A recent New York Times opinion piece by Hannah Seligson has declared “the unhappy marriage” to be “Facebook’s last taboo.” As a scholar of Facebook, I found the singling out of marriage rather odd. For years now, critics have been decrying the general lack of unhappy anything on Facebook, arguing that the level of self-monitoring typical on the site strips it of authenticity and relational value. While it’s true that most people try to limit the amount of negativity they display on Facebook (as in any semi-public social space), and the interface itself privileges good news, Facebook users are leveraging the medium specifically for the delivery of “bad” (or uncertain) news.
That Facebook is a semi-public space with most, if not all, social norms for public spaces carrying over from face-to-face interaction is now a commonly accepted definition of the platform. In fact, Seligson touches on this a number of times, comparing Facebook, for instance, to cocktail parties for which the married couple hosting must put aside private squabbles and present a united front. That the space is now theoretically visible to hundreds or even thousands of Facebook “friends” certainly reflects a change of scale.
Seligson isn’t writing about Facebook users who post running totals of the number of times their spouses have incompetently loaded the dishwasher, however. She’s focused on divorce announcements, which are a very different social phenomenon from marital tensions, though the latter may culminate in the former. Like all social norms, those that govern both marital tensions and marital dissolution are evolving with communication media; as with most such norms, it is practices that are changing much more rapidly than underlying values.
It was these practices that were the focus of my dissertation research, through which I addressed the challenge posed by Trevor Pinch (2010) in his piece “The Invisible Technologies of Goffman’s Sociology From the Merry-Go-Round to the Internet.” Pinch argued that too often, sociologists studying interaction ignore the material circumstances upon which social interactions are predicated. New technologies are often seen as world-changing simply because they are new; a decade later, the technology is subsumed into everyday invisible infrastructure and virtually ignored—consider radio and the telephone, which were themselves once sites of technological panic in mainstream culture. Research is often misguided, Pinch tells us, in falling prey to the assumption that new technologies create new forms of self-presentation and interaction merely by their newness. This assumption is based on the common but erroneous belief that any human interaction is not mediated by technology.
It’s not only the semi-public context of Facebook that deters people from publicizing their marital problems. Facebook is documentary by nature. The content that we post there—which is to say, the stuff of our digital self-presentations—is preserved in the digital archive of the Timeline, available to anyone with the right permissions (including people we haven’t yet met when we make them). I found in my research that users were conscious long before the introduction of Timeline that recording relationship troubles on Facebook could easily magnify them, especially given the unique reach and permanence of the medium. One male undergraduate explained to me in a 2009 interview that after a major fight with his girlfriend, the only thing that kept him from changing his Facebook relationship status was the understanding that to do so would have been tantamount to declaring a permanent breakup.
The same permanence that requires user circumspection regarding relationship troubles, however, can become an asset once permanent dissolution has occurred. Divorce announcements aren’t new, but Facebook allows them to be made with much greater efficiency than was previously possible. When people get divorced, they have to tell a lot of other people about it. Pre-social media, this typically had to be done over a long period of time, piecemeal. While one’s inner circle would be appropriate recipients for phone calls made specifically to deliver the news, the majority of one’s social connections would not qualify as “need-to-know” and would thus just have to hear about it when circumstances made it relevant. This might keep the news “news,” in some settings, for months or years.
One advantage of using Facebook for information disclosure, particularly for negative news that one may hope to personally deliver a minimal number of times,[1] is the sheer breadth and endurance of the medium. With a single status update, users can reach a lot of people from various social contexts over a relatively long period of time—at least a few days, if enough people interact with the post that Facebook’s News Feed algorithms flag it as important and prioritize it accordingly. The same documentary character of the space that discourages the posting of minor disagreements is an advantage when one wishes to advertise a permanent change. (The phenomenon of “divorce selfies,” for which Seligson claims “mini-meme”-hood, is likely driven by the priority inherently granted to images by those algorithms: an announcement attached to a photo will reach more people right out of the gate.)
Even better, the people with whom the recent divorcée is not intimate enough to target the news, but with whom she might like to be, will learn of her newly single status sooner rather than later. Facebook allows people to deliver what I have termed “open recipient news,” that is, news that is not definitively targeted at a particular recipient or group of recipients. While we have a general sense of who will notice our posts on Facebook, the medium allows for some degree of plausible deniability in both directions—you can insist that it was not meant specifically for your mother while also denying any expectation that your coworkers respond to it, if they happened to see it.
For my dissertation, I analyzed this phenomenon through interviews with lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) Facebook users who used the site either to explicitly “come out” or to “drop clues” about their sexual orientations. Divorce and LGB identity have in common the issue of uncertain or variable valence: one may be unsure how others will react, or fairly sure that certain others will take the news as good while others take it as bad. Deliveries of good and bad news have distinct structural features; to stray from them may lead to all manner of interactional difficulty, as news deliverer and news recipient struggle with competing definitions of the situation. In some cases, the deliverer may not know whether her news is considered good or bad by a particular recipient until after it has been delivered, making the interaction potentially problematic and especially difficult to frame, since it may not be clear whether there is a “blow” that needs to be “cushioned.” Facebook offers an opportunity to avoid such awkwardly problematic interactions, and many users are happy to take advantage.
Additionally, the general sense of Facebook as a public space disincentivizes strongly negative reactions to news like sexual orientation or divorce. While some users may go further to explicitly frame the news, as an old acquaintance of mine recently did in a bulleted list New Year’s status update with the item “Finally divorced (a very good thing),” largely shared norms against public delivery of negative news and “starting fights” in sociable spaces like Facebook combine to suppress responses that might treat the news as bad. The principles of the strategy are not new, but Facebook allows us to realize them in some new ways.
That Facebook status updates are not a medium for seeking or providing marital counseling should not shock anyone who uses Facebook or, for that matter, interacts in public. But the new interactional practices enabled by the particular material circumstances of Facebook, which users are developing to smoothly deliver news that would previously have produced unavoidable awkwardness, are interesting indeed.
[1] Note, for instance, that one of the few negative “Life Events” now pre-filled on the Facebook Timeline is “Loss of a Loved One,” alongside “End of Relationship.”
E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman (@cabell rhymes with “Scrabble”) holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her teaching and research interests include digital media, technology, embodiment, gender, and sexuality.