 of their mobile operating system iOS, Apple even introduced a feature to mitigate this effect by making the screen of your device glow more towards the orange part of the spectrum. The show must go on, after all!
Beyond disrupting our sleep, there are also other physical dangers. A study commissioned by US mobile carrier AT&T found that seven in ten people use their smartphone while driving, with four in ten admitting to using social media while at the wheel. One in ten even use video chat while driving (!). For a country with approximately 250 million cars on the road and a driving age as low as fourteen in some states, that is a hugely worrying statistic, but perhaps says more than any other about how desperate people seem to be to continue using social media. There is an awful lot invested in social media maintaining their perception as innocent, fun, social, and above all, harmless. We shouldn’t be so sure.
What we can be sure of is that our use of networked, consumer technology, and particularly the combination of smartphones and social networks, despite being rapidly and intimately incorporated into our lives on an unprecedented scale, is not particularly good for us in the long run. Being on social media in moderation and using smartphones to access them may be perfectly innocent in themselves, and many people still voluntarily use social media for basic, prosaic reasons, but there are aspects of what social media does to us individually, what it means for our societies, and what it can tell us about how we live that are troubling and that need to be articulated for all to hear. Our desperation to take dangerous selfies and compulsively check social media in the middle of the night in a way that disturbs our sleep, or while driving so that we end other people’s lives and ruin our own, are just a few of the more colourful examples.
I want to make it clear that I do not hate social media and I am not arguing that you should either. There are a lot more useful things to say about the world than dividing it into “good” and “bad.” The idea for this book came partly from the ambivalence of my own relationship with social networks and apps, and when I finished the first draft of its manuscript, I shared this fact with some of my friends using a social network. The point of outlining how social media are not as good for us as they claim to be is not to be judgemental of their usage or dictate what people should or shouldn’t do. We are “only human” after all, and human vulnerability and entrapment in habitual self-detriment should be met with compassion and solidarity. But just like those pet parrots that compulsively pluck out their own feathers, surely we cannot be content to simply look on without objectively wondering: Why? If it is so easy to demonstrate the downside of social media usage, why do so many people keep using it? It’s not as if the pathologies described above pass unnoticed in the end.
Were the activity something else more stigmatised, such as alcohol, we would immediately respond to the scenario with a well-known label: Addiction. But addiction is a slippery diagnosis that tends to have lesser or greater applicability depending on the activity or substance to which it is applied, and there is not always a strict basis on which to decide when an individual is addicted and when their behaviour in relation to a given stimulus is simply excessive. While there is a tendency for the media to portray excessive social media usage as “addiction,” it is more complicated than simply applying our understanding of addiction to a new area. Addiction, as psychologist Richard Wood (2007) points out, is a concept largely borrowed from the diagnosis of substance addiction in the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and so is a metaphorical rather than direct characterisation when applied to media usage such as video games or social media. That is not to say that one can only truly be addicted to substances — gambling addiction is a very real problem in some people’s lives, and so is pornography addiction, but we would be better placed to learn from addictive patterns, rather than insisting on seeing them everywhere. True addiction, whether to substances or media, also has a number of hallmarks that aren’t necessarily present in social media addiction. For a start, more of the same stimuli is needed over time because a tolerance develops, and users become desensitised to the stimuli that previously gave them what they wanted. Gamblers no longer feel the same rush when gambling the same sums, heroin users quickly develop a tolerance to the effects of the drug and require an increased amount to feel the same high, and pornography users often lose the ability to enjoy actual sexual contact, and have to seek out increasingly extreme materials just to get the same stimulation. Furthermore, addictions can usually develop to a point where the user has completely lost control of their life. Drug use, alcohol and gambling addiction are again the most common examples. Addictions also frequently lead to identifiable and dangerous withdrawal symptoms if the activity or behaviour to which the individual is addicted is taken away. While there is some indication that certain social media are as hard to give up as alcohol or nicotine (Hofman, Vohs & Baumeister, 2012) and social media-driven usage on a smartphone can cause withdrawal-like symptoms such as anxiety when unavailable (Moeller, Powers & Roberts, 2012), there is no evidence that these symptoms are medically serious in the same ways, for instance, as those of heroin withdrawal.
Many of us love to hate social media and roll our eyes if they are overemphasised. It’s not uncommon to have at least one friend who has left Facebook, their name greyed out and their previous comments and interactions all gone without trace. But despite such unease about the role of social media in our lives or in society in general, we continue to use them. Huge numbers of us use social media in ways that can demonstrably have subtly detrimental effects on us, for huge amounts of time, and many of us behave as if we are apparently desperate to continue doing so. There are now more Facebook users logging onto the site at least once a month — 1.79 billion at the time of writing — than there are Catholics, Muslims, or left-handed people in the world. Over a billion of these people check Facebook every day. In 2015 it was reported that the UK’s Royal Navy was having difficulties recruiting because younger candidates couldn’t face the idea of being trapped in a submarine underwater for up to 90 days, with no access to the web or social media. “The fact that you are disconnected from the world wide web and Twitter is actually a significant barrier to recruiting young people,” defence consultant Nick Chaffey told the Daily Mail (2015). According to research agency We Are Social, the average UK social media user spends two hours and thirteen minutes on social media per day, while the global average for internet users isn’t far behind at one hour and forty-nine minutes.
What do these people get from their use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other “social media” platform that could possibly explain such an extreme relationship to them? These hordes of people must be driven toward these platforms by some fairly powerful forces, but what are they? And are these forces external to these people, acting upon them to motivate them onto these platforms, or do they come from within these people’s own minds? These questions frame the need to build a much clearer picture of what is really going on. They are the kinds of questions it is essential to ask about any society in which large numbers of people do something that is arguably to their own detriment. To some extent, participating in things that we know cause harm is a common feature of life in contemporary consumerist culture, but this usually occurs in a context where people feel they have no choice. The emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for example, is something that is widely regarded to be bad for the environment, and for the people and wildlife that live on planet Earth, yet almost all of us who believe global warming is a problem are still complicit in making this situation worse because our need for energy or transportation (not to mention our hunger for steak, iPhones, and cheap consumables manufactured on the other side of the world) requires that carbon dioxide and methane be emitted. But technology isn’t supposed to be the same, is it? Why on earth do so many people find social media so hard to put down?
In the past, when calling our motivations for using social media into question, I have been scolded by people who say things like: “But there are lots of benefits to social media. You can keep in touch with friends, or stay up to date with what is happening in the world.” The liberal, market-oriented view of consumer technology has always focused on its positive aspects and encouraged us to believe that our relationship with technology is one that empowers us with new choices and sacred freedoms. Long before the age of apps, the “world wide web,” upon which the original social media websites grew, was hailed as a practical advantage to its users; a growing series of tools to make life easier. We are now, you often hear, an “information society,” largely thanks to the internet. Writing before “social media” existed, Todd Gitlin (2003) argued that terms such as “information society” or “information age” were “instant propaganda” for a positivist view of what the technology of the internet could bring its users. “Who in his right mind could be against information or want to be without it? Who wouldn’t want to produce, consume, and accumulate more of this useful stuff, remove obstacles to its spread, invest in it, see better variants of it spring to life?” he asked rhetorically. After all, technology brings progress! A CompuServe ad from 1982 illustrates this well:
Someday, in the comfort of your own home, you’ll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyse the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play bridge with three strangers in LA, Chicago and Dallas. Welcome to Someday.
Interestingly, Steve Jobs was still evangelising about essentially the same types of capabilities when the iPhone launched 25 years later in 2007, the only difference being that the “comfort” of one’s “own home” was no longer a necessity for such affordances so much as a hindrance — classrooms, museums, public transport, or behind the wheel of a moving car have now all become common locations for the same activities to occur.
One can’t sensibly disagree that social media, and the internet more generally, are capable of providing real practical benefits, and there is no denying that some of these benefits are indeed social in their nature, but this should not mean that social media are somehow immune from proper analysis or critique, or that their sole usage is that of basic practicality or sociality. Just as Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer took issue with the positivism and rationalism of the enlightenment, we cannot allow any such pragmatic account of social media to be our prevailing analysis. A bit like saying “red wine helps you live longer,” it ignores the moderation that is required, the dependency that can and often does form, the numerous other inevitable drawbacks, and the broader diagnosis as to why certain aspects of life might be amiss to start with. Just as nobody who drinks wine daily does so primarily for the health benefits without kidding themselves, nobody who uses social media in the compulsive and self-defeating ways that have become common does so purely for its social or practical benefits.
To say that social media and the internet are not predominantly practical is not, however, to say that they do not offer any practical benefit. Rather, the argument must be that such practical uses are not what drive their use. Briefly, it is worth exploring some of the areas where social media are used rationally or with a clear, conscious purpose.
The nomenclature of a “news feed” used on some social networks is curious given that such a proportion of the content it tends to contain is not “news” in any conventional sense. This emphasis owes more to the idealistic history of the web as an “information superhighway,” but like the emphasis on sociality, it obfuscates the timeline’s other more common, if dysfunctional, purposes. Social media are sometimes an important means of access to debate and to information, and a study by Pew Research Centre from May 2016 reported that 62% of US adults get some of their news via social media, with 18% doing so “often”. Since information can easily be found elsewhere however, the case for social media as an information-centric architecture is a weak one. As we will see in chapters Two and Five respectively, social media are often a far more important source of non-information and even disinformation than they are a bona-fide source of trusted information.
Social media can be used effectively as a fundraising or awareness-raising tool. According to the New Yorker, the ALS “Ice Bucket Challenge” of 2014, although widely derided as a fad, was an indisputable success. Despite many copycat videos featuring people dumping ice cold water on themselves without raising any money for the cause at all, the 440 million videos, viewed 10 billion times in all, raised a staggering 220 million dollars globally for ALS organisations, with the American ALS Association receiving “thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year.” Much as the videos may have become annoying after a while, the campaign was a uniquely social media-native affair and exemplifies the ways in which social media can concentrate the web’s practicality and sociality to useful ends.
The benefits of social media can also be personal: According to a 2013 report from Pew Research Center, “One in ten Americans have used an online dating site or mobile dating app themselves, and many people now know someone else who uses online dating or who has found a spouse or long-term partner via online dating.” Whether dating sites count as “social media” in the most common sense of the term is debatable, since one of the defining hallmarks of contemporary social media is that they are generalised, multi-purpose platforms (see Chapter Four for a discussion of this generality), whereas dating apps and websites are far more specific, but even away from purpose-driven dating apps and websites, people have always met on the web for sex, romance, and true love. In one recent example, couple Victoria Carlin and Jonathan O’Brien got married after Carlin tweeted in 2012, “Well I’m in love with whoever is manning the Waterstones Oxford Street account. Be still my actual beating heart.” Four years later in July 2016, Carlin tweeted, “Dear reader, I married him #noreally #yeahidunnohoweither.” Again, critiques of social media do not need to be blind to such stories; they are not counterexamples and they do not disprove anything that will be argued in this book. Rather, the very fact that this story and a few others like it are reported in the press and capture people’s imaginations is not only because they are saccharine or heart-warming, depending on how romantic you are, but because the chances of them happening are astronomical — such benefits are certainly not the reason people are constantly checking Facebook.
Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure argued that, rather than things existing first and then being labelled by language, a word being used to denote something was an act of construction and that language was a way to confer socially constructed meaning onto the world. The term “social media” is a good example of this. It insists that social media primarily facilitate our social lives. While no doubt lexically sound to begin with, this signifier seems to imply that the capacity to be social, referred to by social scientists as “sociality,” is the only attribute worth using as a descriptor, rather than an attribute that is arguably just a layer woven into its other functionalities to make them more appealing, and we are left with something of a misnomer. They could be called “sleep-disruptive media,” or “depressive media,” but then Facebook’s shareholders might not be so happy. “Social media” is not a neutral term, and should not be above critique. What could be wrong with “media” that are “social”? It’s like calling them “fun media” or “friends media.” This characterisation is a huge part of how the internet’s positive side and capabilities have been sold to us, and has even shaped much of the research into the role that social networks play (e.g. Nadkarni & Hofmann, 2012). Most major technological introductions are accompanied by highly positive or utopian thinking, and the web was no exception. While sociality may have been redemptive of an earlier, more boring web, today it obfuscates the other roles that “social” media have come to have, explored in the remaining chapters of this book.
Sociality can rarely occur without denoted spaces, be they rooms in a house, or buildings and spaces within a city. The perception of the early web as a separate space is an interesting part of its social history, and the idea of an exciting new “cyber” space was a part of how this utopianism was articulated. US internet lawyer Julie E. Cohen tells us, “The cyberspace utopians have been most influential […] precisely where their contribution is least remarked: in catalysing the narrative construction of cyberspace as separate space” (2007). Sociality on the web proved most popular with people who were otherwise restricted in their sociality and social space: Teenagers, reclusive individuals, and enthusiasts in very specific niches who were not geographically close enough to one another to discuss their passions in “real” space. It was a trail that had been blazed long before it became mainstream with consumer networks such as America Online, or AOL. Forums, news groups, and bulletin boards, although seldom pitched as nominally social for sociality’s sake, provided early forms of sociality by connecting people who wanted to discuss highly specialised interests with others who shared them. They also involved features that survive to this day on social media platforms, such as discussion threads and emoticons. AOL was one major platform on which the web’s early sociality gained commercial and social momentum, with teenagers and middle-schoolers tying up household phone lines for hours so that nobody else could use them, because to be online was a social activity rather than a purpose-oriented tool, yet did not require even leaving the house. AOL also foreshadowed many features of contemporary social networks with features such as user profile pages, screen names, avatars (profile pictures), and text-based real-time conversations. As we should be aware today too, teenagers are often early adopters in some ways because, as Sherry Turkle (2011) has written at length, they use technology to escape. It is when their parents start using the same technology that you know it has gone mainstream, at which point the teenagers will look for something else (Wiederhold, 2012), but the importance of social media for them as a primary social conduit cannot be underestimated. Data published in 2016 show that the widespread adoption of social media since 2007 has coincided with a 45% decline in teenage pregnancy over the same period (Bingham, 2016), so the illusion of the web as a space, albeit felt rather than stated outright, does at least have some advantages. For teenagers, recluses, and “geeks” alike, the sense of the web as a separate space into which you could escape was and remains an alluring one, even if the “cyberspace” terminology was not consistently an explicit part of the experience, and is now virtually unheard of.
For everybody else, for whom satisfactory sociality already existed, the internet was not initially an obviously social technology. Social media use as a normative, mainstream, grown-up activity did not begin until the social networks we use today, such as Facebook, appeared — more than fifteen years after the original web was introduced. If Facebook was the only way to be friends, the 76% of the globe’s population not (yet?) on Facebook at the time of writing would have no friends. If Twitter was the only way for us to partake in social news consumption and information exchange, there would have been no such thing as a public sphere until 2006 when it was founded, and digital humanities colleagues wouldn’t be quoting Habermas quite so reliably as they do. In other words, the sociality of “social media” is not an explanation in itself for why we use them so much because the things it is claimed they do for us socially are largely behaviours that predate their arrival by decades or even centuries, subject to a few enhancements. We should be very careful about confusing an explanation of why so many people use social media with an account of their practical or purely social — in the literal sense — affordances. The internet in general has provided a means to communicate in real time using text, sound, image, or video, with people in any part of the globe, often with no additional cost besides that of the device being used to connect and the internet connection itself. That is an amazing capability which some social networks have now incorporated. It might be what people use Facebook for sometimes, but it is not why people use Facebook specifically, to begin with.
Those who scolded me for seeming as though I had overlooked the social benefits they had experienced on social media were missing the point. It is not that “social media” aren’t intensely social, so much as the fact that they neither have the exclusivity on sociality in the way that their name appears to suggest, nor function in an exclusively social role, as we will see in Chapter Two. Furthermore, as sociologist C. Clayton Childress (2012) has observed, all media are social, and to allow ourselves to believe that “social media” are uniquely so is shaky ground at best. He asks: “But if these new forms of media are social media, does this imply that older mediums such as film, television, and books are anti-social?” One of the most important things we do with any medium is to consume and share it with others. As an example of this, Childress uses the work of sociologist Elizabeth Long (1994), whose analysis of women and literature indirectly takes issue with the myth of un-social media, or “the reader who reads alone”:
While we might imagine a solitary reader getting lost in a good story as she sits by her window, this picture masks the simple fact that the achievement of literacy is itself a complex and collective social accomplishment. […] Perhaps most importantly for readers, the myth of the “reader who reads alone” masks the deep conversations that reading engenders; talking with others about books we have read is one of the many social pleasures of the medium.
As much as the long-term presence of the web in our lives has a history of being something useful and ultimately sociable, we are kidding ourselves if we think that such uses alone drive the popularity of social media in their current iteration. A better justification for the use of the word “social” would be as an acknowledgement that users’ sociality has in some ways become a commodity, harvested by a social network’s owners. While social networks obviously involve people who are known to you socially in some sense or other, the fact that they are called “social media” should not be seen as a reflection of what they offer their users, so much as what their users give to them.
A positivistic emphasis on the mechanical features and convenient affordances offered by social networks is both deterministic and naïve. Some uses for the internet, including aspects of social media, are useful, and some are social, but these aren’t what make social media irresistible. It’s time to talk about what does.
I was once commissioned to write an article entitled “Is Social Media Making Us Lonely?” for a start-up technology publication (2013). In the course of researching this article, something dawned on me. It seemed like instead of social media making us lonely, loneliness was, if anything, making us turn to social media. The studies on this relationship are conflicting. In truth, it’s a lot more of a cycle, and loneliness is far too specific of a condition since it is itself a symptom with an array of social causes (see Chapter Three). Nonetheless this raised the important issue of causality: When people consider a technology’s role in their lives, they tend to think about how it has been or will be the cause of various changes in us and in the world. That is exactly what the editor and I had done in agreeing on an article with that headline, and we were not alone. Endless blog articles with titles like “How social media is changing the way we (do business/ make friends/have sex/do other everyday activity)” betray this logic and show it to be widespread. The BBC’s World Service even bizarrely asked on its website: “Is social media fueling a craze for stronger [male] jaw lines?” (2016). Some academics and behavioural scientists are guilty too — one of the studies cited in this chapter begins its abstract with “The social network site Facebook is a rapidly expanding phenomenon that is changing the nature of social relationships,” and many others do similarly. Social media can certainly affect us, but does our use of them really make us do anything? Social relationships are as old as humankind itself; after thousands of years of human genetic and social evolution, is it really Facebook — about twenty million lines of PHP code; a privately-owned Californian database with a website (and app) user interface — that is changing the very nature of social relationships, something so central to human essence? Unlikely, if you think about it a bit harder. Facebook isn’t changing anything except its own features (as explored in Chapter Four); it’s a combination of the people who created Facebook, the people who use it, their relationships and respective needs, of which the Facebook platform itself is only the mediator, and lastly the society in which this interaction takes place. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, VKontakte, LinkedIn, and all other social networks that people actually use (so, not Google Plus). Banal, throwaway statements of the form “social media is changing us” typify a variety of lazy thinking known as technological determinism, typical of how technologies are often discussed and understood as their usage changes gear from early adopters to more mainstream usage. To see things according to a technologically deterministic outlook is to believe that technology can somehow induce or suppress our behaviour, as though we have no control. Technological determinism is the belief that adding a “pride” flag emoji will make life substantially easier for LGBTQ individuals, or that replacing the “gun” emoji with a fun-looking bright-green water pistol will somehow do anything to ameliorate gun violence. If we think of technology as being external to our humanity or agency in this way, we easily forget that the people who designed and built that technology, unlike the technology itself, have intentionality and may well be interested in steering and controlling our behaviour. When it is put like this, the complete loss of agency on our behalf that it implies becomes clear, and its absurdity is revealed. In the first instance, your brain is what determines your behaviour and responds to your environment, not some “brogrammers” at Facebook or Snapchat. The technology invites you do certain things in ways that are undoubtedly influential, but there is nothing in that technology that forces you to do them.
Another problem with technological determinism is that the opportunity to identify the real cause of our own behaviours is often lost. Rather than speculating about what it is that technology makes us feel or do, we would do well to start asking what it is in us that makes us find any given technology — or action within that technology, such as “liking” something — appealing. Technology allows, more than it causes, and if our behaviour changes when a new technology comes along it is because we are finally able to do something that we already had a propensity to do. When a technology becomes as general as social media has done, this is a difficult question, but all the more necessary.
Where technological determinism is one extreme because it externalises our behaviours onto a technology and eliminates our capacity to think and act for ourselves, the other extreme is also problematic. In most societies, there is generally a tendency to pathologise, medicalise, and even penalise individuals for behaviours deemed undesirable or deviant, without looking at any of the broader societal factors that may have led to those behaviours. Broader debates do happen on occasion, but they seldom receive much attention or credibility, and both conservative and liberal politics tend to favour total individual responsibility so that questions about underlying systemic causes need not be asked. If people riot, they’re “animals”; if somebody carries out a mass shooting, they’re either “crazy” or it’s because of their fanatic religiosity (depending on the religion).
Individual responsibility is the sacred preserve of modern economics, justice, and ethics, yet there is every reason to believe that when a society is less happy, more repressed, pressurised, or unbalanced, people are more likely to seek out pleasure and comfort, and the dysfunctional behaviour of its members in order to do so will begin to increase. If your “friend” Johnny spends an excessive amount of time on Facebook, for example, is it because Johnny is at fault, or because Johnny’s brain, being that of a human being, will tend to seek certain things that Facebook convincingly promises, and because the economic and social pressures under which Johnny and many people in Johnny’s society live are inclined to exacerbate compulsive behaviours such as the overuse of social media?
The tendency when addressing social media is to normalise their scale and presence in our lives, but like Marx’s idea of the superstructure, consumer technology often reflects, echoes, and subtly reinforces the prevailing norms and assumptions of the culture that gave rise to it, and the lowercase-p politics that can be identified in that culture. Rather than determining culture, technology is culture, and it is essential to start seeing it as such. In an age where technologies such as Facebook are so much a part of the broader culture, this inevitably means that there is a contradiction between technological determinism and individual responsibility; you cannot have a situation in which technology can and does make us do things, but capitalism, austerity, inequality, and injustice — all also cultural and historically produced — cannot and do not. Either culture affects our behaviour or it doesn’t.
The only resolution to this contradiction has been to imagine that technology is somehow outside of, and deterministic of, culture. A far better basis on which to try and seek answers, however, is to say that it is our cultural and economic environment, in combination with our brains, that makes us do things, and interaction with the technology that that environment produces is just one of several means by which this happens. When such connections are revealed, and technology is shown to be intimately connected with the culture, economy, and psychology of everyday life in a given period of history, it becomes a useful gauge by which we can ascertain the health of our democracy, culture, and collective consciousness, and social media are an especially good opportunity for an accurate reading of those cultures and economies. Those seeking to understand social media as a technology can learn a great deal from looking at the culture that produced them and drives their usage; those looking to learn about that culture can do so partly from examining its technologies.
This anti-deterministic way of looking at things also reminds us that accepting social media as a normative part of human life is a choice that we don’t have to make, just as not all of us like dubstep, BBQ ribs, or Sex and the City. However, identifying social media as a subjective feature of our cultural landscape does not mean that we can take our eyes off it. Even if we have decided to abstain, or never chose to participate in “that Twitter thing” in the first place, we still urgently need to consider digital technology’s place in our lives, however distant we think we can be from it. It is in our lives whether we like it or not by virtue of being part of the lives of those around us. According to Pew Research Center, half of US adults who are not on Facebook live with somebody who is, and there are also increasing uses of social media as a privatised extension of public life; local governments, police, and municipal authorities now often use Twitter to broadcast important infrastructural information, for example.
Traffic sign, Euston Rd, London
This only confirms what we already know: Those who are not interested in international affairs are still affected by war; those who can see nothing of interest in economics are still impacted by currencies, markets, and reckless lending; and those who know nothing about the law are still bound and prosecuted by it. Even if you aren’t given to such trivialities as social media at all, consider yourself well above posting a selfie, never check your Facebook or Twitter from your phone — let alone in the middle of the night or while driving — or aren’t on any social networks at all, it is in all of our interests to pay attention.
It is therefore time to take a wide-ranging look at how our changing relationship with technology and networks originates from broader cultural, political, and economic questions about the lives we lead; a holistic, general, critical account of social media, not as a “separate space,” as past analyses have characterised the web, but as a digitally arranged, tightly integrated extension of the very same cultures, economies, and social relations that we already inhabit. A bit like an ocean’s currents, there are underlying patterns and tendencies in our usage of social media that do not originate in them, but in ourselves and the societies we create, and as social networks encircle more and more of our digital activity and daily life, we will come to see that there is an awful lot at stake. This is the kind of analysis that will be attempted in the chapters that follow. While this book may well be pigeon-holed as a book about social media, it is not a book about Facebook or Twitter or any other specific platform per se, and should not be taken as a specific analysis of certain platforms or websites. It is a book about human subjectivity, capitalism, its culture, and the effects and consequences of the combinations these produce. Since we can read Facebook, Twitter, and others as cases of a broader phenomenon that can and likely will be reproduced and amended by other corporations in the future, the ins and outs of specific platforms like Facebook or Twitter or the companies that happen to build, run, and own these platforms are relevant only insofar as they illustrate manifestations of a broader, underlying pattern.
We cannot allow the character or narrative of our relationship to social media to be dictated by the forces of capital that own and benefit from these platforms, since no motivation would exist to exercise the necessary degree of scrutiny towards Facebook, Twitter, and other such enterprises. If the companies of the same names are asked about the effects their products may have on their users, they will make an unqualified and positive assessment of their own products and deny that there is anything detrimental about their platforms if they are used properly, or that they are responsible for their misuse. But as we will see in Chapter Four, your activity on so-called “social media” can create enormous revenues for these platforms’ parent companies. These corporations’ very existence, not to mention quarterly profits, are dependent on our continuing usage. The answers must therefore come from those who have nothing to gain from the economic success of social media. There may be no more radical or important act in our time than to draw attention to the connections that entrenched, powerful institutions wish to remain out of sight. These connections are hiding in plain sight, however, and where this work may not always offer solutions to the — at times — alarming pictures it will paint, it is hoped that the articulation of these connections with sufficient care will itself be a useful and constructive contribution to our understanding. What is attempted here is therefore a radical exercise of “connecting the dots,” such that, with enough work, a picture begins to appear that shows social media users their true relationship with social media, and shows us our true relationship with capitalism.
The same picture is probably very clear to the large corporations that give us social media platforms. Inside Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other smaller enterprises involved in bringing social media platforms to market, the connections between culture, capital, and psychology that will be revealed in this work are already well understood. But where such connections are a strategy for these organisations, understanding them is for us a way not to be outwitted; a way for us to be aware of our own position within that picture. While the connections made in this work are the stuff of important meetings at Facebook, the stakes for us are much higher.
It is my hope in writing this book that readers will be provided with a map for situating themselves in relation to technology, to social media, and to capitalist culture. Especially for those who intend to continue using social media, it is essential to understand the relationship between all three and to derive from that a clearer idea of what you are really doing, and who you are really serving, when for example you check your Facebook at night or tweet a selfie.