A German law governing privacy at the workplace recently made it illegal for bosses to look up prospective employees on Facebook (Jolly 2010). In doing so this law attempts to restrict Facebook’s presence in the job hiring process and illustrates one of the many ways in which social media have surveillance dimensions. The rapid uptake of social media as well as their spread into virtually every social realm prompts such action in a number of spheres.
Social media refers to a set of web-based services that enable users to share content with each other. Many of these sites are used to exchange specific kinds of media: YouTube for videos, Flickr for photographs, Digg and del.ici.ous for news. Their reliance on user-generated content provides them with a cultural and contextual versatility. As Internet-based services compatible with mobile technology they also benefit from spatial versatility, all of which means that the opportunities for surveillance multiply. Personal data proliferates and flows promiscuously.
Social media facilitates information exchange between individuals and institutions. When used to convey personal details they augment their users’ visibility, not only to their chosen “friends” but also to other agencies and institutions. This chapter uncovers key features of surveillance practices using data emanating from social media platforms. Although a wealth of surveillance literature has explored the role of the Internet and electronic databases, social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter generate an unprecedented amount of user-generated information. This research explores the surveillance features of these platforms by considering how the “social” in social media contributes to a more social surveillance.
Using Facebook as a case study, five features are considered. First, users participate in a collaborative identity construction with other users. Second, friendships provide unique surveillance opportunities as users often engage with a particular audience in mind. Third, the construction of a personal social network means social ties become visible, measurable, and searchable. Fourth, an ever-changing interface and privacy controls alter users’ visibility through the site. Fifth, social media content is easily recontextualized. Information leaks are now a common outcome.
The first three features illustrate interpersonal aspects of social media with an emphasis on social ties. The final two highlight its growth into social life, institutions, and culture. These features are supported by findings from three sets of semi-structured in-depth interviews. The first set is with thirty university students at a mid-sized Canadian university who use Facebook to exchange personal information. The second set is with fourteen university administrators who use social media to communicate with students. This includes professors, campus security, residence life, human rights advisors, and marketing and communications. The third set of interviews is with twelve professionals who use the aggregated data available on Facebook as a business tool, including marketers, consultants, and software developers.
In order to understand social media surveillance, scholars should turn to recent developments in this field. The following section provides a theoretical background rooted in sociological and surveillance studies material. This will contextualize the five features of social media surveillance that are explored in the following section. Upon providing both a theoretically and an empirically rich description of these five features, this chapter concludes by situating this research alongside a growing scholarship on social media surveillance, and recommends directions for subsequent research.
The background to studies of social media surveillance includes at least three items, discussed briefly below: social science research on Internet surveillance in general, a rapidly growing body of knowledge on the dynamics of social media, and some broader discussions of digitally mediated social relations. However, it is worth noting that the specific “key features” of social media surveillance are also located within large-scale social and cultural shifts that both inform and are informed by them. Above all are the ways that contemporary conditions are characterized by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000).
As Bauman says, the shift from a solid to a liquid phase of modernity means that social forms do not keep their shape for long and thus cannot serve as frames for human action and life strategies (Bauman 2007, 1). Yet while this is so, it does not mean that liquid modernity is entirely shapeless, still less that the structural and institutional facilitators and constraints on human activities and life strategies have somehow melted away. To the contrary—and this is especially visible in the context of new media—surveillance itself is liquefying, with new implications for everyday life chances and opportunities that affect new media users in particular ways.
Liquid surveillance (see Lyon 2010) bespeaks a world in which older institutions of marketing or crime control have become malleable and adaptive. Indeed they “modulate” to use the word favoured by Gilles Deleuze in his work on the “society of control”. In social media such as Facebook, friends are fluid and surveillance is multifaceted. Although the forms of social order produced in part by surveillance are no longer relatively static, their pulsating, morphing shapes are no less significant for the reproduction of social class positions, for example, than the productive relations that they are replacing.
Yet for many social media users, surveillance, and especially surveillance-as-control, does not seem to flicker on the horizon. Indeed, it seems that for them, control is in their hands as they choose whom to accept or deny as friends and build their networks of like-minded acquaintances. The notion that the Internet could have this connective capacity in a world pulled apart by ever-increasing mobility has been prominent since its inception. Manuel Castells, for instance, spoke in the nineties of the “vast array of virtual communities” enabled by computer-mediated communication (Castells 1996, 22), in which identity construction is an organizing principle. Sociologists such as Barry Wellman extensively researched the emergence of such communities, linked by new media, arguing, notably, that they tend to be characterized by “networked individualism” (Wellman et al. 2003).
The advent of social networking sites in the early twenty-first century offered new opportunities for contact, networked individualism and perhaps even for community. Scholars have examined such sites, sometimes in celebratory, sometimes in more sober, fashion, including in its surveillance dimensions. One recent study, of Anders Albrechtslund, argues that for social media users, surveillance is empowering and does not involve forms of violation. As he rightly observes, users share activities, beliefs, tastes, and preferences online, precisely so that they can socialize. This Albrechtslund dubs “participatory surveillance” (Albrechtslund 2008), in part to distinguish it from Andrejevic’s (see below) “lateral surveillance”, which for Albrechtslund is compromised by its association with panoptic metaphors.
For Albrechtslund—and no doubt many users—social media are empowering and are a mutual “sharing practice”. Voluntary engagement with others and with identity-construction is seen as key to the practice of participatory surveillance. Such findings as Albrechtslund’s offer a cautionary tale for surveillance studies, which are all-too-often preoccupied with the Orwellian and the panoptic. Genuine insights into surveillance processes are available through the exploration of users’ actual involvement in social media, in analogous ways in which diverse public responses to camera surveillance or employee interaction with workplace surveillance may be viewed. Albrechtslund does not deny the role of socially negative uses of social media; his claim is that those should not dominate forms of analysis.
So how exactly did the Internet become a key surveillance site? This may be grasped by considering the development of Internet surveillance over a period of almost two decades. The key moment, as Manuel Castells notes, was when the Internet was opened to commercialization. This spelled the “transformation of liberty and privacy on the Internet” (Castells 2001, 170). Why? Because from a marketer’s viewpoint “surfing” data could be added to the already highly profitable geo-demographic data to create new nuance and depth in understanding consumer profiles (Lyon 2002). And what was useful to marketers was equally important for employers, police, and others.
What Mark Andrejevic (among others) called a “digital enclosure”, that is, “an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself” (Andrejevic 2007, 2), creates a condition of surveillance. For all the benefits of interactivity to those thus enabled to “stay in touch” with their social media contacts, each click permits more data to be accumulated, to circulate. And, as in other cases, as more information is gathered, so there is less accountability of data-gatherers to the general public. Yet the consequences are considerable. As Andrejevic also observes, social sorting is at the core of what organizations do with Internet-generated personal data (Andrejevic 2007, 125–128).
The advent of geo-tagging or of locating users in space as well as in time simply takes surveillance potential one stage further (Lyon 2007, 43). It builds on ways that geo-demographic marketing has increasingly sorted consumer populations since the 1990s, by adding online data to other more conventional kinds. The use of software and statistics to socially sort all manner of populations has now become a basic mode of organization in almost any enterprise, public or private. And the consequences for life chances and opportunities are considerable, such that, as Burrows and Gane (2006) argue, such surveillance is salient not only for those individuals affected but also for the production and reproduction of social class differences. That this is also visible on the Internet, and in the development of the so-called web 2.0, is explored further in Beer and Burrows (2010).
Much then hangs on the frame within which social media surveillance is understood and how its key features are construed. On the one hand are the analyses of those like Albrechtslund, who rightly highlight the interactive, participatory, mutual, voluntary, and empowering aspects of social media, while acknowledging that negative surveillance also occurs. On the other hand are those like Andrejevic, who see social media in a “digital enclosure” or, more strongly, Christian Fuchs, who insists that social media users are an “audience commodity” sold to advertisers. The fact that they are also content producers means not that the media are thus being democratized, but rather that this is the advent of the “total commodification of human creativity” (Fuchs 2010, 148–149).
Part of the point of this paper is to show that the key features of social media surveillance are best understood by acknowledging both the aspects discussed above. The liquidity of today’s surveillance may be seen in the ways that social media sites are constantly mutating as users cooperate with providers to develop new modes of contact and identity-construction, but simultaneously in the ways that, however fluid and flexible, all online surveillance contributes to social sorting and to the reproduction of difference.
Another key point, made in the following section, is that because surveillance is not the first thing that springs to mind in discussions of new media, it is helpful to explore the issues from the perspective of those who consider themselves as users. Collaborative identity construction, lateral ties, social ties, changing interfaces, and recontextualization, discussed below, each connect the generation of personal data by users with the ways that such data are available for surveillance “uses”. Such uses, we suggest, are also liquid, but there are discernible and often powerful currents within those flows.
These perspectives build a theoretically informed understanding of the five features discussed in the following section. Liquid surveillance facilitates participatory surveillance and online sociality. Yet it also enables data commodification and other types of large-scale scrutiny. Identity becomes more liquid as a result of ubiquitous opportunities for speaking about one’s self as well as about one’s peers. This is typically fuelled by participatory motives, but also enhances other kinds of online surveillance. Second, lateral ties become a dispersed and versatile conduit for intentional as well as accidental leaks. These connections allow sharing between trusted colleagues. Yet this information is also held by Facebook, who may sell it to advertisers or hand it over to policing and intelligence agencies. The connection between participatory and more problematic social media practices is further exemplified by the visibility of social ties. Social media is used for empowering purposes, but this rests on the creation of social ties that contribute to visible social networks.
The final two features speak more broadly to the volatility of social media. Social media interfaces constantly add and modify features. Facebook does this to such an extent that we can consider change to be a permanent feature of social media. This has the effect of enabling unanticipated forms of visibility. These changes enhance the scope of peer-to-peer sociality and scrutiny, all while facilitating the commodification of these exchanges. Additionally, information on social media platforms is easily recontextualized, such that participatory surveillance may generate content that will be used for marketing or other purposes. Both interpersonal activity and institutional information management share Facebook. It stands to reason that a theory of social media surveillance should acknowledge both empowering and exploitative practices.
Five key features of social media highlight a shift in the collection of personal information on the Internet and illustrate the growing liquidity of surveillance. New forms of visibility and transparency afforded by social media are coupled with user practices to manage these possibilities.
Users increasingly participate in a collaborative identity construction with their peers. Facebook allows users to share information about their friends with those friends. Profiles are composed of fields where both users and their friends can add personal information about that user. By default this information is shared with both users’ networks of friends. Thus, speaking to a colleague also means speaking about that colleague to an extended audience of users. This occurs on four principal locations: walls, photos, tags, and comments.
Walls are a prominent feature on user profiles, where friends can post messages and other content as a series of chronologically ordered entries. This serves a dual purpose: content is used to communicate with friends, but also offer a kind of public testimony about that person to their network of friends. Students acknowledge that the kind of postings a user will receive from friends is treated as a reflection on the their personality and character:
I guess the type of wall posts they get also kind of reflects who they are as well and, again someone who has a lot of really nasty wall posts from the people added on Facebook as friends might not exactly seem the most appealing person in the world. (interview #24)
With this reflection in mind, users are tactical about the content that they post on their friends’ walls. They are careful how they portray their friends, relegating sensitive or compromising content to the private message feature:
I love the walls and I post on people’s walls all the time—but at the same time I’m very careful about what I post on other people’s walls and I also send a lot of messages because it’s like ‘This is wall appropriate, this is message appropriate’. And [ … ] it’s just a fact of life that people are going to read my conversations. [ … ] We all know what we’re saying to each other. (#19)
The above respondent suggests that scrutinizing other user’s conversations is a taken-for-granted feature of social media. Likewise, users report having to scrutinize their own wall for problematic postings from their friends:
Especially people have a tendency to throw things on your wall and you’re like ‘Uh, you forget that I’ve got a dozen friends who are still friends with this person and they could see this and could see this on their News Feed’ and that kind of thing. (#22)
Users will not only monitor what other users will say about each other, but also actively monitor what is being said about themselves. In employing these tactics, users increasingly frame the wall as featuring content that is entirely public and visible to others:
Like, when you write like you know, hilarious comment on one of your friends’ walls, it’s not necessarily to communicate with that person, but to show everyone who comes and visits their page that you are communicating with that person. So, it’s intended to be viewed by others, in its very nature. (#28)
Users can also upload photographs of their friends. With over three billion photos uploaded to Facebook every month (FB Statistics 2010), it stands to reason that they are a central feature for interpersonal assessments. Indeed, most users report that when adding a new contact to their network, they will immediately scrutinize the photos on their profile: “You can get to know someone by looking at their information [ … ] you can see all the comments people have made on their photos and all the photos of them and all the photos that they’ve posted” (#19).
Friends can further augment a user’s visibility by tagging them in a photo. By creating a link between the photo and the user’s profile, tags facilitate browsing often hundreds or thousands of photos featuring any single user from dozens of sources. As an added feature, the act of tagging someone is itself content to be distributed. Following default privacy controls, if friend A tags friend B in a photo—which may belong to friend C—this will be featured on both walls as well as both users’ friends’ news feeds. The politics of tagging has become a sticking point for some users, especially those who have struggled with incriminating material about them being publicized:
There’s a picture of me someone took randomly in an awkward position. It looks like I’m doing something bad to the teacher, but I was actually not. That was like a hundred comments on it. That took a week to get it off. (#7)
Through this experience, the above respondent developed a series of tactics to cope with incriminating photos:
First of all, especially people who are taking photos of you doing something destructive at parties, if I know they’ve taken it, I will go tell them like the next day after the party: ‘Do not upload these. Please delete them’. And if they do upload, I would tell them again. And, first of all un-tag myself. And then, I would report to Facebook. (#7)
As this is a growing concern, campus security is increasingly involved in cases where students have been defamed through social media:
Within Facebook itself, if someone comes to us and says ‘subject A is slandering my name and has several entries on their Facebook sites about me that are grossly injurious to me’, then we will check that out. (#37)
Through tagging users are publicly identified by their friends. This feature has been extended to text-based content like notes as well as status updates. When a user is tagged in someone else’s note or status update, this content will then appear on both users’ profiles as well as both friendship networks’ news feeds. This feature has also raised concern for the tagged person’s reputation. Many students are concerned with how their friends’ opinions will reflect on them:
You can make a note on Facebook [ … ] and you can mention people in the note. I find that a little bit difficult just because a lot of the time the views they’ll sometimes post aren’t something that you agree with. (#22)
Comments are another way users can be made visible by their friends. This involves adding a text-based response to content like photographs, status updates, notes as well as actions like adding a friend or joining a group. Comments add a conversational feature to activity on Facebook, such that users can comment indefinitely about any content or activity on the site. This feature ensures that users do not have exclusive claims over how they present themselves on social media. Upon receiving an accusatory comment on a note she posted, one student used the comment feature herself to manage her online presence:
But like an acquaintance of mine [ … ] flamed my post and in the comments he accused me of being like tacitly supporting the murder of all these civilians and posted a picture, a link to a picture of someone who I had participated in the murder of. I was just like what the hell is this? I didn’t delete it, I instead wrote my response underneath it hoping that anyone who came across it was like, so he is a whacko. (#28)
Users rely on what others say about their friends to make inferences about them. Given the difficulty involved in managing what potentially hundreds of friends are saying about a user, this is seen as a more authentic representation of who that person is. This is not to suggest that users are void of any tactics. They can choose to remove wall posts, photo tags, or comments, and can report inappropriate content. They can also disable their wall and hide all tagged photos as a means to minimize their friend’s influence. But the absence of a wall or photos on a profile is often read as an admission of guilt in that the user is attempting to conceal something.
Marketers, employers, and other institutional watchers access a rich knowledge of users when those individuals are bound to a network of colleagues to whom they wish to remain transparent and trustworthy. Users have a particular audience in mind when uploading and sharing personal details. Yet that audience makes up only a small portion of the people who have access to their information.
Institutional surveillance typically occurs in fixed and readily identifiable settings, including the border crossing, the interrogation room, and the census form. These allow for a degree of deceit and subterfuge on the part of the person under scrutiny. In contrast, Facebook is a site of social convergence, with other users belonging to several social spheres. Personal information is not authored with all potential audiences in mind. Thus, other watchers can intervene in ties between a Facebook user and that user’s intended audience. The majority of respondents claimed that they upload information for their closest friends and occasionally their relatives. There is some variance in terms of ideal audiences, as some use Facebook for geographically proximate ties whereas others use it mostly for long distance ones. With these kinds of friendship ties shaping the way users understand Facebook, they will provide information meant for a personal audience. As one student notes:
That’s the best way to get a measure of someone [ … ] when they think they’re in their own space. The things people post on Facebook can be very telling. Right or wrong, if you want to know about someone, look on Facebook because that’s sort of where they bare their souls to the world. (#19)
These social ties are manifest as a kind of soft coercion, with pressure from a network of friends pushing users to engage with the site. The majority of respondents report joining Facebook at the behest of their friends, and then being expected to submit biographical content. These friendship ties regulate the kind of information provided through a passive yet ongoing scrutiny. When uploading information, users only identify a portion of their audience. This suggests a self-presentation geared towards friends, ensuring a degree of comfort with sharing otherwise sensitive personal information. For example, users are routinely asked by friends to post their phone number on Facebook. Given the site’s quasi-public status, this troubles some student users:
I’ve seen a lot of people being like ‘I’ve lost my cell phone, please give me your phone number’ and you’ll just have walls full of people’s phone numbers with their name attached and I think that’s really stupid. (#21)
The user’s social ties with their friend network compel them to share personal information. What’s more, the information they share is expected to be consistent with how they would otherwise present themselves to those peers. This is not to suggest that deception and identity play are absent from Facebook. Rather, this becomes the kind of deception that would normally exist between friends and colleagues. Instead of actively resisting online surveillance, these tactics are akin to a Goffmanian form of self-presentation (1959) based on the use of explicit and implicit cues to maintain a favourable public image.
Sites like Facebook turn social connections into visible, measurable, and searchable content. This adds a dimension of visibility to the study of social ties and social capital, which indicates that “who you are” has always been a reflection of “who you know”. With social media this has become a standard feature for profiling individuals. Not only are a user’s social ties visible, but others can also make inferences about private information on the basis of friends’ publically accessible information.
The notion that social ties are a form of personal information often escapes users’ scrutiny simply because they do not submit it in the same way they submit photographs and other content. As a result, “friends” and “friends in common” are accessible features on user profiles, even when most other content is kept private. Following the default settings, everybody would be aware of the company that everyone else keeps. This information is used internally by Facebook to recommend new friends based on existing ones. Respondents look at other users’ friends not only to confirm their identity, but also to make inferences about users. Too few friends and too many friends are both seen as cause for concern. Several assumptions are made: too few friends suggests either the user is too socially withdrawn, or employing a false identity. Too many friends suggest social promiscuity, a lack of privacy concerns, or lack of knowledge about privacy controls. As one student reports:
You can’t have that many friends. [ … ] There were people on the site being like ‘Add me!’, like ‘I’ll add anybody’. And it’s just like you’re going to have way too many friends and way too many people who you actually don’t know. (#21)
Another respondent suggests that the kind of scrutiny cast on friends also applies to the self: “There are people who have over 1000 [friends]. And, okay, you can know a lot of people, but l have too many right now” (#19).
Beyond this immediate discomfort, there’s a growing realization among users that friends, when taken in aggregate, can be used as a window into a users’ innermost thoughts and intentions. Social ties are descriptive in and of themselves, but they also allow one user’s personal details reflect on their peers. Users may choose not to disclose their sexual orientation or political affiliations, either by omitting these details or hiding them with privacy controls. Yet a portion of their friends will openly share these details about themselves. By monitoring this information in aggregate, researchers claim that it can be used to make assessments about users (Wills and Reeves 2009; Jernigan and Mistree 2009). If the average user has 130 friends, and one fifth of those friends have partially transparent profiles, those users provide a substantial sample of information that may reflect on the individual. Current privacy settings are not able to prevent these exploits, as the user in question is essentially bypassed. The inferences made through users’ friends may not be accurate, although that’s hardly the point. Through social sorting this information shapes social outcomes.
The fact that a user’s friends reflect them presents some unique challenges to self-presentation on social media. Many are clearly ambivalent about this kind of exposure, as evidenced by the number of users who hide this information. Yet by default, users are sharing this information with the public. Users are beginning to realize the extent to which their friends reflect their identity, and many have expressed discomfort with this. Yet this discomfort is mixed with fascination about the insight these features provide. One student states: “I don’t think everyone should be able to view who my friends are. Interestingly enough I do go look at other people’s friends” (#26).
Social media platforms are dynamic. Not only do they perpetually solicit new input from users, but they also forge new avenues for that information. Likewise, user engagement is shifting in response to changes to the interface. This illuminates a broader vision of how Facebook operates, the culture in which it is situated, and the way its users position themselves in it.
Users report that Facebook itself is continuously changing. Revisions to the interface push some information to the foreground, while hiding other details. New features and third party applications require further personal details from users. Facebook’s front page prominently invites users to make new friendship connections and send new content to existing ties. Each revision to Facebook’s interface is accompanied by new privacy settings, which by default are left open to a broad public. These changes indicate a tension, where Facebook’s developers purport to offer users greater control over their information while promoting open and unrestricted access to their personal information. The 2007 decision to make this content searchable through Google indicates that Facebook is increasingly linked to additional settings.
These changes to the interface and privacy settings are met with a degree of distrust among users, who link them to attempts to monetize personal information:
I really don’t trust Facebook at all because, they’re there to make money, obviously, and it’s like ‘Oh, we don’t sell your personal information’ and then it’s like ‘Oh, headline story: Facebook selling your personal information’. (#19)
In addition to these features research on the topic should consider the complexity of the users themselves, who may transpose this information to separate contexts. They may save a photograph to their hard drive and e-mail it or upload it to a separate site, repost it in their own photo album, or simply tag or comment on it. In all these cases that photo leaks from its original setting to another, and is thus made more public. Yet the latter methods require less user intervention, suggesting that these kinds of leaks are increasingly a built-in feature of the social media.
As users continually catch up with a changing interface, it stands to reason that information they post about themselves or others will be more widely distributed than anticipated. This suggests an ongoing learning curve for using Facebook that leads users to perceive each other as potential liabilities. Photos of a mature student’s children were leaked when a day-care employee posted them online:
Now I think she had intended to put them up privately and that was just the mistake. However still, she made those pictures available to everybody that goes to the day-care, all the other parents that were there and it was done without my consent and I was actually very upset by that. That’s a violation of my privacy and my child’s privacy. (#26)
Recognizing these shifts, users themselves treat their engagement with Facebook as an ongoing project. Many users report that they have revised their personal content; either modifying or removing content as well as pruning ties with their peers. These measures are framed as a way to cope with the emerging risks associated with Facebook’s changes. As one student states: “I go through my privacy settings every couple months and just make sure that everyone is still how I want it to be” (#19).
Although very few respondents are willing to predict how Facebook would change in the immediate future, they anticipate that its content will become more and more public with time. As for how they would use Facebook in the future, student respondents treat the job market as a catalyst for major revisions to their engagement: “I will probably start locking down profiles and stuff, un-tagging myself from scandalous photos” (#4). Another student claims: “When I’m applying for jobs and stuff I think I’m going to turn off my Facebook” (#20).
Despite uncertainties about new features and issues, respondents who approach Facebook from an institutional perspective regard it as a growing aspect of their responsibilities. A university web coordinator comments on the sudden emergence of a new set of responsibilities:
When I first started, social media and Facebook weren’t necessarily part of my daily routines, but there’s been an explosion in the last few months especially in the area of higher education and we developed this social media task force. (#36)
Likewise, a marketing coordinator indicates that the only certainty is their continued engagement with the social media: “I really can’t predict, I really don’t know, but I do know we’re going to continue to be part of it, whatever it is (#35).
The conditions described in the above section suggest that information on Facebook circulates to an ever-increasing amount of social spheres. Information is increasingly free from its initial context when uploaded to Facebook, augmenting the scope of any single act of surveillance. This speaks to some of the key features of most contemporary surveillance: where information is gathered in a particular setting and context, is scrutinized elsewhere, and the consequences of this scrutiny may occur in yet another context. This in turn is why simplistic notions of privacy, including those relating to privacy settings found on social media sites, are inadequate to contemporary conditions. Context is crucial (Nissenbaum 2010).
This is an acceleration of the leaks previously considered in information databases (Lyon 2001). It’s no novelty that information tied to a particular context may migrate elsewhere. This can be caused by technological error or the deliberate and often malicious intention of a particular operator. Yet social media platforms privilege the open distribution of personal information through “sharing” and “publishing”. As a result, the leak becomes a standard feature for information exchange in social networks.
Facebook is especially susceptible to recontextualization. Personal information is appraised in a distinct context, typically one that differs from the context in which it was authored. A profile may be treated as a personal—if collaborative—diary. Yet its contents are generally handled as a public broadcast. As Facebook gains prominence as a de facto location for self-representation, information found on user profiles will be assessed in several contexts. These features illustrate an interpretation of the social in social media: these services endeavour to bridge as many social contexts as possible.
Social networks first emerged as a service used exclusively by trusted colleagues. When it was limited to a number of American universities users were under the impression that they were sharing information with their fellow students. As a result Facebook emerged in a climate where university students were relatively comfortable sharing personal information with known peers. Starting in September 2006, their siblings, parents, and non-university colleagues began to join the site. Although this provoked some discomfort, they were more likely to use their privacy settings rather than remove personal information. As employers, politicians, and other institutional representatives joined the site, users had grown accustomed to the degree of authenticity they offered. Facebook is now a hub of social convergence. A student’s friend list still contains university colleagues, but they are situated alongside family, friends, co-workers, and strangers.
Students author a wealth of information about themselves in a particular context. Many participants report either joining or augmenting their Facebook presence during the first few weeks of school. This activity is tied to a specific agenda: to create a publicized identity, make new friends, and socialize in a context linked to recreational drinking and casual romantic encounters. The “party photo” is a kind of interpersonal currency in this context, yet it is treated as a liability during job applications. In light of these possibilities, researchers should explore the principal trajectories by which information leaks. Conversations and photographs from this context are perceived as potentially leaking into a postgraduate context, whether that involves graduate school, law school, or job applications. In a more general sense, respondents describe consistent leaks between personal and professional contexts:
Obviously at work you have your professional self and at home you have your private self and your private life, but that’s the part of you that gets reflected on Facebook. So, whereas before Facebook, there was this definite distinction between walking through the doors of the office and once you’re out of there [ … ] with Facebook and with the Internet, your private life can follow you around 24/7. (19)
One student offers a scenario where a childcare employee’s photos are leaked into the public and the dilemma this presents for parents who are evaluating their professional image:
And I’m thinking, you put that information on your page, that you happily work at a child care facility A and here you are in a drunken state—and that’s not to suggest that I believe that people who work at child care facilities should live cloistered lives and not party and have a great time, but am I left with that one snapshot of this person and is that the person that I want to hand my child over to? (#27)
The above respondent acknowledges that Facebook users have the right to their private lives, but also concedes that if information about lifestyle is made public, this person would act on it. The kinds of leaks that are possible are difficult to anticipate, but it stands to reason that they will threaten interpersonal boundaries that users would prefer to maintain. A human rights advisor offers such a scenario:
Let’s say you’re a person of a particular religious background that isn’t particularly supportive of intimate relationships before marriage. Right? And somebody sends that out. Imagine how your family in Egypt is going to feel seeing those kinds of things. I mean, there are huge ways to devastate people in very fast terms by using that technology. (#40)
Unlike more tangible kinds of surveillance regimes it is the indeterminate nature of later scrutiny that evokes some anxiety. Users do anticipate this, but admit to not knowing the outcome, or being fully capable of preventing this. Even if the user adopts some tactics to avoid the worst consequences, it is difficult to anticipate all the outcomes of publishing information. Different populations of people are engaging with the user’s profile, different kinds of institutions are taking an interest in personal information, Facebook introduces new features, and users adopt new practices. Past activity is coupled with future conditions in a way that poses unique challenges.
Social media’s growth makes it a pressing concern for surveillance studies. A key tension underlies research on this topic: managing personal information on social media is largely a user-initiated task, but a lot of activity on these sites is beyond the control of users themselves, and may further the increased liquidity of surveillance. Recent scholarship has considered the surveillance consequences of social media. Although some (for example: Albrechtslund 2008) highlight the voluntary and empowering potential of managing online visibility, others (for example: Andrejevic 2007; Fuchs 2010) warn that these services augment institutional surveillance while enabling new ways of exploiting everyday sociality. By exploring the key features of information exchange on Facebook, this chapter offers an understanding of the “social” in social media based on the increased visibility of its user base. Although the consequences that Andrejevic and Fuchs describe are a reality for users, many are aware of these consequences and are adopting tactics to prevent or at least manage the risks associated with living through social media.
Changes to the interface, coupled with emerging practices, complicate users’ attempts to manage their online presence, although they are developing new tactics in response to these challenges. Despite this apparent growth, a director of campus security comments on how social media is still at an early formative stage of its development: “It’s like a toddler. It’s not a newborn anymore, it’s a toddler, it still needs some direction, some guidance” (#34). How such direction, such guidance, will emerge, and where from, remains to be seen. It is unlikely that those charged with responsibilities for campus security will be able to offer such tutelage for “toddlers” without extensive collaboration with a number of other stakeholders. But this is an area beyond the scope of this chapter.
To conclude: This chapter draws on empirical research that is limited to one particular social media platform and illustrates from a user perspective some of the novel dimensions and directions of today’s liquid surveillance. Although Facebook’s sharply growing population and emerging features justify the decision to focus on Facebook, subsequent research will expand this scope by contributing empirical findings from other platforms (see Andrejevic’s chapter in this book). The growth of surveillance studies requires increased specialization, especially in the field of emerging “social” technologies. Although scholars scarcely understand the full consequences and potential of these technologies, they are rapidly accumulating a significant user population. As sites like Facebook and Twitter become a mainstay in everyday life, indefinite retention becomes the de facto outcome for personal information, which has clear and consequential implications for surveillance. How many of these implications are also a cause for concern will be shown by subsequent research.
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