Facebook has both a generic global story and then a much more specific English consequence. Most people in most countries believe that society has shifted from a historical experience of community to people becom-ing part of a more modern but also more individualistic lifestyle. In short most of the world today subscribes to a ‘myth’ of prior community. We believe that once upon a time we lived in sites such as villages where people knew each other well and gave each other support and company.
This is retrospectively regarded as an ideal and is usually employed to critique modern life, especially urban life, seen as isolated, cold, unfriendly and unsupportive by comparison. In this mythical village or community people mixed equally with friends, family and neighbours or the people they worked with.
Initially Facebook was dismissed as something trivial for young people, but after that iconic moment when mothers began to send friend requests to their children, the platform changed into a place thoroughly populated by kinship. This meant that the prior separation of peers from relatives was dissolved. Later other people, such as those who worked together or lived near one another, also felt it was appropriate to friend on Facebook. One of the reasons this may have been acceptable is that at first it may have seemed as though we could now reverse history. The result appeared to be a possible return to this lost world of free, intense and mixed sociality. It felt like we were back in a community of just a few hundred people we actually had met, with whom we could exchange harmless gossip and feel the warmth of common knowledge and mutual interest.
This was pretty much the phase in the history of Facebook which I encountered during 2010 when I undertook the study in Trinidad, now published as Tales from Facebook.1 In that volume I argued that social media was best understood not as a bright new modern force following from prior advances in the internet, but instead as a nos-talgic and conservative return to this ideal of community, which having been lost as face to face interaction could here be regained online. This nostalgic sense of past community is especially power-ful since for almost all peoples around the world the last few decades have actually led to an increasing ability for individuals to create or find distance from the traditional intensity of face to face sociality, whether through new opportunities in education, labour, housing or migration.
At this very general level the example from England fits within the overall argument. There were many cases within this book that seem to speak to this global sentiment. Recall the woman who remarked that now her business had grown it had lost the intimacy of when it was a small firm, but that Facebook had helped them to return to the older experience of when this was a community, not just a shared workspace.
Similarly there are many examples of WhatsApp groups that form around family members now living in different places. There are also attempts to retain the community of the school class when people drift to dispersed colleges and work. In all such cases Facebook seems a bul-wark against the potential loss of community.
The problem with all this is made clear in Chapter 2 of Tales from Facebook.2 Here we meet Alana, who actually lives in a tiny hamlet in Trinidad based on a few stem families. While people in the town saw Facebook as a place to recover community lost, she saw it as a place of refuge from her actual community, because she really did live in a traditional offline community. Yet she regarded this as no idyll: it was something that gave her no privacy, knew all her business, never left her in peace, did not forget quarrels that had gone on for generations, endlessly gossiped, had nothing new, classified her in certain ways she could not grow out of and basically could drive one nuts – though certainly it could also be supportive and even loving. In England after a short period people thus also came to regret the degree to which Facebook actually achieved exactly what they required from it – a re- acquaintance with all sorts of people with whom they had lost con-tact, now gathered in the same shared but also terribly awkward and embarrassing space.
Facebook thus has its own cultural history, which may explain why people have turned it into various things, largely irrespective of the plans or intentions of the company that created it. In fact it is worth a brief pause to reflect on whether it would have made much difference to social media if Facebook had never been invented. The world’s big-gest population, in China, does not use it. Populations as vast as India and Brazil developed their social media through Orkut; their recent shift to Facebook was mainly because of its presence in prestigious foreign counties rather than anything extra it offered as a platform.
If Orkut had conquered the world instead of Facebook most people would be essentially unaffected. When people migrate from Orkut to Facebook or from Facebook to WhatsApp it really may not matter much in terms of the consequences for what they are doing on and with these platforms.
A historical perspective thus seems to confirm our ethnographic view that we may have misled ourselves in thinking that the study of social media was largely the study of platforms as causative. The positive side of this conclusion is that it liberates alternatives. If gen-res of communication of behaviour happily migrate across platforms it should alert us to the importance of these robust genres; the resil-ience of young people’s quarrelling and banter. All communication is determined by frames and contexts. To understand the English we need to appreciate, as Kate Fox3 did, how people talk for hours in a pub without really saying much at all, but thereby effectively creat-ing and maintaincreat-ing social relationships; or the tensions in parent–
child communication, or the way in which people discuss football and soap operas in the office before starting work. In short people have always talked on specific ‘social media’ platforms – home, office, pub, High Street, telephone, political debate, school, etc. – and have done so in culturally specific ways: as women, teachers, men working in the building trades, the working class and so forth. This is why today we have quite specific Facebook usage by young mothers or specific Twitter usage by school pupils.
It was nevertheless possible to make general claims about social media as media. For example, we see a shift from a textual to a more visual emphasis in ordinary communication represented by platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. The foundation for Chapter 2 was a theory of polymedia. Instead of treating each platform independently, or social media as separate from other media, we recognise that each occupies a niche in relation to all the others that a person employs.
In Chapter 3 Twitter visuals only made sense in contrast to Instagram visuals. Because the range always represents a choice, people are judged on which they use, so polymedia also represents the embed-dedness of media in social relations and moral judgements. In turn polymedia forms part of the idea of scalable sociality as a choice – not only of which media, but which group of people we are engaged with, ranging from smaller to larger groups and from more private to more public communication. Thanks to social media we can see the way we scale our sociality more clearly. Both polymedia and scalable sociality are in turn examples of a still larger theory of attainment.
This recognises that social media enables us to do more or different things, for better and worse, but should not thereby be used to sug-gest we are any the less human or in any way post- human.4