Our survey results
Theme 2: activities on social media
One of the main activities on social media is posting visual materials such as photographs and memes. Our first question under this theme specifically addresses this aspect.
Fig. 4.7 suggests some marked contrasts between the sites. While 67 per cent of the respondents in north Chile post less than 20 per cent of their photographs on social media, 20 per cent of those from southeast Turkey post over 60 per cent of theirs. On the other hand 32 per cent of the responses from the rural China field site indicate that none of the photographs that are taken ended up on social media.
The reasons lie in differences regarding what visual material is seen as appropriate for social media posting. The key criterion in many places, including northern Chile, is humour. People share items such as pictures which are funny, and attract comments for that reason. Social media is viewed as a form of entertainment. For example, a ‘meme war’
is where people post memes in the comments section. These will often generate hundreds of responses, whereas someone’s photograph of food, their afternoon activity or a selfie will generate at most 15 comments.
Thus while users here continue to snap images for their own personal enjoyment and posterity, the emphasis in social media is on visuals that generate a large amount of social interaction.
Fig. 4.7 Distribution of percentage of photographs posted on social media
This is even more true for our rural China field site, where people generally do not share their own photographs on social media – the excep-tions being teens and young women who share selfies. Generally they prefer to share memes and funny postings. McDonald thinks that here, just as in northern Chile, such postings are thought to be of greater gen-eral interest. Another reason is privacy. For many the few photographs of oneself or one’s family that are shared online are often kept in password- protected galleries, accessible only to those who know them personally.
Our next question on activities looked at playing online games.
The stand- out figure here is from industrial China. This is prob-ably the site where people’s working day involves the most unremitting labour in factories. It is therefore not all that surprising to note that they use gaming as a means to relax and to separate themselves from work.
In fact this reflects a wider emphasis upon the use of smartphones for entertainment more generally, a feature that clearly emerges in this additional survey conducted by Wang7 on smartphone usage among 200 handset- owning respondents in her field site. These workers usually do not have the spare time, money or energy for extra social life after long hours of heavy labour. At the same time, in addition to the relaxation that such games provide, gaming is also viewed as a major way of hang-ing out with friends online, especially among the young men.
Online gaming is also a very important aspect of social media (especially Facebook) in southeast Turkey. The most common games were Candy Crush Saga, Ok and Taula. Gaming is a way to socialise with new and old friends. People play these online games not only with known friends but also with strangers. There are possibilities that these strangers might also become new friends through gaming. Online
Fig. 4.8 Distribution of online gaming on social media
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gaming is also used to flirt discreetly with people of the opposite sex. For the very young (i.e. children in primary school, aged 8– 11 years) gam-ing is probably one of the main reasons for usgam-ing social media. In fact many actual farmers in Turkey played Farmville, the first really success-ful Facebook game. In contrast home gaming (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii) is still important in Italy, where it works as an element of bonding within the family group.
Theme 3: privacy
A third broad area in which people often see an impact from social media and which we thus explored was privacy.
It is evident from Fig. 4.10 that respondents across different field sites have different views about sharing their social media passwords with others. As we can see, this varies from the one in five who do this in north Chile to the four out of five who do this in our rural China site.
However, we learn more when we look in detail at whom they are pre-pared to share their passwords with.
Most field sites recorded high percentages when it came to sharing passwords with partners, which can be explained by the perception (in some of our field sites) that social media use can easily lead to infidel-ity, through being able to friend strangers. Sharing passwords between partners thus allows for the security of monitoring of a partner’s account.
89% Distribution of use of smartphones for
Multimedia and Entertainment 86%
MUSIC
Fig. 4.9 Distribution of use of smartphones for multimedia and entertainment in industrial China
In sites such as south India couples sometimes maintained just one social media profile between them, making sharing passwords inevitable.
In our northern Chile site the entire extended family, from neph-ews to grandparents, may well share use of the same computer. The mobile phone may therefore be the only piece of privacy a person has.
While many couples experience jealousy over their partner’s use of Fig. 4.10 Distribution of people who shared passwords with
family/ friends
Table 4.4 People with whom users shared their media passwords
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social media, sharing a password is rarely considered obligatory. People respect their partner’s privacy, with many reporting that they preferred not to know if their partner occasionally speaks with an ex or flirts online. A meme sums up this feeling, illustrated in Fig. 4.11 above.
In rural China many share passwords with their friends while in school – not only in order to establish trust, but also so that their friends can help them look after their QZone profile (by logging in and main-taining any games that need care to ensure continued accumulation of levels).
Fig. 4.12 shows that, with the exception of the English field site, there were groups of people in sites who used fake or anonymised pro-files. The Chinese situation is very different since social media is not generally based on the use of real names. Real names are mainly used for work- related accounts, since many factories use social media for communication with workers. For ‘private’ social media most used an anonymous QQ name, since anonymity provides a huge space for free-dom of speech. People also have multiple accounts for purposes of play-ing games or beplay-ing able to use several different sites, as is evident in Fig. 4.13.
McDonald’s participants generally felt that, if someone was a true friend, they ought to be able to recognise you from your avatar/ screen name. As such this convention also acted as a way of ‘testing’ friendship.
Chinese social media platforms such as QQ and WeChat also allow you to ‘label’ a friend’s account with a nickname of your own in cases where Fig. 4.11 Meme from north Chile showcasing a partner’s privacy on social media
you do not recognise the account owner. Avatars also helped to facilitate friending of strangers, providing a ‘mask’ from behind which the initial interactions could occur.
The main problem with this question is that people who use mul-tiple fake accounts are quite likely not to want to reveal this to a survey.
Certainly Costa felt that her result was unlikely to be accurate for her site in southeast Turkey. Admitting to fake profiles could damage one’s reputation. For a man to acknowledge this was almost an admission that they were actively hunting and harassing women, while for women it was tantamount to declaring openly that they were hiding something.
A different source of anxiety was the possibility of photographs being uploaded onto social media by other people, without their knowledge/ permission. This topic is investigated in Fig. 4.14.
Fig. 4.12 Distribution of social media profiles without real name/
photograph
Fig. 4.13 Reasons for multiple QQ accounts in industrial China
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In industrial China people are generally happy to see others post-ing their image – somethpost-ing they took as a sign that they were valued by others. These factory workers were usually in the position of being
‘attention givers’ in their daily lives, finding that as a disadvantaged group attention was rarely paid to them. However, some young women might be concerned that photographs of themselves posted by others might not look as good as those they chose to post themselves. This was also a consideration in Trinidad.
Our Brazilian site is both sociable and given to sharing, but there may still be several factors that mitigate against this practice. Teens are very careful about placing photographs online, and avoid those that carry information about their relationship status. Villagers typically are careful about whom they are seen with, as any sign of proximity (for example, a man and a woman speaking on the street) can and often will become gossip, as locals will imply they are having an affair. In our English field site there was a radical difference between young people, who hardly ever removed such tagged photographs unless they were particularly damaging to their reputation, and older people, who often systematically removed all such images.
Theme 4: commerce
We also explored the use of social media within the commercial sphere, starting with a question as to whether people click on advertisements.
Fig. 4.14 Distribution of responses to question on whether users wor-ried about people putting photographs of them on social media
The evidence from our site in northern Chile is consistent with a general tendency to avoid consumption. The town of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile has remarkably few shops and also of offline advertise-ments. In general, consumption, brand loyalty and even displays of upward mobility are considered here to be somewhat crude and super-fluous. While the city is considered ‘marginal’ it is not ‘impoverished’.
Many residents financially benefit from working in industries connected to the region’s abundant natural resources such as the copper mines.
What drives this lack of conspicuous consumption is a sense of solidar-ity with neighbours and of fitting into an unassuming form of norma-tivity. While individuals very often ‘like’ or ‘follow’ local businesses on Facebook, they rarely consume national or international products of the type that place advertisements there. By the same token Facebook is not used as a site for expressing conspicuous consumption. The situation is entirely different in our Brazilian and Trinidadian field sites.
If this is a case where we cannot lump together sites from Latin America, it also reveals a clear discrepancy between our rural and indus-trial China sites. Conducting business via WeChat is very popular in the industrial China field site. Wang suggests that only around seven per cent of people ‘proactively’ engage with e- commerce, such as setting up one’s own online shop or selling goods through one’s social media profile.
Others engage with social business more passively, mainly through click-ing on advertisements which were shared on their friends’ social media profiles. A frequently mentioned and practiced activity related to poten-tial consumption is ‘Jizan’ (‘collecting “likes” ’), a practice on WeChat to earn a free gift or discount. Even local restaurants use Jizan to promote their businesses. People will frequently forward sales promotions on Fig. 4.15 Distribution of responses to question on whether users had clicked on advertisements on social media
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their personal WeChat pages and urge their online contacts to ‘like’ the retailer’s official WeChat account in order to get the discounted commod-ity. All of these encourage people to click on the advertisement on their social media profiles. More generally merely noting that one has ever clicked on an advert may not mean a whole lot. Most of our evidence is for a quite limited impact from social media on marketing.8
We then looked to see if social media extended the way peo-ple influence each other socially with respect to consumption, asking whether respondents had ever bought something because they saw a friend with it on social media. Although 30 per cent is not that high for this event occurring at least once, Miller was surprised to find the English site had the highest percentage. The ethnographic evidence was entirely different. He found older informants were quite proud to declare that they were not susceptible to advertising, either on or offline.
It is possible that they took this question to show how they were being influenced by friends as opposed to being influenced by social media.
The issue in Italy is possibly not that users refuse to be influenced by images on social media, but that those influential images will be those of Italian celebrities as role models rather than of their local friends.
We then looked at whether people actually made money through social media. The figure for our northern Chile site should again be seen in the wider context. Since this is a place where people largely avoid contact with the formal commercial sphere, which is remarkably absent from their town given the incomes generated by mining, an informal use of social media for local selling on a small scale has become a substitute for such formal commerce.
In industrial China many social media games were designed to encourage people to spend money in order to gain advantages in the
Fig. 4.16 Distribution of buying behaviour
games. This is discussed in detail in the books written by McDonald and Wang.9 This may be especially appealing among factory workers since even the status of having achieved a higher level in games can become important when one’s status is so low in the offline world.
Once again problems arose with the way in which people inter-preted the question. In south India responses to this question reflected two categories: 1) spending on pay-as-you-go internet data plans with the intention of using the data for social media; and 2) money spent on buying things through advertisements that appeared on social media, which respondents also regarded as spending on social media.
Fig. 4.17 Distribution of responses to question on whether users had ever made money through social media
Fig. 4.18 Distribution of amount spent on social media/ online games
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As social media has become a channel of marketing for local, national and global businesses, we enquired as to whether people ‘liked’
or ‘followed’ businesses on social media.
There are several factors behind these responses, the first being that this represents the distribution rather the extent of such influences.
Prior to this study Miller had already noted the degree to which Facebook had become integral to local businesses in Trinidad.10 Sinanan observed promotional activity on social media by local businesses such as bars, where image and reputation were particularly important. Furthermore, with regard to the relatively high usage of global commerce in Trinidad, respondents who purchased items from global businesses usually arranged for relatives in the US to courier their items to Trinidad.
We would not have expected the Chinese sites to have global links since the Chinese internet is essentially internally directed. In China Taobao is the biggest online shopping site, along with WeChat; both of them are largely focused on domestic markets. In other areas people interpreted the question in various ways. Brazilians may consider Coca Cola as local because it is present locally, though a global brand, and Nike may be seen as national, through its association with well- known Brazilian footballers. As noted above people in south India regard any money they spend in response to advertisements within social media as money spent on the social media companies themselves. A better under-standing will come from our qualitative work as described in Chapter 6.
Analysis of this suggested that in most sites social media marketing was limited in its impact other than for businesses where personal relation-ship are involved – in which case it does seem to be important.
Fig. 4.19 Distribution of businesses ‘liked’/ ‘followed’ on social media