CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - UniversitÃ¤t Salzburg

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Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance SocietyIt would be rather harmful if parents try to control these spaces:“Many adults believe that these restrictions are necessary to prevent problematicbehaviors or to protect children from the risks of society. Whether or not that viewis valid, restrictions on access to public life make it difficult for young people tobe socialized into society at large. (...) We are doing our youth a disservice if webelieve that we can protect them from the world by limiting their access to publiclife. They must enter that arena, make mistakes, and learn from them. Our roleas adults is not to be their policemen, but to be their guide“ (boyd 2008b).boyd (2007b) formulates the hypothesis that MySpace users are primarily kids withworking class background. MySpace users would also include music freaks and “kidswho are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers”. Shecalls these teens the subaltern teens. Hegemonic teens would mainly use Facebook.“These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going tocollege. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarilywhite, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to theprom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities”.Hegemonic kids on Facebook would have a negative view of the subaltern kids onMySpace. boyd (2004) characterizes Friendster as a site for self-presentation, a site forconnection, and a site with faked profiles (Fakester). boyd (2006a) found in a case studyof Friendster that the most common reasons for adding someone to friends lists werethat these people were actual friends, acquaintances, family members, or colleagues.Social networking platforms like MySpace would be “full-time always-on intimatecommunities” (boyd 2006b). boyd and Heer (2006), based on participant observationincluding interviews, survey, and focus groups of 200 Friendster early adopters, arguethat the Fakster profiles served playful purposes and were viewed by their creators asartistic creations.David Beer (2008b) argues that the research agenda outlined by boyd and Ellison(2007) is too much focused on the user and excludes macro-contexts.“By focusing solely upon the user, which is what boyd and Ellison's closingsection on 'future research' suggests, we are overlooking the software andconcrete infrastructures, the capitalist organisations, the marketing and advertisingrhetoric, the construction of these phenomena in various rhetorical agendas, therole of designers, metadata and algorithms, the role, access and conduct of thirdparties using SNS, amongst many other things. (…) Capitalism is there, present,particularly in the history, but it is at risk of looming as a black box inunderstandings of SNS. (…) This is what is missing, a more political agenda that ismore open to the workings of capitalism. At the moment we are informed largelyby accounts of these spaces where we can connect, spaces that are host to new orremediated social connections, spaces that are democratic and mutually owned –the direction boyd and Ellison intimate and their focus solely upon the user looksto perpetuate this agenda even if unintentionally, at least, in my reading, that isthe risk. My feeling is that the dominant visions of the democratization of the web17
Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societytoward a model of ‘collaborative’ or ‘collective intelligence’ needs to bequestioned with some rigour” (Beer 2008b: 523-526).In short, Beer’s critique of boyd and Ellison is that the approach is individualistic, toooptimistic, and ignoring that ISNS are embedded into capitalism and are primarilycorporations with capitalist interests.Just like techno-pessimism, techno-optimism is a one-sided discourse that ignores themultiple, contradictory causality of complex systems (Fuchs 2008). Just like that it isunlikely that ISNS only put users at risk, it is one-dimensional to assume and unlikelythat ISNS only empower users. The empowerment discourse is also individualisticbecause it focuses research primarily on how individuals use ISNS for makingconnections, maintaining or recovering friendships, falling in love, creatingautonomous spaces, etc. It does not focus on how technology and technology use areframed by political issues and issues that concern the development of society, such ascapitalist crises, profit interests, global war, the globalization of capitalism, or the rise ofa surveillance society (cp. Fuchs 2008).Further examples for the techno-optimistic empowerment discourse on ISNS can begiven. Such studies stress especially the opportunities for forming and maintainingsocial relationships of various kinds. The following discussion is not complete, i.e. onlyexemplary, and is presented chronologically.Donath and boyd (2004) hypothesize that social networking platforms are technologiesthat are more suited for forming and maintaining weak ties than strong ties. Ellison,Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) conducted empirical research on the quality of socialconnections in the social networking platform Facebook. Their method was aquantitative empirical online survey with a random sample of 800 Michigan StateUniversity undergraduate students, from which 286 completed the survey. The majorresult of the study was that “participants overwhelmingly used Facebook to keep intouch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by someform of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class”. There was astress on “connecting with offline contacts as opposed to meeting new people”.Facebook users used the platform for maintaining strong social ties and forming weaksocial ties. Facebook“may help individuals to maintain pre-existing close relationships, just as it can beused as a low-maintenance way to keep tabs on distant acquaintances. (…)Online interactions do not necessarily remove people from their offline world butmay indeed be used to support relationships and keep people in contact, evenwhen life changes move them away from each other” (Ellison/Steinfield/Lampe2007).Another survey (N=1440, Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield 2006a) at Michigan StateUniversity showed that students have high confidence that their profiles describe themaccurately (mean=4.16 of 5). There was high agreement to the statement that oneengages in keeping in touch with old friends and checking out the Facebook profiles ofpeople one has met in person.18
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CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - UniversitÃ¤t Salzburg

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