It would be quite implausible to suggest that all these findings were predictable. If anything we might have expected the Church to be the institution which seized upon the possibilities of social media to reach further into the intimate and private lives of parishioners. Yet it turned out to be extremely cautious about doing just that – to such an extent that we even find religious villagers suggesting that, partly because of this historical reticence, Facebook in some ways feels like more of a real community than does the Church. By the opposite token commerce might have served its own interests better by displaying a wariness about being too nosy or intrusive. Instead, however, many major firms have launched a no- holds-barred assault which openly reveals their desire for as much intimate knowledge about their customers as they can lay their hands on. As a result people are incensed by commercial predations, and may well be withdrawing their custom from the most egregious practitioners. Yet the political results reveal a more complex equation. A local politician might be quite intrusive, but this may be still acceptable if people regard the cause as legitimate. Meanwhile, political opinions expressed on social media may have little to do with any actual politics, instead becoming a means by which people today establish per-sonal taste and friendships.
Although the original intention in shifting from the world of inti-mate relationships to institutional usage was to move on to other issues, we have actually rather similar findings in both domains. Whether in relationships to people or in relationships to institutions we find new contradictions and dilemmas mainly focused on the way in which social media conflates previously more discrete arenas of private and public communication. As a result both domains contain a good deal of sensi-tive contingency in terms of precisely how people try to gain the advan-tage of closer relationships without the concomitant negative effects.
A customer may be completely opposed to receiving a phone call from a commercial outlet, for instance, even though this is a village shop or res-taurant. On the other hand there are other commercial outlets in the vil-lage such as a beauty parlour where the nature of gossip and friendship may reach a level where the customer might be offended if a member
of staff refuses a Facebook friendship request. This is similar to the tension found earlier in the discussion of personal connections among staff in a small firm. Office workers generally sought to be friendly on social media – but not too friendly. In short we find with institutions the same dilemma that in Chapter 4 was termed the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’.
As Rupert noted, local firms, just as much as individuals, needed to use social media to develop more personal relationships that at the same time were neither too close nor intrusive.
In general it is the subtle differences and need for sensitive nego-tiation that emerge when we deal with specific local relationships such as village commerce or the dilemmas of a lay preacher. Changes in the relationship to more distant and abstract institutions appear coarser- grained. The least acceptable cross over is when large corporations show, through targeted advertising, that they now have deep knowledge about what would be regarded as personal and private matters, such as an individual having cancer or even preferring a particular brand of drink.
Yet the same removal of distance between the private and the public can on occasion have the opposite effect of favouring the individual over the institution. So an MP finds that the traditional layers of responsi-bility have been undermined and now pretty much everyone expects him or her to respond personally to almost anything they may wish to complain about.
In general the problems arise when the presence of an institutional concern in the more private sphere of social media seemed inauthentic or obtrusive or, as in targeted advertising, simply crass. If institutional issues seemed to arise more naturally out of the discussions and friend-ships of Facebook, this was deemed more acceptable. Local politicians could reinforce the sense that they were ordinary villagers with shared concerns by including local issues on their personal Facebook walls.
Similarly a member of a church committee could try to spread interest and involvement in the church through his or her personal postings.
A key factor was the underlying ethics. People would be more prepared to accept intrusion where the topic registered was something with which they felt they ought to have been more involved in any case, but had neglected. In general, villagers in The Glades are highly philanthropic and engage in a remarkable amount of volunteer work. They were far more dubious about commercial imperatives.
It might be thought that the reluctance of the Church to use social media would be evidence against this conclusion. Yet actually there was little evidence that people were offended by church usage, this reticence rather seeming to reflect the internal and apparently
traditional fears of the Church about becoming too involved in peo-ple’s intimate or even theological lives without a clear invitation to do so. This would also be true in quite another part of the field work. The almost obsessive concern with ‘confidentiality’ found when working with the health service during the applied project with the hospice seemed to come almost entirely from a fear within the institution, rather than from any concern expressed by the patients about other medical professionals seeing their medical records. In the report to the hospice, evidence is presented that this recurrent fear around patient confidentiality may have now become one of the principal causes of harm to patients20 since the result is that relevant medical profession-als commonly do not have access to critical information about these patients. In short this is not some new factor, but rather a deeply ingrained aspect of Englishness. The evidence suggests that this has become so internalised by English institutions such as the health ser-vice and the Church that the fear of intrusion is now stronger within the institutions than within the public they fear to offend.
So the main effect of this research is to distance ourselves further from blanket generalisations about topics such as religion, politics and commerce. Instead we see a mass of highly specific and contingent vari-ables which depend on factors such as how local the commercial organi-sation is seen as being, or how traditional a church is supposed to be, or how and when political debate should be introduced into friendship and family. The main generalisation linking all of these together is the observation that almost all the issues presented here have to do with the way in which social media has transformed traditional boundaries and barriers between what were regarded as public domains and private communications and relationships. This is precisely the point at which the discussion of social media in institutional use contributes to our final concluding chapter.