Online Seminar 1-12 November: Daniel Miller An Extreme Reading of Facebook

[Keith Hart]

There is no doubt that the last five years have seen a quantum jump in how most people experience the internet. ‘Web 2.0’ features above all the spread of Social Networking Sites (SNS), of which the Open Anthropology Cooperative is one. Chief among them is Facebook. From the OAC’s beginning some of our snootier members complained about the ‘Facebooky feel’ of our Ning platform, the cheesy way of making ‘friends’, the superficial flashiness of it all. And yet it is not outlandish to suppose that we may be witnessing a fundamental change in the way many of us experience living in the world.

Daniel Miller’s paper, ‘An extreme reading of Facebook’ (available here), is not just an opportunity to engage with his ideas, but also to reflect on ourselves and the means we have found for coming together in this place. His is as close to a universal topic as we will come across, since, whatever we may feel about it (and I have had my moments of disenchantment), who does not know Facebook from the inside?

Danny has dedicated his life – and getting on for thirty books – to developing the anthropological study of material culture, the things people have made, and increasingly the virtual society in which they circulate. He has summed up his project in the first of two volumes, Stuff (2010), reviewed at the OAC Press. Join a discussion of the book and review in the Group, OAC Book Reviews.

His method and style are humanist, putting the emphasis on what people think and do as revealed by ethnographic practice and presenting his arguments with as little jargon as possible. He makes three bold propositions about Facebook:

1. It turns upside down the assumptions on which modern social science was founded.
2. It performs a function as an unseen witness similar to that of God.
3. As a cultural system it shares some of the fundamental features of Kula.

Daniel Miller invites the attacks of entrenched academicians; he may or may not be pushing at an open door with us. I want to invite the widest possible participation in our discussions. Please do not assume that there are invisible barriers to joining in, hidden protocols designed to dissuade outsiders. We encourage detailed analysis of Danny’s arguments, but also invite personal testimony, anecdotes and reflections that need not be so closely related to them. The aim is to advance a conversation about what anthropology is and might be, but don’t get twisted in knots over whether your contribution is anthropological or academic enough. We have a large membership from University College London where Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture in the Anthropology Department. I hope this will be a stimulus rather than an obstacle to their online participation.

The seminar will last from 1st to 12th November. This gives everyone a chance to reflect and read, maybe even a chance to do some limited fieldwork on Facebook or here at the OAC! We are developing a new medium of social interaction here. You can help shape what it becomes.

[Philip Swift]

Daniel,

A great paper, which has set a fascinating discussion in motion. I especially like your effort to make Facebook a conceptual friend of Kula rings. By chance, before I read your paper today, I was looking over Louis Dumont's preface to Evans-Pritchard's Nuer, where Dumont concludes that E-P's fabulous insight was to see the system in terms of relationships rather than individuals. After I'd read your paper, it struck me that E-P could well have been talking about FB.

But this is exactly the point of your first proposition, I guess, according to which Facebook offers the possibility of re-ordering social theory in favour of anthropology. As I read your argument, the problem that sociology has here, is in part that it's inherited a twinned suspicion (from the early 20th century) of crowds and technology and the threats that both pose to the authenticity of the individual. I can't imagine that Heidegger, for example - with his distrust of the dangerous gravity of the mass (the 'they') and his serious misgivings about technology - would have much fun on Facebook! But, as you imply, what Facebook teaches social theory is precisely that the possibility of establishing intimacy and authenticity isn't negated by technological mediations.

Indeed, wasn't that the point of Marshall McLuhan's (pre-Internet) argument about the 'global village' made possible by the extension of telecommunications, and of television in particular?

But what grabs me most of all is your provocative second proposition, and the association your draw between Facebook and Levinas' thinking on the face of the other. That is, the idea - if I've got it right - that the Facebook participant may be understood as saying 'Here I am' (as Abraham said to God), and establishing visible, moral commitments whose ultimate witness would be an ultimate, invisible Other; in other words (possibly) God.

This notion of the relation between visible presentations and an encompassing invisible moral context put me in mind of a passage from the gospel of Matthew, where Jesus teaches his followers on the proper means of prayer: 'whenever you pray, go into your [chat?]room, and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you' (Matthew 6:6).

To be sure, Jesus is recommending a high level of privacy in relation to prayer here, although privacy settings may be adjusted according to the user, I suppose. But what I'm wondering is whether your brilliant biblical thesis is perhaps a little too, err...biblical.

What I mean is that I wonder about the validity of your biblical (and Levinasian) thesis, in so far as it might be premised on a particular, local sense of both what divinity and subjectivity are. But perhaps, if this is a problem, it might be one less to do with your analysis, than it has to do with the architecture of Facebook itself.

(I very much appreciate that, when you next log on and see the stream of questions, you may not have time to reply to them all...)

[John McCreery]

Susanne, what can I say. What you have written is empirically grounded, on point, totally brilliant. Bravo! In hopes of adding something to what you say (there is nothing to detract), I offer a complementary perspective.

--------------


From the Introduction, "Case-Based Methods: Why We Need Them; What They Are; How to Do Them" by David Byrne. In David Byrne and Charles C. Raglin, eds. (2009) The SAGE Handbook of Case-Based Methods, pp. 1-2.

Danermark et al. (2001, p.1) have firmly stated:

....first, that science should have generalizing claims. Second, the explanation of social phenomena by revealing the causal mechanisms that produce them is the fundamental task of research.

We agree, and have considerable sympathy with the turn to critical realism as a basic metatheoretical foundation for social esearch practice that is proposed by those authors. However, we want to qualify and elaborate somewhat on these fundamental premises. First, we want to make it clear that for us generalizing is not the same as universalizing. It is important to be able to develop an understanding of causation that goes beyond the unique instance — the object of ideographic inquiry. However, it is just as important to be able to specify the limits of that generalization. We cannot establish universal laws in the social sciences. There is no valid nomothetic project. We hope to demonstrate here that case-based methods help us both to elucidate causation and to specify the range of applicability of our account of causal mechanisms. The emphasis on the plural form of mechanism in the preceding sentence is very important. It is not just that different mechanisms operate to produce, contingently in context, different outcomes. It is rather that different mechanisms may produce the same outcome — the complete antithesis of the form of understanding that is implicit in, and foundational to, traditional statistical modelling's search for the — that is to say the universal, always and everywhere, nomothetic model that fits the data.

I am not in complete agreement with this statement. My recent involvement with social network analysis suggests to me that there are nomothetic models that do say important things about the deep structures of the world as a whole. I am, however, struck by the way in which it finds a middle ground between the traditional poles of nomothetic and idiographic research, in which a modest but rigorous exploration of causes both larger than the particular case and limited in their scope have a role to play. I find this approach highly compatible with with the propositions with which I concluded my presentation at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan meeting last Saturday (November 6, 2010).

*Cultural anthropologists should be more like archeologists
*Examine each fragment of data carefully
*Locate it in historical and geographical context
*Use available data and scientific tools (as well as empathy, intuition, and humanistic interpretive skills).

But, once again, thank you for this wonderful demonstration of how anthropological knowledge can speak effectively to current debates.

[Keith Hart]

Lane DeNicola said:

there may be some analytic traction to be gained (specifically on the issue of Facebook's parallels with Kula) from comparative analysis of Facebook with its alternatives. This could include any of the vast array of existing social networking sites, or one of those "rivals" seeking to differentiate itself from Facebook, such as (for example) Diaspora.

This is an important point, Lane. But it is related to another, the frequency of monopoly platforms in internet commerce, broadly speaking. One OS, one search engine, one email, one auction house, one free phone service, one micropayments system, one bookstore, one music store, one SNS for grownups, one SNS for kids...and before long one anthro SNS (4000+ and going strong) and definitely only one kula ring in Melanesia (with local variations pace Susanne)! Obviously these monopolies are only stable in the medium term. Android is making a run at iphone. Linux is rising at the expense of Microsoft (with the active help of IBM in Brazil). The NYT article I reproduced above has some interesting things to say about all this. I would be surprised if Diaspora really replaces Fb, even if it keeps all the open source nerds happy. Although the tragic tale of Murdoch's bet on MySpace may be salutary.

What interests me as an economic anthropologist (shock! horror! there is life beyond the social/material divide?) is where these monopolies come from and what sustains them. If I were, God forbid, a conspiracy theorist, I think it suits the corporate world and maybe governments too to have one major e-player in each branch of commerce. I remember reading a chilling comment by an official of the Federal Reserve, saying they were keeping an eye on Paypal and if they felt like it they could reclassify it as a bank and drive it out of business with the consequent rise in operating costs. Of course I am aware of the "winner-takes-all" line, the power-law distribution (one site crosses a threshold and soon the rest are nowhere), the Wired guys like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson since way back when etc. But I think the issue of Facebook and its competitors deserves consideration in terms that are not just a rehash of sociality vs material culture.

[Francine Barone]

I just happened across this and thought I would share it here as further food for thought. Danah Boyd posted these two fragments on Twitter:

"Met a teen today who deactivates Facebook every day post-use so that no one can see her stuff. She re-activates every day to look at others." (link)

"Met another teen who deletes all wall posts. Deletes status updates 12-24 hrs after posting. Deletes comments immediately after reading." (link)

If you're quick (such is the nature of Twitter), you can catch a few more of Boyd's tweets explaining the teen's logic of circumventing the privacy settings, ensuring that friends can only contact her when she wants to be contacted.

As Steffen argues, it's clear that people use SNS in very different ways according to their needs. The interesting thing here is that it seems that the girl is attempting to delete traces of her (existence?) conversation(s) while also remaining part of them and being able to watch others - as though the teen recognizes a social imperative to be part of the public conversation, yet inherently fears it? Rather than refusing to participate in Facebook by not having an account, she de-activates and re-activates her account to control what her peers can witness at any given time, basically only taking part in the circle of exchange in real-time as a witness herself. Storage of past conversations and asynchronous contact are removed. The process of comment exchange is important, while the comments themselves are expendable (not immaterial :)).



Steffen Dalsgaard said:

The only thing, which I think we can say for certain, is that we are social in FB as total solitude would make very little sense in such a forum. At least I have never come across anyone having an FB account without having any friends. The 'witnessing' - whether God, Society or the Other be the witness – is thus what I find to be one of the most interesting aspects discussed here, especially in the way that I see it as closely related to the idea of FB seen through the perspective of Kula: the name and fame-game and the expansion (or possible shrinking) of the self as being very much about witnessing or having an audience to the exchanges that take place. At the same time, I think FB might entail an objectification of not just the self but also of the Other (you don't really exist in FB without your friends?) in a way that challenges individualism/individuality?

[M Izabel]

We have five more days to go. It seems the momentum is slowing down. Maybe it is appropriate now to reconcile what we have considered so far. I find Francine's proposition that Facebook can be anything (because it is something to every Facebook member) interesting.

Being a fanatic of GST, I think we can appropriate all our views about Facebook within a web of varied theoretical possibilities. Before we can do that, we need a totalizing idea that can reconcile the many ideas we have expressed. There must be a meeting point for all of our ideas.

The easiest thing I can find is that Facebook is a text. Besides being the product of a software program, which is both a language and a text, Facebook is also a reservoir of meanings. The way each member utilizes or understands Facebook is his personal meaning of the language and text.

Maybe we can use Melcuk's Meaning-Text Theory to understand the multiple layers of meanings within a text specially if the text is very complex. Facebook, for sure, has its own lexicons with multiple meanings. For instance, there are people in my list who are not my friends. Is "friend," therefore, an acquaintance, a friend's friend, a network member, a fan, an admirer, a groupie? Even "LOL" is used by some when they have nothing to say and others when they are not interested to reply. Is "LOL" lauging out loud, a filler, a "dead ender", a nervous expression, a "no comment" alternative?

Theories on Hypertext are also useful. We can even go further by considering images on Facebook as visualized texts, pictorial narratives, or stories masked by shapes, colors, smiles, styles. Maybe to someone posting his recent picture is actually his way of saying "look at me now," "I look good," or simply, "This is me."

Barthes' idea that the birth of the reader is the death of the author seems applicable. No matter what the goals of the creators of Facebook are, they do not matter to its members. The creators own the text and the readers own its meanings. If Facebook is a utility to someone, that's his meaning of Facebook. He is not far from the truth, since he practices and operates his meaning. Facebook is a place for me because that's how I view Facebook when I'm on it. Others may think of it as time since it is time for Farmville or for posting messages when they are on Facebook. We cannot dismiss actions, operations, and practices as not true and real.

If Facebook is a god to someone, and it heightens his spirituality every time he is on it, I do not see any falsity in his claim. Also, maybe Facebook is a material or a medium. Before we can accept such ideas, we need to check the materiality of the digital and hypertext or the functionality and dysfunctionaly of the software as a form of technology. As far as I'm concerned, texts, images, and all forms of technology are materials. Anything that needs a material to exist is a material to me. A Facebook is nothing without computers, cell phones, and other gadgets where it is embedded. Maybe, afterall, we need to resort to what the philosophers have said about being and existing to really understand the crux of the matter.

[Justin Shaffner]

Like sex, being active on the Net, comes with its risks. Facebook is no exception. In addition to the usual kinds of threats to reputation, there is the risk of catching various kinds of viruses and worms. There are also phishing scams and identity theft. Many of us use some kind of protection such as anti-virus or privacy control. Others abstain from some activities, if not altogether.

About this time last year, I was procrastinating on Facebook when my friend Teddy started chatting me. He said he was in big trouble and needed my help. He explained he was in London for some conference, and had just been robbed while taking a taxi. Everything had been taken, and now he was unable to pay his hotel bill. He wanted me to wire him $900 so the hotel would not call the police on him.

Teddy and I had been through a lot together, and I really wanted to help. I first met him in Papua New Guinea when doing fieldwork. He was there on a post baccalaureate grant to try and make Ok Tedi mining company’s environmental documents and research intelligible to the affected communities downstream.

But something was wrong. Maybe it was the odd spelling mistakes; or his frustration at my suggestion that he should go talk to the American Embassy, or my asking him whether or not he wanted me to call his parents for him. Whatever it was, it just didn't feel like my friend Teddy. So, I asked him about our time together in Papua New Guinea, something that only he would know about. That's when he went offline. Worried, I emailed him asking him to confirm that he was alright. A few hours later, he replied saying that his Facebook account had been hacked by Nigerians, a variant of the so-called 'Nigerian 419' scam.

In pre-colonial times, the Marind-anim of New Guinea – the language family that I conducted fieldwork with – would headhunt in order to capture a name and identity for their child. Fortunately, for my friend Teddy, the capture was not total and he was able to regain his identity. Others are not always so lucky.

But this was something besides identity theft. This was a matter of becoming. This was perspectival, more akin to possession or shape-shifting. Here then we have a form of magic, to situate alongside kinship and exchange as forms of social networking – all three being kinds of relationality. For a time, 'he' actually had me convinced. It was not Teddy. But it was not not Teddy either. And apparently, others were also convinced.

Danny Miller said, "Facebook is a place where you discover who you are by seeing a visible objectification of yourself. Central to Trinidadian cosmology, as found in Carnival, is the belief that a mask or outward appearance is not a disguise. As something you have crafted or chosen and not merely been born with, the mask is a better indication of the actual person than your unmasked face. This is why one of my informants states that the true person is the one you meet on Facebook, not the person you meet face-to-face. It follows that the truth about yourself is revealed to you by what you post on Facebook. On Facebook you find out who you are."

Perhaps in this way, Facebook is less like god, as Danny suggests, and more like an oracle. You never know what you're going to discover about yourself or others when you go on Facebook. And doing so, like all other forms of social interaction, entails putting the 'symbolic' at risk. In this way, we could argue that what we're dealing with here, in forms of kinship, exchange and magic, are ways of trying to control and manage the effects of relationality – the efficacy of the very forms in which things appear – in both its constructive and destructive guises?

[John McCreery]

Perhaps in this way, Facebook is less like god, as Danny suggests, and more like an oracle. You never know what you're going to discover about yourself or others when you go on Facebook. And doing so, like all other forms of social interaction, entails putting the 'symbolic' at risk. In this way, we could argue that what we're dealing with here, in forms of kinship, exchange and magic, are ways of trying to control and manage the effects of relationality – the efficacy of the very forms in which things appear – in both its constructive and destructive guises?

Beautiful.

I especially like the way in which this approach lends itself to the use of updated forms of old-fashioned methods. I imagine an anthropologist for whom Facebook is a field site. She begins by exploring the local social structure (here she can turn for assistance to the physicists and mathematicians who have been developing tools to extract significant features of structure from large data sets, e.g., the work of M. Girvan and M.E.J. Newman). She goes on to examine the material conditions and embodiments that flesh out the abstract networks composed of nodes and edges with which the physicists and mathematicians deal. She takes note of the servers, telecommunication networks, and client terminals without which Facebook ceases to exist. She may wonder about how Facebook changes as new hardware and software are added to the network. Is Facebook on a cell phone the same as Facebook on a PC or an iPad? How do the size and clarity of screens, the quality of sound reproduction, the speed of networks and interface design affect the experience? Then comes the question of meaning and the problem posed by the fact that in a user population that now exceeds a half billion people there is plenty of room for variation. Again network analysts may be able to offer assistance. Tools developed for citation network and semantic network analysis can help to map the distribution of terms and concepts in relation to particular subnetworks and communities. At the end of the day, however, it will take real world ethnography, the kind of thing that Danny Miller is pioneering in his studies of Trinidad, to work out what Facebook means to particular sets of people. A critical factor will be the material world background to online interaction.

One line of inquiry that is likely to be especially fruitful in a broad theoretical sense will focus on the differences between material and virtual interactions, which will turn out to be far more complex than the simple binary material/virtual suggests. I find myself considering the differences between agricultural products in Farmville, the way in which agricultural products are treated on the Chicago Commodity Exchange, and the mud, sweat, mechanical and physical labor involved in producing Happy Meals, the "Fair Trade" coffee on sale at Starbucks, or organic vegetables for upscale restaurants.

I recall Susanne Kuehling's observation that group solidarity seems much stronger in World of Warfare than on Facebook. Of course, I think. WoW engages groups in competition with ritualized combat used to seize and hold territory. Quite a different world that from Facebook.

Anyway. While we could go chasing about for the latest "theory" and debate the merits of combining this or that form of "critique," there is, it seems to me, plenty to be done and done more fruitfully by sharpening our traditional tools and adding to our toolkit the technologies that network science is now making available.

[Daniel Miller]

Many meaty things to chew on over the last two days, and thanks for these. First let me turn to Keith and his frustration with `same old’ social/material and impatience for some proper economic and political analysis. But I know Keith enjoys debate so Iet me take the stance that I am entirely opposed to his sentiment. Keith knows well that with books on capitalism, virtualism etc, I have never been a slouch in relation to issues of political economy, but we were both brought up within ideological frames that more or less said things are `important’ to the degree that the are about politics and economics. It took me a long time to realise how misguided this is. I prefer that things are important to the degree they impinge on people’s welfare. That ideology mainly led to a false politicisation and economic reductionism that was often trite. If Facebook is used by 500 million people in places like Indonesia and Turkey and really has an impact that reverses major trends in social relations and strongly impacts on intimacy and loneliness and such like, and this seems largely outside the remit of political and economic anthropology, then I would almost welcome this as a necessary corrective in the anthropological sense of significance and in some ways comforting.

Of course some elements are relevant to such debates. I am rather glad we have avoided tedious discussion of Mark Zukerberg and corporations. Much more promising issues would follow from Lane’s discussion. The question his begs is this. Kelty shows these issues are of considerably importance to the political economy of creating web infrastructures with wonderful stuff on the implications of open source, and on constraints in software, as well as Keiths important issue of monopolies. But Lane hints that it is possible to have two beasts that are entirely different in infrastructural terms without that having consequence for usage, in which case lets recognise this division and not impose one area of analysis inappropriately on another. The design side of the digital world opens up whole new terrains of study, but that should not detract from the issues I tried to raise in my paper.

Suzanne brings out another perennial `same-old’ question but one always worth responding to. Anthropology lives and dies by the scholarship of ethnography, and I have to bow immediately to her expertise on Kula. But as an extremist I always want to balance the parochialism of ethnography with theory and generalisation. To do that I attempted, exactly as she surmised, not to contend with the nuances of Kula as she encounters it, but with the discourse of this trope in anthropological teaching `The Kula Ring’ although to be fair at least I took a scholarly version in the sense of Munn’s book. But the reason should be obvious. We live in a world where Facebook is easily dismissed as superficial and transient - evidence for our fall from `authentic culture’, while I want it taken seriously as part of the stuff of life today. I pick Kula because it is the `ur’ example of authentic culture for anthropology, so an extended analogy makes the point, which remains true even if it turns out that the model of Kula I use is now found to be subject to the constant scholarship to which we remain committed as exemplified by Susanne.

But of course just as Kula is vulgarised for the purpose of theory, so is Facebook and each commentator notes that Facebook can be hundreds of things we haven’t even touched on and could be the subject of alternative debate, but then there is no pretention here to a comprehensive analysis. The same point applies to Phillip. I am not suggesting that Trinidadians precisely fit the situation of Abraham, indeed they come closer to Christian concepts of witnessing as used today by powerful Pentecostal influences. But the reason is that I want this point about witnessing to be relevant to understanding Facebook anywhere, whether the users are nominally polytheistic or atheistic. I am not really calling this issue `religious’ it is about something still more fundamental, which is the constitution of persons as moral beings through an appropriation of the witnesses as judgemental. This is core to many religions, but there are secular equivalents like Freud’s internal projection of the parental gaze in the super-ego or Munn’s use of Sartre’s concept of the witness.

I hadn’t discussed it earlier but Justin is spot on in his discussion of the oracle for the particular situation of Trinidad. I discuss this in my work on `Style and Ontology’ the truth for Trinis is discovered by putting on an appearance and going out in the world and then finding out from peoples responses who one is, this kind of oracular version of self-objectification is also found in discussion of highland New Guinea where people dance in front of their enemies (see Strathern and O’Hanlon) and I think is common in more egalitarian societies, where the constitution of a person comes less from institutionalised and long term genres, but has to be reconfirmed constantly through exposure to the other. You really never know who you are going to be until you see how people respond to your projection of yourself – and that is often the point of posting on Facebook. As John says this leads to discussions of how this might work in different kinds of posting and why for Trinis the key posting is often photographs rather than texts, and why people do respond so often to photographs. But as John says if you want to take this further we need more ethnography.

Which finally brings me back to Ameria, if I baulk a bit at discussion of `things’ it is partly because one doesn’t want material culture studies to be simplified to a concern with things, it is often much more about objectification, which is exactly what this discussion of oracles pertains to. As Steffan notes this can include issues such as that of how crafting oneself online differs from offline genres, with crafting being a proper analogy with artisanal work, but now we see that the product that is crafted is not that willed or intended, but that which comes back to us from the subsequence gaze of the other as witness/oracle.

[M Izabel]

Using analogy in our analysis, oftentimes, does not simplify things but rather complicate. We tend to see and consider only a part of a whole. If A is like B, we should make sure that A has all the qualities of B. If only some qualities of A are found in B, we better specify them in our usage of the analogy and in our analysis.

I don't think Facebook is like an oracle. In terms of self-discovery, Facebook does not show things and make one realize something about them. He has to look for them and find out about them himself. My first day on Facebook was like my first day in San Francisco. I saw new things and strange people. I saw poverty, opulence, style, simplicity and met swindlers, druggies, prostitutes, and transvestites.

Also in my navigational tour, I met friends, relatives, old classmates, and acquaintances. I checked their new looks, relationships, hobbies, and jobs. I discovered many things about them that I never knew. My old friend who could only eat once a day due to poverty before is now a lawyer handling big corporate cases. I could not help but wonder what if I did what he did-studying law. Would I be happier and more successful?

I also discovered that I still had that feeling of being betrayed and abandoned after the photo of my former boyfriend and his wife popped up. Nobody told me that my former boyfriend is already married. It was I who searched his name and checked his relationship status. I did not know, after almost a decade, that I still had that pain. There was no oracle who told me to send him a message so I could move on.

It was I who clicked the button, who said my piece, and forgave him. On Facebook, if you want to discover things about others or about yourself, you better have dexterous fingers and yes, a set of observant eyes. The faster you can type correct names, the more things and people you can search. On Facebook, one has to explore to discover others and himself.

[Huon Wardle]

the truth for Trinis is discovered by putting on an appearance and going out in the world and then finding out from peoples responses who one is

Danny, either I have missed something or you are using Trinis in an astoundingly - let us say 'heuristic' - way here: you might as well say 'human beings' or am I wrong? Could you explain what you are doing with the term (Trinis) since, the last time I looked, Trinidad was a nation state divided by race and capital interests and brought together by diverse creolizing processes: all of those features defy description in terms of some kind of national character typology.

[M Izabel]

There are unsaid etiquette and moral policing for every group or community on Facebook. In the groups or communities where I’m a member, we tend to state the obvious that fosters group think and not the truth that causes conflict when it comes to our perception of others. When someone beautiful gets a new haircut and posts her beautiful photo, almost in chorus, we say “gorgeous” or "beautiful" or we press the “like” button. I don’t think a beautiful person posts her photo because she doesn't know she’s beautiful. Let’s not be naïve. Self-marketing to gain friends and admirers is common on Facebook.

When someone fat posts her new photo with more pounds on her cheeks, generally, we say nothing. Maybe her close friend will say “nice” or press the ”like” button but never the truth that she should lose some weight. There are many things we cannot tactlessly post on our walls, as if it’s a rule. I tend to check first who will be reading my post and if it will matter, help, hurt, or exclude someone. Like in real life, I watch my words when I’m with people not so close to me. If I want to be safe with my response, like others in my groups, I use “LOL,” “:),” “Ok” and the “Like” button.

The “like” button is really negligible and meaningless. It is pressed as a response indiscriminately even when someone only writes “LOL” or “:)”. I primarily use it to show that I read or see the post even though I don’t like it. My friends also do the same. They “like” even though they don’t. How can a Facebook member know the truth about himself then when the truth is suppressed so not to hurt him? Self-discovery, the literal meaning of it, is the key.

When I translated to my language and posted a poem of Marina Tsvetaeva that was very telling of what I felt that time, nobody commented, but I got many “like”. It seemed they either liked the poem or my loneliness. Somehow, I realized that I should not be deep without them telling me. When I clearly expressed what I really felt on my wall, almost everyone comforted and advised me. They did so because I gave them a chance to do so. There was no self-discovery in that situation since most of their responses were predictable advices, wishes, and pep talks. How would I know something new about myself through responses such as “I know you are strong” and “Because you’re stubborn” when I already knew I could be both.

Like in real life, I don’t go on Facebook to solicit responses from others for my self-discovery. I discover myself by exploring what they don’t say and do on Facebook that are related to me. When nobody posts on my wall or even press the “like” button or write “LOL”, it’s time for introspection for me. Maybe I’m becoming arrogant and self-centered or maybe the group or community I'm in is dead and boring.

We should avoid interpretive generalizing statements. Let’s not forget that Facebook is a metacommunity of communities.

[M Izabel]

Sorry, I'll double post while I'm still at it.

I've been silent about the mask or the carnival, since my only ethnographic experience related to it was diasporic-- meaning, not in its real setting. When I used to live in Cambridge, MA, every summer, immigrants from the Caribbean held a mini-carnival. They played loud music, wore beautiful costumes, and danced wildly. I did not sense anything that was particualrly related to their wearing of masks or headdresses. Masks and headdresses were part of their costumes. In fact, they were more into their music, dances, and bodies. There were participants who wore nice costumes but they could not dance. They did not get wild applauses as those who wore no costume at all but could dance.

I asked my Brazilian friend about mask-wearing in their carnaval. She said most wear them to complete their costumes. Some wear them so they can dance wildly and show off their bodies incognito. Others just think masks are beautiful. She added, “You may have the best costume, the most beautiful set of mask, headdress, wings, and attire, but if you don’t have a gorgeous body and can’t dance samba, it’s useless. It seemed to me what she said was that carnaval is about people and their bodies and movements first before the materials that adorn them. I don’t know if Danny is over-reading the Trinidian carnival mask. Maybe what she said makes more sense, and is easier to grasp:

“Carnaval is a celebration before lent. Don’t you like sinning without people knowing and kissing boys who do not know who you are? I don’t want to be called a slut when they see me inside the church after the carnaval. I wear a mask because I want to be wild.”

On war dance:

I don’t see any self-objectification in the war dances of the headhunters of Mountain Province in the Philippines, the nomadic Aetas who still hunt and gather, and the male elders in my culture who are known for their “kill or be killed” bravery and warring behavior. They dance to mock and frighten their enemies. Their dances are also rituals for their gods of war. Primarily, they do it for posturing that they are not scared or stressed. Haka (peruperu) of the Maoris, from what I’ve read, has the same functions. The headhunters of the Philippines do not project their well-known bravery or express who they are or perform their savagery through dancing. They do it through, well, cutting heads, counting kills and telling stories about them. I see nothing about self-discovery and oracular realization in the war dances of these peoples.

Can't we read what are only visible, discernible, and understandable on Facebook? Oracular realization is very beautiful a concept, but it seems a wild interpretation to me. We have to consider also the fact that there are Facebook members whose profile photos are cartoons, movie stars, buildings, paintings, CD covers, film posters, and other non-human images. Do you expect those members to self-discover and self-realize through the responses to those images? Facebook, like a city landscape, has institutions, organizations, stores, restaurants, gyms, churches, and other establishments as its members. How can Domino's Pizza, for example, self-discover and self-realize?