The conclusions that are starting to emerge from this examination of synchronic ethnographic material are further reinforced when we start to examine historical materials – although the term historical is of course relative, since the period of interest is less than a decade. What we find is a quite extraordinary malleability in these platforms. Take, as an example, the medium that preceded social media as a huge transfor-mation in communication – email.
Email had a radical impact upon my generation that has been ana-lysed by Broadbent and others.11 What email achieved (a position then reinforced by subsequent media such as texting) was the overthrow of more than a century of infrastructural reinforcement of a strict division between work and non- work. As shown by feminist research on domes-tic labour, companies had made strenuous efforts to ensure that work matters stayed at work and domestic concerns should not intrude upon work. Yet, try as they might, companies have found it impossible to limit emailing to work matters, so within a few years these barriers broke down. Far from being merely a tool of capitalism, email had effectively demolished one of the most solidly entrenched rules of capitalist enter-prise: the expulsion of the personal. For people of my age this property of email remains. I seamlessly move through emails concerned with family, leisure activities and work, all of which have a major place in my email inbox. In writing about email I would naturally have claimed that this was its main consequence. However, working with these young peo-ple today it soon became clear that email is now used for precisely the
opposite purpose. They never use email for personal correspondence, but ensure that it is only ever employed for work, school or commer-cial purposes, thereby protecting their personal communication from such contexts. At this point the use of email by teenagers has become radically different. Once used to dissolve the separation of work from non- work, it is now the way these young people mark this same sepa-ration. For them, emails have performed a backflip to become the exact inversion of what I would have assumed they were destined to remain.
Of all the social media it is perhaps Blackberry’s proprietary mes-saging service BBM that has been most neglected in writings on the topic.
Few people realise that it provided an early example of the personal pro-file, or that WhatsApp is in many respects a copy of BBM, serving simply to make it available for all other phones. BBM was particularly impor-tant to young people because Blackberry phones were in effect the first really cheap smartphones. The fact that it was encrypted also made it ideal for the development of young people’s private circles. This was first apparent from our study of Trinidadian youth.12 One of the key genres of their BBM usage was all sorts of quarrels and banter. In England, too, school pupils recognise that much of the initial negative social media, through which children were sometimes intensely nasty to each other, originally developed through BBM, where it remained largely under the radar of adult surveillance.
In Trinidad there was a fairly natural migration of this genre of usage from BBM to WhatsApp as people gave up their Blackberry phones for the more prestigious Androids and iPhones – natural because WhatsApp was such a similar platform. In The Glades, however, a quite different sequence emerges. As England is far more affluent than Trinidad, new Android and Apple smartphones had spread among young people in a period before WhatsApp was invented. As a result the entire culture of negative teenage usage migrated instead to the grow-ing platform of Twitter (with a brief interlude for some on Facebook), which leads to the creation of ‘Twitter beef’. The point of this example is that one would otherwise have argued that privacy was a crucial affor-dance of the encrypted BBM for this kind of behaviour.
Twitter, by contrast, looks entirely unsuitable for this purpose. It is one of the most open social media, especially as these young people never use their privacy settings. As a result Twitter is potentially much more open to adult surveillance. It is merely the current cultural hap-penstance that parents are not yet present on their children’s Twitter accounts that makes this negative teenage usage possible at this point in time. Nevertheless, the consequences are dramatic. It is very hard to
imagine an adult saying they prefer Twitter to Facebook because it is more personal and intimate. For them it is ‘obvious’ that Facebook is for more personal communication and Twitter is more for information. Yet many school pupils gave as one of their reasons for preferring Twitter to Facebook the fact that they regard Twitter as a more personal and intimate platform.
This is the history of social media. Again and again these examples of unpredictable and surprising shifts in the usage of social media dem-onstrate the extraordinary malleability of platforms. Instead of being able to match the platforms with particular usage, we find just when this seems clear the usage goes into reverse, demolishing our comfortable generalisation.
Such a combination of ethnographic and historical evidence is not just a problem for the study of platforms such as BBM and Twitter.
It is perhaps even more a problem for the study of affordances – those characteristics of platforms that we have been using to explain why they have been chosen for a particular usage.13 Most of the academic analyt-ical work that has tried to go beyond the reduction to platforms has done so on the basis of teasing out features that seem to be more constant, and about which it is thus possible to generalise. It has also focused upon situations where there is a clear rationale between usage and that par-ticular affordance.
The best examples of this style of analysis are probably Baym and Broadbent.14 However, it is also employed in our theory of polymedia.
For example, this approach was previously used to explain why people might use Facebook and more recently the implications of adding the visual affordance represented by webcam.15 The ability to see people as well as hear them is an affordance. Baym clearly defines the idea of an affordance as ‘the social capabilities technological qualities enable’.16 None of these academics subscribes to any form of technological deter-minism, but equally all feel it would be foolish to ignore the influence of technology on what human beings do. In effect the argument is that, all other things being equal, we would expect people to use a platform for those things and in those ways which the properties of the platform facilitate and make easy.17 The trouble is that the evidence from our studies is that they do not. Instead of behaving in an orderly and sen-sible way that is respectful of affordances, people use social media in a disgracefully inappropriate and dysfunctional way, often with very little consistency. They treat us academics terribly.
There is also an additional layer between the analysis of platforms and that of affordances, since each platform may have several facilities
and, as with polymedia, they may be used to complement one another.
Skype is usually considered as a visual media based on the use of web-cam. Yet you can also use it as a phone without the webcam, or even for just texting. In our book on webcam18 we examine the internal polyme-dia within Skype, noting for example that some people simultaneously type messages which contradict what they are apparently saying at that moment (for instance when there are children present to overhear them).
Facebook is a social media, but it also has facilities for private messag-ing and live chat, which relate more to messagmessag-ing services. WhatsApp to groups is different from WhatsApp to individuals. A selfie is an obvious example of a particular kind of content, but it is also trans- media. You can post a selfie on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, for exam-ple, while continuing to call it a selfie.
Certainly we can find many examples where people look to a very specific communication channel in order to find a particular affordance that they require. An example was Ruth, a hospice patient who, being only in her thirties, is entirely comfortable with most social media, as well as with the various potentials of iPhones and iPads. Her real embrace of social media came when she developed breast cancer. For any woman breast cancer and its treatment can be extremely embarrassing as well as traumatic. Ruth is concerned about what others might assume has happened to her breasts, and the only people with whom she is comfort-able discussing this are other breast cancer patients. Even with these fellow patients, however, she prefers not to reveal her identity.
Fortunately she found that social media platforms exist which are designed entirely for anonymity, and one is specific to women expe-riencing breast cancer. There she felt free to remark ‘OMG I have just lost my ladygarden’ and ask what impact treatments had had on other women’s pubic hair. She imagined men could well find equivalent sup-port over issues such as sexual impotence, where anonymity might be essential for participation. She contrasts this with other people she knows who are suffering from breast cancer. One is a friend of a friend who is more extrovert and seems to want to put every detail of her ill-ness on Facebook. Ruth uses her private forum daily because she finds it hugely helpful when, for example, people predict the potential impact of hormone treatments on one’s own emotional state. Ruth is doing what we would have supposed a sensible person would do: carefully weigh-ing up various affordances and choosweigh-ing between them to help her deal with the situation. There is no doubt that on many occasions we can see a direct link between an affordance and the choice of that particular platform. It is simply that much of the time we cannot.