Today’s makeup selfie (Urban Decay’s Electric Palette).

I had no idea the upcoming ABC sitcom Selfie was going to be a thing (this fall if you for some reason care) until I saw an ad spot for it while half watching the World Cup or something. Very suddenly I was more than half watching, and within a few seconds I was tweeting angrily.

I mean. Read the premise (courtesy of Wikipedia).

Using a premise similar to Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the series will follow the life of Eliza Dooley (a modern day version of Eliza Doolittle), a woman obsessed with becoming famous through the use of social media platforms (including the use of Instagram and taking selfies), until she realizes that she needs to actually find people that she can be friends with physically instead of “friend” them online. This prompts Eliza to hire Henry Higenbottam (a modern day version of Henry Higgins), a marketing self-image guru who is left with the task of rebranding Eliza’s image in the hopes to show her that there is more to life out there than just playing Candy Crush Saga with an iPhone and connecting with a Facebook page.

As one of my Twitter friends put it, “The problem with Pygmalion is that Eliza just liked herself too much, said no GBS fan ever.”

No, but seriously, though. My anger had a lot more than just to do with general knee-jerk Feminist Rage. That was, of course, part of it, and part of it was also the tired, irritating, silly stuff in there about anything done via social media as less real (is this really a thing we’re still doing?). But a more significant part of it was also related to some emotional work I’ve been doing recently that’s left me feeling intensely vulnerable and has been much more difficult than I expected.

I’m doing selfies.

Mostly on Twitter, mostly of makeup. I recently got majorly into eyeshadow (I will stop LJing at some point, promise) and at first it just seemed like a fun way to record my experiments with it, but soon I was doing it a fair amount. So yeah, so what? Lots of people do. It’s in the dictionary in an official capacity, for crying out loud.

The thing is that it hurts. It makes me want to cringe every time I hit send, an awful moment where I feel like I’m betraying something. I’m doing a wrong thing. A lot of it is probably personal neurosis, but I don’t think anywhere near all, and anyway, don’t all our neuroses have social contexts? Don’t they all come from somewhere?

I was familiar with the fraughtness of the selfie. Most of us should be by now. Selfies are great, selfies are awful, selfies are feminist, selfies aren’t feminist at all and are in fact tools of the patriarchy, selfies are things stupid attention whores (I use that term here very, very mindfully) do because they have no self-esteem and need people to tell them they’re pretty. Duckface. Duckface duckface duckface.

Intellectual familiarity does not prepare you for something like this.

The discourse around selfies is fraught because selfies are complex locations within which gender and mental wellbeing and the attention economy and the politics of self-presentation and a hundred other things all collide into a tangled mess of a thing. Selfies are fraught because almost everything of which a selfie is conceptually and culturally comprised is controversial.

(Alliteration!)

But what I see in almost everything being said about selfies is that it seems impossible to not, in one way or another, feel bad for taking them. Whichever way I turn, there’s conflict.

The idea of selfies as something that vapid, appearance-obsessed women (always women, even if non-binary people like me are doing it, even if men are) do is especially toxic, I think. Witness the Selfie premise above. There’s also the now-infamous piece in Jezebel by Erin Gloria Ryan that characterizes selfies as “a cry for help”. She’s ostensibly writing in the service of feminism, and it’s not that she doesn’t make some good points, but the form in which she does ends up being pretty shaming, in a way that Ryan herself appears to feel intensely.

Nor is the proliferation of selfies into a generation of women who are old enough to know better a promising development; it’s a nightmare. The picture that accompanies my byline on this very website is a selfie. I’ve posted selfies to Facebook, and Twitter. I always feel bad about it; it always takes several tries to not look stupid, and even now, I kind of hate all of them. “Hey guys, I’m by myself!” my selfie says, “Can you please somehow indicate that other humans are out there so that I do not collapse into my own loneliness????? LOLOLOL” Please, god, no.

I know that feel. The thing is, I can’t escape the powerful suspicion that I feel that way only because I’ve been made to.

Not that selfies and what they do, when we’re talking about gender, aren’t problematic. Focus on appearance for the sake of affirmation is not necessarily a good thing, no, and when it’s a thing embedded in society organized along patriarchal lines, of course it’s profoundly troubling. But for me, then, there’s the feeling of I’m making myself look desperate and stupid and self-absorbed. I shouldn’t enjoy it when people say nice things about how I look. Bad feminist. Bad.

I should note that Ryan would probably disagree that what I post is a “pure selfie”, given that I’m usually showing off my makeup skills. But I think that’s hair-splitting of a pretty unhelpful kind. It’s still my face. I still want people to say nice things.

At the last Theorizing the Web we had an entire panel devoted to selfies, and Anne Burns noted many of the ways in which this kind of discussion is harmful in her paper “Disciplining the Duckface: Online Photographic Regulation as a form of Social Control”:

Regulating the selfie is a means for regulating the selfie-subject, where both are conceived of as being innately problematic and requiring control. As addressed in this study, notions of ‘too many selfies’ and the labeling of young women’s self-presentations as narcissistic, seek to limit both what, and how, women are encouraged to photograph. Such discussions impact upon notions of privacy and identity negotiation, but serve primarily to mark and marginalize certain groups. Therefore, through the limitations imposed on a certain type of creative practice, subjects’ behavior and participation within the public sphere is curtailed.

For Ryan, it’s (mostly sort of) okay to take a picture of you wearing a hat and post it to Instagram. Take a picture of just your face and you’re in trouble.

But as Jenny Davis has noted, the duckface itself is a kind of control over the form and presentation of the bodies we gender female:

[O]ne performs the Duckface by sucking in the cheeks and pushing out the lips. This makes the lips appear fuller, the cheekbones more prominent, and the eyes wider. It can also minimize asymmetry when taken from the correct angle. In short, this expressive configuration contorts the face in line with standards of feminine beauty.

So again, it’s not that there’s nothing troubling or problematic going on here. It’s not that the context of the selfie isn’t indicative of harm. It’s that for someone who isn’t cisgender male who wants to take a selfie, who wants to post a selfie, and who dares to want to hear nice things in response, there is literally no way to win. There’s no way to not feel at least kind of bad.

Guys. I just want to post pictures of myself wearing makeup on Twitter. It should not be this hard.

I want to emphasize that I realize how obvious these points must be to just about everyone who’s likely to read this. They are obvious. But these things are wound up in visceral, embodied emotion, and it’s easy to forget that when primarily what you’re doing with them is engaging in academic debate. It’s one thing to write and talk about a selfie; it’s another thing to post them and deal with the resulting emotional fallout. It’s another thing to take all the stuff you’ve read in blog posts and essays and papers about selfies and identity, and face the way they really do smash painfully together in your head when you’re announcing to your Twitter followers, as I did a couple of weeks ago, that for a few days you’re going to post a daily makeup selfie.

So why not just stop?

Because I don’t think this is fair, to put it bluntly, for all the reasons Burns describes. This is regulating the self and presentation of the self in ways that legitimize some things and delegitimize others. It reifies the idea that some kinds of selfies are okay and others are beyond the pale, that some kinds of selfie-subjects are acceptable and others are simply not. That, among other things, No True Feminist would ever do it. That enjoying attention is wrong, false, inauthentic, and vain in a way we almost exclusively ascribe to women.

We should examine where a desire for positive, appearance-based attention comes from. But can I please not feel ashamed for having that desire at all? I’m not saying that anyone has directly and intentionally made me feel that way, but that this is exactly why that discourse is harmful, and I understand that now in a deep way I didn’t before.

So what I’m doing about it is I’m posting selfies. Aggressively, like I’m making a point to myself, because I am. I’m trying to enjoy the positive comments as much as I can. I’m thinking about this a lot. And someday, maybe, someone will be like “hey, you look awesome today,” and I’ll be able to just smile, type “thanks :D”, hit tweet, and get on with my goddamn day.

LOOK AT MY FACE on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry

Image Credit: Marco Paköeningrat

Ugh. I hate the new Facebook. I liked it better without the massive psychological experiments.

Facebook experimented on us in a way that we really didn’t like. Its important to frame it that way because, as Jenny Davis pointed out earlier this week, they experiment on us all the time and in much more invasive ways. The ever-changing affordances of Facebook are a relatively large intervention in the lives of millions of people and yet the outrage over these undemocratic changes never really go beyond a complaint about the new font or the increased visibility of your favorite movies (mine have been and always will be True Stories and Die Hard). To date no organization, as Zeynep Tufekci observed, has had the “stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.” When we do get mad at Facebook, it always seems to be a matter of unintended consequences or unavoidable external forces: There was justified outrage over changes in privacy settings that initiated unwanted context collapse, and we didn’t like the hard truth that Facebook had been releasing its data to governments. Until this week, it was never quite so clear just how much unchecked power Facebook has over its 1.01 billion monthly active users. What would governing such a massive sociotechnical system even look like?

I am, by far, not the first person to ask this question. I’m not even the first person to ask this in the wake of this most recent revelation. Kate Crawford in The Atlantic suggests that Facebook implement an opt-in system for experimental testing. That way, users could be presented with extremely clear and concise terms for their participation. I would add this might even be an opportunity to provide value back to users through small payments for being a part of the study. I’m not particularly thrilled with the power dynamics at play, but if I can get paid to take experimental drugs, I think I deserve some money to have my emotions manipulated by computer scientists.

In either case, an opt-in system would still be an in-house solution. Would it be possible, or even favorable, to have external oversight of Facebook’s practices? Should the government do it? What about some kind of “user’s advocate” position within the company? If the latter were to be implemented would we vote on representatives or would be invited through a lottery? And what about very specific and complex issues like this emotion study? Are current institutions enough or do we need something new? Let’s take these questions one by one:

Should the government do it?

This is a deceptively tricky question because on the one hand, they already do through the Securities and Exchange Commission (now that they’re publicly traded) and through the Federal Trade Commission (in their role as a consumer protections agency). Back in 2011, when Facebook defaulted a lot of privacy to “public” the FTC required that Facebook open itself up for regular audits for “no less than 20 years.” On the other hand, trust in government agencies is at an all time low (no link required) so why would we trust the fox to tell us about the security status of our hen house? Hell, we even rate companies based on how much they protect us from our own government.

Should we have a user advocate position within the company?

This seems like an elegant solution but a few simple questions make it seem implausible. This person, if they were to have any real oversight power, would actually need to be in the Facebook offices. That would mean they’d need to move away from their current source of income and take up shop in Menlo Park or some other regional office. This would also be a full-time job, so any kind of employment and requisite compensation would need to be replaced. If these were paid government positions (good luck making that happen), we’d be giving even more money to corporations. Being paid by Facebook would be an obvious conflict of interest. Making it an unpaid position would ensure that only independently wealthy Google Glass Explorers would run for office or accept the position if they “won” the lottery. Also, given Facebook’s global reach, how would we handle language barriers? Even India, which holds the largest democratic election in the world and contains dozens of languages within its borders, resorts to using one language (Hindi) that only about half of the country speaks. Representation will be exclusionary, it’s only a question of how much and for whom.

Regardless of whether we hold an election or a lottery we run up against the classic problems of representing others’ interests within a complicated bureaucracy. Several centuries of political thought suggest a couple of inevitable problems: First, the representative will start realizing, once they settle into the job, that really progressive campaign promises or previously held beliefs are “not realistic” within the confines of their job or term. It would not take long for them to, at least from the outside, look like the Silicon Valley equivalent of a “beltway insider.” It isn’t an indictment of the person, it’s a sociological fact of complex bureaucracies: they only work through internal logical and cultural consistency. It would be impossible for one person (or even a committee of people) to make any kind of substantive change without acquiescing to a fair amount of the existing business culture.

Should the advocate be elected?

It’s tempting to hold elections for someone that will represent us in Menlo Park. It just seems like the very epitome of democratic control. We’d all vote for someone that wants to protect our privacy from governments and the company itself. Maybe they would even campaign on the implementation of a “dislike” button. Regardless of their platform we’d run up against the same old problems with all elected officials: first, like all enormous elections, those with a shot of winning are the ones that appeal to the most amount of people. This isn’t always the best way to fill a job position. Not only would we run the risk of having User Advocate Grumpy Cat, we’d also probably end up with someone that knows how to, and has the resources for, a global media campaign. That doesn’t sound like your average person.

Should we hold an advocate lottery?

A lottery would not solve the compensation and culture problems faced by elections, but they might actually be more representative. In theory, this randomly chosen person has the best chance of being the modal Facebook user and thus providing a more representative perspective of most Facebook users. They might even have a shot at being more persuasive given that it’s a somewhat unenviable position to have never chosen to pursue the job but still be under pressure to advocate on behalf of fellow users. They have the rhetorical position of a juror: serving a public duty in as impartial a manner as possible.

How do we regulate or popularly govern complicated tasks and technologies?

This final question gets at one of the biggest and longest-standing issues of governing in a technologically advanced society. If a lay advocate doesn’t understand the technology or the experimental design on their own, they’ll have to have it explained to them by someone else. If that’s the Facebook employee trying to implement the feature or design the experiment that can get very tricky very quickly. There would be nothing stopping them from obscuring or understating the possibilities of harm to users. How would the advocate make an informed decision?

Some of the first urban planners, in fact, were obsessed with this kind of question. Modern cities, if they were to fairly and efficiently distribute goods and services, would have to be deliberately planned so that the technologies of daily life didn’t end up in too few hands. It was obvious to them that without diligent and proactive planning, large cities would always be places of extreme power and wealth inequality. There was no other way around it. The very early work of those planners still remains severely underutilized in street, as well as digital, networks.

Are our existing institutions up for the task, or do we need new ones?

This is, essentially, the kind of question the federal government ran up against in the late 50s and early 60s when several disturbing psychological and medical experiments became public knowledge. Expertise can become so specific and so complex that only fellow experts appear fit to assess an experiment’s validity, efficacy, or ethical standing. Laura Stark’s work on the early history of American social science and medical ethics review seems incredibly prescient right now more than ever. It is tempting to paint Institutional Review Boards –those obscure university bodies that assess the ethics of research designs–as outgunned and outmaneuvered by private companies but that would be missing the point. IRBs, and Cornell’s in the case of the Facebook study, are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

According to Stark, in an essay for the Law & Society Review [paywall], IRBs were not originally set up to solely defend the rights of research subjects. She writes, “At first, there was not a tremendously high priority on determining what, precisely, constituted proper treatment of human subjects: the federal aim was above all to disperse responsibility for this new thing called subjects’ rights.”

How does the initial motivation for IRBs influence their current behaviour? A lot actually. IRBs have a great deal of discretion and that discretion is invariably wrapped up in how decisions can be justified to an angry government looking to not only disperse blame, but to come up with a rationale of why something was approved in the first place. Stark, theorizing the initial formation of these boards, writes “IRBs were declarative groups– their act of deeming a practice acceptable would make it so.” Indeed, that is still the case. Cornell’s IRB declared that “[b]ecause the research was conducted independently by Facebook and [Cornell’s] Professor Hancock had access only to results” the study design was ethical.

It is incredibly difficult to say whether IRBs’ wide discretion needs to be reined in. While this particular Facebook study should not have happened the way it did, making all research more complicated is not the answer. If you are a researcher, or even a friend of one, you probably know the pain and frustration of IRBs’ seemingly arbitrary research design changes. You also probably know that the pre-packaged ethics training one receives as a prerequisite for submitting something to the IRB has all of the intellectual stimulation of an SAT test. There is something deeply broken and no apparent way to fix it.

Starks’ prescriptions for improved IRB boards include “(1) drawing more people into the ethics review process, and (2) pressing this new cast of decision makers to talk to each other.” These are good suggestions in the University context, but what about corporations? Is this something that IRBs need more training in, or do we need to pass new laws that require IRBs in the corporate sector? Given the ever-increasing overlap of industry and academia, I’m more inclined to revamp IRB board training and mandated ethics training for researchers. We will continue to see collaboration across companies and universities for the foreseeable future, but at least the ones doing the research will have to pass through a university first. Part of being a researcher in data science, cognitive science, or any of the classic social and behavioral sciences will need much better training. That way, the next time a social scientist is presented with the alluring and increasingly infrequent opportunity to work on a well-funded project they will design a better, more ethical experiment.

David is on Twitter & Tumblr.

Papers

Utz Sonja, Muscanell Nicole, and Khalid Cameran. Snapchat Elicits More Jealousy than Facebook: A Comparison of Snapchat and Facebook Use. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Jennifer Charteris, Sue Gregory, and Yvonne Masters, Snapchat ‘selfies’: The case of disappearing data, in B. Hegarty, J. McDonald, & S.-K. Loke (Eds.), Rhetoric and Reality: Critical perspectives on educational technology. Proceedings ascilite Dunedin 2014 (pp. 389-393).

Jenny Davis and Nathan Jurgenson, Theorizing Context Collapse: Context collusions and collisions, Information, Communication, and Society, 2014

Christopher Kotfila, This message will self-destruct: The growing role of obscurity and self-destructing data in digital communication, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2014

Michael S. Bernstein , Andres Monroy-Hernandez , Drew Harry1, Paul Andre , Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas, 4chan and /b/:An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, 2011

Franziska Roesner , Brian T. Gill , and Tadayoshi Kohno, Sex, Lies, or Kittens? Investigating the Use of Snapchat’s Self-Destructing Messages, pre-proceedings version of a paper appearing at Financial Crypto 2014

Blogs and Essays

Nathan Jurgenson on ephemeral social media photography in The New Inquiry.  Three of his essays on the Snapchat blog on Temporary Social Media, liquid profiles, and again on temporary photography.

Jenny Davis on ephemerality and trust here at Cyborgology.

Sam Ladner has two posts on social media ephemerality, here and here.

One from Jeremy Antley from his blog.

danah boyd’s thoughts.

from the daily mail, take with appropriate grains of salt

What sort of ideological context would make the emergence of social media, as we know it today, both possible and likely? What background ideals and institutions would motivate the development of what we now know as social media? In other words, what theory of society would help us understand why today looks like it does, why media technology and culture developed in the ways that they have, why, out of all the uncountable possibilities the internet offers, we have Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Instagram, and not something else?

There are two ways to approach these questions: the first way would be to trace the history of the development of technologies–see what sorts of material/scientific advances happened when they did, and why (e.g., economic and regulatory reasons, etc.). That’s not what I’m interested in doing. My approach is not historical, but philosophical (duh): I want to know what kind of society would want something like “social media” as we know it. I want to see what set of background assumptions and ideas need to be present for what we now know as “social media” to make sense.

So, just to be clear: I’m not presenting a historical or factual argument as to how and why this happened. I’m trying to give a theory of the kind of society that would support such a development.

I think Jacques Ranciere’s account of neoliberalism (chapter 5 here)–which he calls “consensus” or “postdemocracy”–is a plausible account of the kind of society that would want both the technological infrastructure and the cultural habits that encourage us to broadcast our thoughts, our images, our “likes” and “favorites.”

For Ranciere, what is distinctive about neoliberalism is that it eliminates the need for (and thus ideal of) representation. The idea of representation is, if you think about it, pretty central to classical democratic liberalism: I do not directly participate in the day-to-day government of my society, but I vote for someone to represent my interests in governmental bodies. So, there’s a difference between “the people” and the people’s representation, between how things really are and how we say they are, between reality and appearance. The de facto/de jure distinction is another example of this gap between fact and its representation.

Traditionally, we’ve been able to make evident a gap between what the law says–e.g., “all men are created equal”–and how society actually works, how that law is executed. The law may say “all men are created equal,” but if we can provide evidence that both (a) a particular group of people are actually, in fact,  included in the category “all men,” and (b) they are not, on the ground and in practice, treated with the equality that the law nominally entitles them, then we can show that there is an inconsistency between the law and its application, and make a case that this inconsistency must be remedied. Basically, it’s a claim that the de jure and de facto state of affairs don’t match up, and must be brought in line. This is how, for Ranciere, women’s suffrage, civil rights, most of the social justice movements of the past have worked. These appeals for justice rely on a dualist metaphysics, one that posits an inconsistency between “how things really are,” on one hand, and “how things appear” on the other.

Neoliberalism, according to Ranciere, collapses the de facto into the de jure–it eliminates the dualist metaphysics (the appearance/reality dualism) and replaces it with a monist metaphysics: how things appear is how they actually are. There is no gap between appearance and reality, no “interval between law and fact” (112), because what appears is a direct and comprehensive representation, or better, visualization, of the facts of the world.

This shift from representation to visualization (this way of putting it is mine, not Ranciere’s) follows from a shift in the technologies or methods of governance. Words, the conventional medium of law and of political debate, don’t directly correspond to what they mean: they’re signifiers that refer to and condense/misrepresent an infinitely more complex signified. Data, on the other hand, can present itself as identical to and coextensive with whatever phenomenon it expresses. Data is “the conjunction of science and the media” which understands itself as “exhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing the count of those parts in line with the image of the whole” (103). Data isn’t treated as a symbol or signifier of the facts, but as a measurement of the facts themselves.

What Ranciere means by data is public opinion polling (writing in 1995, he might be thinking about Bill Clinton’s reliance on public opinion polls). Such polls are a method of “scientific modeling and forecasting operating on an empirical population carved up exactly into its parts…the total distribution of the people into its parts and subparts” (103). Public opinion polls assign everyone to a demographic, and then measure the distribution of opinions across demographics. 18-24, 25-39, 40-65, 65+ — a this seems like a comprehensive, all-inclusive metric: it includes everyone of voting age, which in the US is 18. And even if this isn’t comprehensive and all-inclusive, all that needs to be done is to make more finely-grained categories: we can break age demographics down by gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, religion, education level, and on and on. Ever-advancing technology “is supposed to liberate the new community as a multiplicity of local rationalities and ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural, or aesthetic minorities” (104). Twitter, for example, supposedly gives voice and access to people who are otherwise closed out of corporate media. The law might be limited in its capacity and its application, but opinion is unlimited. [1]

Ranciere argues that this conjunction of science & the media that I’m calling “data” co-opts and neutralizes the ability of minorities to challenge their exclusion from and marginalization in the law. He calls this “state mimesis of the political practice of litigation. Such a mimesis transforms the traditional argument that gives place to the show of democracy, the internal gap in equality, into a problem that is a matter for expert knowledge” (109). What the law considers a problem of justice (unequal treatment before the rule of law), data considers a problem of knowledge–we just have to tweak the algorithm so that it works better. That’s how I interpret Ranciere’s claim that “identifying and dealing with the lack must then be substituted for the manifestation of wrong” (107)–it’s not that society is unequal, but that our algorithm isn’t functioning as well as it should.

The (supposed) advantage of “data” is that it allows us to think that we’ve solved all problems of justice, that we live in a post-racial, post-feminist, classless society, in a flat and perfectly meritocratic world. It looks like everyone is included, that everyone has a voice and that their voices count. From this perspective, the only injustices are making false claims about exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (e.g., calling out sexism gets interpreted as itself sexist).

As Jason Rines (@badhumanist) pointed out in class this week, while Ranciere’s talking about opinion polling, the “science + media” complex has changed a lot in the 20 years since Ranciere wrote this. Instead of opinion polls, we have social media and communicative capitalism. What is social media but the exhaustive, increasingly fine-grained presentation of everyone’s opinions, and opinions of others’ opinions (“likes,” “favorites,” “shares”)? On something like Twitter, it’s not just that, a Ranciere describes, “the count of their speech [is] identical to their linguistic performance” (102), but that linguistic performance is itself what is quantified. Social media is a tool for counting, quantifying, and tracking linguistic performance as such. It “reflect[s] the community’s identity with itself as the law of their acting” (112). This “law of their acting” would be like the algorithm that describes the pattern of behavior characteristic of all the subjects in X group. This law is identical with the performance because it (supposedly) describes and codifies performance. It’s not a representation of their speech, but the very empirical, factual patterns their speech exhibits.

Whereas classical contract theory says societies are legitimate because their members agree/consent to the rules of that society, “consensus” society argues that it is legitimate because its rules are merely formalizations of what people actually do already. Its rules are just the facts of everyday life expressed in data.

So, a social order that stakes its claim for legitimacy on data, and in which quantifiable behavior counts, more or less, as political participation and enfranchisement, such a social order will be deeply invested in developing more ways for people to quantify their behavior, their ‘opinion.’

I’m not trying to make any causal claims here–I’m not going so far as to say Ranciere tells us the causes for the development of social media. Rather, his theory of consensus or postdemocracy help us understand the kind of society that would support the developments in media technology that have given rise to what we now know as social media.

[1] The limited nature of the law, in contrast to the unlimited nature of opinion, is fundamental to JS Mill’s “On Liberty.” This text is one of the key philosophical accounts of liberalism. Its distinction between law and opinion, as well as its emphasis on civil rather than individual liberty, may make it more neo-liberal than traditionally liberal.

I want to thank my Theories of Neoliberalism class, especially Jason Rines (@badhumanist), Ashley Williams (@ash_bash23), Ryan Shullaw, and Lloyd Wymore, for the conversation and questions that resulted in this post. The class tumblr is available here.

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

Today, Facebook announced some significant changes in its approach to privacy: New users now start with “friends only” as their default share setting and a new “Privacy Checkup” will remind users to select audiences for their posts (if they don’t, it will also default to “friends only”).

This announcement is significant in that it is the first time that Facebook has ever stepped back its privacy settings to be less open by default. This appears to contradict a widely held assumption that Facebook is on a linear trajectory to encourage ever more sharing with ever more people. Media reports have pitched this as a victory for users, who are supposed to have forced the company to “respond to business pressures and longstanding concerns” or “bow to pressure.”

Facebook, itself, presented the changes as a reaction to user feedback:

While some people want to post to everyone, others have told us that they are more comfortable sharing with a smaller group, like just their friends. We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse.

But the narrative that Facebook is responding to consumer demands conceals what I believe is a deeper philosophical shift within the company–but one that is still fundamentally rooted in self-interested profit-seeking. Facebook’s revenue primarily derived from delivering targeted ads to users. The more information Facebook has about a user, the more effectively it can target these ads, and the more marketers will pay for this service. So, Facebook has a vested interest in maximizing how much information each user shares.

Historically, Facebook–like so much of Silicon Valley (as well as news media and researchers)–has operated with the simplistic belief that less privacy equals more sharing. Specifically, Facebook believed that when people speak to the broadest possible audience, they generate the most interaction and, therefore, maximize sharing. Facebook once sought to instigate a cultural shift that would see people come to accept speaking to and sharing with a mass audience as the new normal. They did so, in part, by making the site’s design difficult enough to navigate that many people determined that managing privacy wasn’t worth the effort.

What Facebook seems to have finally realized is that when people conceal more they also reveal more. Nathan Jurgenson observed this co-implicated relationship in an essay on this site, saying:

“Publicity” on social media needs to be understood fundamentally as an act rife also with its conceptual opposite: creativity and concealment.

In the absence of effective privacy controls (and the concealment they provide), Facebook has become plagued with a phenomenon known as “context collapse,” which, occurs when the various roles one performs and the audience one performs them for collide and contradict. Jenny Davis describes the cause of this phenomenon:

Social actors hold many roles throughout the life course and simultaneously at any given moment within the life course. For instance, one may be a mother, sister, athlete, student, and exotic dancer. For each role, the social actor maintains particular identity meanings guiding who s/he is, and a network of others who (typically) share these expectations. Although the expectations across roles may coincide neatly, it is most often the case that each role bears slightly different meanings, and in some cases, highly contradictory ones.

Context collapse often results in a “lowest common denominator approach” to sharing, meaning that a user shares only what they believe is appropriate for all potential audiences, which doesn’t tend to be very much–or, at least, not very much of interest.

In order to get people to start sharing more interesting and valuable information (that it can sell for more money) Facebook has had to reinvent itself so that users perceive it to be affording greater privacy and concealment of information. As Nathan suggested in the previously mentioned essay, sharing is seldom interesting when it’s obscene–the term Jean Baudrillard used to describe the drive to fully reveal and expose a thing. Instead, sharing is most often a process of seduction–“of strategically withholding in order to create magical and enchanted interest.” This process can be likened to a burlesque performer’s fan dance, which simultaneously exposes and obscures from view.

But, just because Facebook has wised up to the way that sharing involves both revelation and concealment, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s become more responsive to users or has taken users’ concerns and interests to heart. Instead, what we’re seeing is a new, more sophisticated approach to exploiting users and further transforming them profit centers. Facebook hasn’t reformed; it’s redeployed. Facebook’s principle goal remains to influence and direct users into activities that boost its bottom line, and, today, it got a little better at doing just that.

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a sociology PhD candidate at the University of Maryland.

Presider: Rachel Rosenfelt (@rachelrosenfelt)

Hashmod: Angela Chen (@chengela)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Discipline and Publish: The New Politics of Publishing

It is hard to overstate just how profoundly and completely the Web has changed publishing, both as a profession and as a set of technologies. Every major category of publishable content, from punk zines to encyclopedias has undergone massive changes and yet some things remain doggedly the same. Mastheads are still very white and male, (even the new ones) although some of the most intriguing and innovative publishing platforms are more representative of  the world. Rachel Rosenfelt, founder and editor of The New Inquiry will preside over a panel of four presentations looking at how the politics of publishing are changing and what it means for authors, readers, and society in general. Ana Cecilia Alvarez and Joseph Staten investigate the apparent disconnect between the popularity of a topic, and any individual piece on that topic. Alvarez, looking at feminist writing on Tumblr and other social media platforms, asks the provocative and absolutely necessary question:  “Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?” Staten asks his audience to reconsider the thinkpiece and how it can be mobilized as a more effective tool for cultural critique. Matthew Clair and Mathias Klang consider the new kinds of ownership models and access systems that have cropped up over the years and outline their roles in expanding the control of private property. Clair takes a uniquely micro-level approach to studying neoliberalism within avante-garde writing communities and Klang discusses the implications of DRM on ebooks for both authors and readers. The panelists in Discipline and Publish approach this field with a critical eye towards the affordances and stated promises of new publishing technologies however, taken together, the panel paints a fairly optimistic picture of the future of publishing.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez (@_llorona) Tumblr Grrrl: On Feminism and Digital Publishing
As a writer publishing primarily on digital platforms—blog articles, Tweets, Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts—I often evoke “feminist discourse” in my work. Although indefinable (hence the quotations marks continuously hovering over the word), within these digital channels, a feminist vocabulary is palpably identifiable, especially between a specific subset of writers whose work circulates around feminist issues. I am one of them, most recently writing critical essays on the perils of feminism’s branding potential. For Theorizing The Web I want to complicate my own invocation of feminism for paid web content by asking the following questions: Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?

In the not so distant past, having a blog, an independent form of publishing, was a libratory gift. No longer were writers subject to the power structures of old publishing models. In an astonishingly short span, the freeing potential of digital publishing has been strangled by the insistent drive to monetize digital content production. Currently the two most common forms of generating revenue—selling certain number of page impressions for banner ads, or selling advertisers the very publication model so they create their own advertorial content—demand an unsustainable amount of content, lowering the quality for sake of quantity.

Today, the most “successful” web content—content that generates the most engagement, be that through page views, likes, or retweets—often features rapidly digestible and incendiary subjects. A feminist diatribe, now populating Twitter feeds on a regular basis, is a more successful lightning rod for social media engagement than similar content that appeals towards other social justice causes. (For some reason) an article speculating whether an actress has been re-touched, under the guise of a feminist appeal towards realistic representations of women in media, will gather much more digital klout than an expose on the climate change, or food justice, or animal cruelty. If “the meme is personal is political,” feminism’s meme potential is particularly salient. What does this mean for writers (from here on, content producers) whose political inclinations work particularly well with social media engagement? How can we measure the effect of their influence? Do these feminist critiques circulate beyond the insular group of social media practitioners who are already too well plugged into these debates? How has the existing business model for for-profit digital publications implicated the political potential of its content?

I hope to be hopeful. Social media allows for an “affinity (or animosity) to collapse distances;” it draws attention towards injustices; it encourages exchanges. What I am forced to ask daily as a writer on the Internet is—how can I reap the potential of digital publishing platforms while I am forced to mine them for profit? How are my political leanings as a writer implicated in my profitability as a content producer? Can I separate the two?

Joseph Staten (@joseph_staten) Rethinking the Thinkpiece
The “thinkpiece” has become, in the last few years, one of the most recognizable (and shareable) forms of cultural criticism on the internet. Focusing on popular cultural artifacts typically consigned to the space of “entertainment” (music, music videos, TV), thinkpieces take these forms seriously and critique them on the basis of their expression of certain norms or ideas, often their representations of women and people of color. Thinkpieces typically cast the objects of their criticism as socially retrograde in their perpetuation of stereotypes, and deem them generally harmful. In the last two years, some of the most thinkpiece-d artifacts have been Lena Dunham’s TV show Girls, Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines,” and Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.

The internet has allowed both cultural artifacts and their critical thinking-through to be distributed more widely than ever before, seemingly increasing the social stakes of both forms dramatically.

But for all the realms of the social and political that thinkpieces consider, there is one they frequently exclude: the realm of the aesthetic.

My paper uses as its jumping-off point the concept of “coincidental consumption” recently introduced by Robin James and Nathan Jurgenson: the process by which the actual content of links shared on social media seems to become “coincidental” to their shareability. (A primary example is sharing an article without reading it first.) In a blog post expanding the concept (http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/11/15/coincidental-consumption-thinkpiece/), James notices how thinkpieces tend to reinforce the coincidental aspects of content: “”most of these thinkpieces discuss the social and political implications of these pieces without talking about the actual music–as though the music was somehow separable from the social and political work these songs and videos accomplish.”

My paper takes this idea one step further, and argues that it is not just music (or whatever particular medium) that think pieces ignore, but the entire dimension of the aesthetic as a category of investigation. Though there is certainly plenty to be gained by examining a music video or TV show for its socio-political significations, the question is, in James’ words, “what gets lost, what’s obscured,” by focusing on these elements to the exclusion of aesthetic ones. Part of my answer will be that the question of artistic quality–what is quality? does it even matter?–becomes severely confused because of the aesthetic leveling-off that the thinkpiece performs. Another part of my answer will be that thinkpieces *themselves* become drawn into the exact same dynamic of coincidental consumption that the objects of their critique reside and are distributed within, dramatically attenuating their potential impact on social thought. Thinkpieces themselves are shared, but not read.

Finally, I will suggest that a reintegration of aesthetic considerations into the social project of the thinkpiece will both sharpen it as a critical weapon and expand its impact as a tool of social good.

Matthew Clair (@mathuclair) Rethinking Technology and Culture: Digital Technologies and Neoliberalism in the Literary Field
This paper considers the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism, which I define as a contemporary set of economic cultural logics about the proper role of government, the market, and the individual in economic and everyday life. Over the past 40 years, sociologists have offered various explanations of the role of new technological developments in shaping, enabling, and reflecting socio-cultural and economic beliefs and practices. Most of this work has been theoretical, macro-level, and focused on the use of new technology in expressly economic contexts. Little work has considered if these theories hold at the micro-level in non-economic contexts. In this paper, I ask: what is the relationship between digital technology and micro-level beliefs and practices? In particular, do neoliberal cultural logics accompany the use of digital technology in non-economic contexts? I answer these questions through interviews, content analysis, and fieldwork among editors and writers in the avant-garde literary field. Assessing how and when they use digital technologies, I find that the relationship between digital technology and neoliberal cultural logics is not as straightforward as macro theories assume. While some neoliberal logics are enabled by digital technology, others are contested. I find that digital technology’s relationship to cultural beliefs and practices is heterogeneous and context-dependent. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my findings for: (1) macro- and micro-level theory on technology and society; (2) the study of neoliberalism as a set of everyday, micro-level cultural logics; and (3) neoliberalism’s role in structuring contemporary social life.

Mathias Klang (@klangable) Is that your book? The impact of e-books on culture
The book as we know it has been declared dead several times in modern history. This trend has only been on the rise in the last decade with the rapid developments in smartphone and tablet technology. It is hard to argue that these devices do not provide a level of convenience to the reader but cogent arguments have been put forward that these devices cannot be functionally equivalent to the analogue book and that by adopting e-books we are losing a vital element of our culture.

While the analogue book remains healthy online sellers, like Amazon, report that they are now selling more digital than analogue books. Pew Internet & American Life project reports that a higher proportion of U.S. adults are reading e-books than ever before. The purpose of this paper is to map out and explore the differences in reading habits and the ways in which these habits are impacting on the way in which we access written culture through technical means.

Technical measures, Digital Rights Management (DRM), have been developed order to maintain control over the ability to copy. On the one hand DRM, in relation to copyrightable material, is a technical measure implemented to ensure adherence to legally established rights. The reader who buys a book does not acquire unlimited legal rights to make copies of the book. Therefore, adding DRM to ebooks ensures that users cannot use technology to go beyond their legally established rights. However, DRM can also restrict users from using their ebooks in ways that are both socially and legally acceptable if we were dealing with analogue books.

Thus, ebooks bought via Amazon can only be read on their Kindle ebook reader, they cannot easily be lent to others and they cannot be resold. These limitations are impractical to implement on analogue books. However, the implementation of DRM with the limitation of certain practices is redefining the nature of the book, and in extension the whole ecology of reading. Technology is re-shaping, and maybe regulating (Baym, 2010; Winner, 1985), an established social practice. The role of technology as regulator has naturally been problematized earlier (Winner, 1985; Latour, 1992; Norman, 1988).

The focus of this work is to point out the ways in which the e-book reader is lured by convenience into using a tethered technology that removes some of the affordances the analogue book provided. Through examples and illustrations these limitations to book use will be demonstrated and their impact on the wider cultural future of books and readership will be mapped out.

Playing with my own gender identity

The Internet is officially abuzz about Facebook Inc.’s newly expanded gender categories.  Here’s the story in brief: Facebook now allows users to select from over 50 gender identifications, such as genderqueer, cisgender, agender etc. (here is a glossary of the options). The move has drawn the expected responses from all of the usual suspects. The deep conservatives are annoyed, the liberals are elated, and the critical progressives appreciate the gesture, realize its significance, but remain dissatisfied with any form of identification confined to a box. I’m of the critical progressive camp, and happy to defer you readers to all of the smart things written by other people.

Meanwhile, I want to focus on another piece of the gender-identity expansion, a piece of great significance which has nonetheless snuck by in light of the jubilation, fighting, and intellectualism surrounding our new opportunity to bend the gender binary.  Namely, I want to talk about privacy, and Facebook’s shifting discourse about identity and power.

A key defining characteristic of Facebook is the profile’s connection to a “real world” referent. Terms of Service are such that users are supposed to display their real names and maintain only a single profile. The architecture is such that other users are easy to find and connect with. The normative structure is such that requests for connection are generally abided. All of this sets the stage for quickly growing intertwining networks. Such intertwinement results in context collapse, or the blurring of network walls, as Facebook users engage with others from the multitude—sometimes contradictory—roles which make up the self.

Recognizing context collapse, and addressing the issue,  Zuckerberg (in)famously said to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that:

The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity  

That is, Zuckerberg (and by extension, Facebook Inc.) ignored throngs of social psychological research about self and identity. But more than that, remained ignorant to the reality that some identities are more troublesome than others, and that those who hold troublesome identities may need to maintain network separations for reasons having little to do with integrity. Or, as Anil Dash aptly summarizes:

If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child, you’ve been wealthy all your life, you’ve been privileged all your life, you’ve been successful your whole life, of course you don’t think anybody would ever have anything to hide

Along comes the new 50+ gender option. My favorite feature of this option is its privacy settings. Unlike a life event, changes in gender are not displayed via the News Feed. Moreover, and more importantly, users can select which members of their network are privy to their newly customized identification.

Implicitly, then, through an architectural alteration to the Facebook platform, Zuckerberg acknowledges that some identities are in fact marginalizing. That separation can be an issue of safety, rather than integrity. That collapsed contexts, though not without benefit, hold differential consequences for different kinds of people. It’s an acknowledgment that power matters, and that those without it have less freedom in both interaction and identification.

The expansion of gender categories is a step, if imperfect, in the right direction. It pushes and rearranges, but never radically breaks. The privacy sensitivity surrounding the new gender options, though, is a pretty big deal.       

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_l_Davis

So I’ve been thinking a lot about curation and its role in contemporary social life. I’ve had such thoughts before, and have since expanded upon them. Here’s where I am…

Curation is the act of picking and choosing, marginalizing and highlighting, adding, deleting, lumping, and splitting. Social life in itself is highly curatorial, as social actors necessarily filter infinite masses of stimuli, selecting and preening in intricate ways while sculpting performances out of the broad slabs that constitute affect, body, and demeanor. In what follows, I argue that new technologies—and social media in particular—amplify curation, facilitating its operation as a key organizing principle of augmented sociality.

Specifically, I briefly outline a three-pronged theory of curation, in which social actors curate their own performances, curate what they see, and are always subject to curatorial practices of others—both human and machine. I refer to curated performance as outgoing curation, curated viewing as incoming curation, and curation at the hands of others as third-party curation.

Outgoing Curation

Performances of self and identity through social media are highly curated. By default, one cannot share every detail of hirself, in all places, at all times. Rather s/he constantly chooses what to reveal, what to conceal, when to do so, and for whom. Such decisions are complicated by the affordances of various social media platforms. Context collapse on Facebook, for instance, means that the social actor has to manage hir performance in ways that appeal to vastly disparate network nodes. Similarly, the affordances of many platforms are such that content can be saved, replicated, and edified in ways that shape not only how the social actor appears, but who the social actor can later become.

Loads of research address the curatorial practices of identity performance through social media. Users can elect to post only flattering pictures, curating their physical images. They can engage in the lowest common denominator approach, sharing only that which will be appropriate for the most sensitive members of the audience. They choose which news stories to share, which annoyances to rant about, when to #humblebrag, when to tag, when to check-in, and when to keep quiet. Users can utilize Fakebooks, aliases, and privacy settings to disperse different performances amongst different audiences. Users can share content through ephemeral media, such as Snapchat, reclaiming one-to-one communicative practices and electing to perform in mediated ways, without leaving artifacts behind. Or, as participants in my own study of social media have said, they can show the “highlight reel,” emphasizing fun, friendship, and success, while largely ignoring the “heavy stuff.” Alternatively, they can utilize social media as a stage on which to elicit sympathy and encouragement, or to perform collective action and political activism.

Incoming Curation

Of course, those who engage social media do more than perform. They also view performances. And the show is highly curated.  I call this selective visibility. The relevance of the audience role for social media users becomes clear in Whitney Erin Boesel’s (@weboesel) reconceptualization of friendship practices, in which she argues that the new labor of friendship falls not to the storyteller, but the reader, who is obligated to sort through bushels of content to glean the important performative acts of one another.

The issue has been well addressed in terms of news and political content consumption. Much of this research shows that people seek out confirmation, creating something of a bubble effect.  At the social level, social media users block, unfriend, skim, and ignore, looking for that which they find relevant, reality confirming, friendship affirming and so forth. In my  own research, I saw that people base these decisions on political affiliation, closeness of ties, and general demeanor (i.e. they delete/block/skim over network connections who are “immature,” politically offensive, politically correct, too happy, too sad, too braggy, too boring etc.).

Third Party Curation

Both outgoing and incoming curatorial practices are quite laborious. Social media users constantly decide what to share, what do to, where to look, and when to close their eyes. A significant portion of curation, however, is out of the actor’s active control. All curation—both outgoing and incoming—is subject to the curatorial practices and policies of others. These others consist of both social actors in a user’s network, and algorithms that sort content on social media platforms.

A social actor can carefully decide what to share and not share, but other network members play a significant part. First, these others can add to one another’s performances through tags, @ connects etc. Second, they can accept or reject connections the target actor initiates, accepting or rejecting the performance of a connection between them. Moreover, outgoing curation (i.e. performance) is always subject to others’ incoming curatorial decisions. That is, the audience need not read what the performer writes. Concretely, although I may share copious dog pictures on Facebook, other Facebook users can opt not to accept my Friend request, to de-Friend me, to block me, or to skim over the content I’ve shared.

Similarly, incoming curatorial efforts are beholden to the outgoing curatorial efforts of those in one’s network. I may seek out the content of a long lost high school friend, but they may  put me on limited profile, engage in “highlight reel” style sharing, or refuse to grant me access altogether.

Finally, both incoming and outgoing curatorial efforts are further subject to machine-based (though human-written) algorithms. Any site with a feed-style format (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) does not show all content that its user’s share. Rather, each site utilizes an algorithm to share what they deem most relevant. That is, each of our curatorial efforts—both incoming and outgoing—run through a second round of curation, one outside of our control.

I am still thinking through these ideas, so suggestions—and especially citations—for any of the sections are welcome.

Keep the conversation going on Twitter (a highly curatorial space): @Jenny_L_Davis

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Goodings, Lewis and Ian Tucker. 2014. “Social Media and the Co-Production of Bodies Online: Bergson, Serres, and Facebook’s Timeline.” Media Culture & Society 36(1):37-51. [paywalled PDF]

Goodings and Tucker work to understand the difficulties of embodiment in light of pervasive technological mediation, and in particular, Facebook’s Timeline. They do so using data from 8 focus groups, with a total of 25 participants.

The authors refer to technologically mediated embodiment as that embodiment which exists in light of, and conjunction with, pervasive electronic and digital media. Through the work, the authors identify two key problems or difficulties of technologically mediated embodiment. First, technologically mediated embodiment troubles communicative boundaries, as multiple networks, with varying expectations, converge together in shared social spaces. Second, technologically mediated embodiment stifles the fluid nature of personal biography, cementing the past in ways which inhibit future re-interpretations of the self.

Goodings and Tucker address the first issue—blurring of network boundaries—utilizing Serres theory of communication.  Serres contends that all nodes of communication require mediation, or a host. That host, however, necessarily creates “noise,” or that which disrupts communication. For example, telephones create static, voices stutter, and Wifi connections run slowly. Facebook is the platform of interest for Goodings and Tucker (though they imply that their work is applicable in the broader social media context). The noise produced by social media, for technologically mediated bodies, is that of blurred boundaries. Specifically, technologically mediated bodies experience noise when temporally distinct selves and socially distinct networks converge in ways that contradict one another.  The problem of the contemporary citizen is then to manage this noise, while engaging through the host (i.e. Facebook or social media platforms more generally). The authors write:

…[W]hen online bodies are fed back to us through Facebook there can be a sequence of unanticipated connections. To Facebook users…it also presents a moment where the computer mediation is revealed, a process that requires managing the coming together of bodies from different ‘space–times’. This is a distinct problem in social media, as in offline social situations it is typically accepted that our different bodies or selves are unlikely to collide (42)

…[N]oise does not simply refer to a technical term of communication engineering, but refers to an additional element that is produced through the mediated act of communicating. In the case of social media this involves the mediated technological space of connecting online… [C]ommunication in Facebook is focused on conveying certain messages from their sender perspective, for example about a night out. Yet Facebook introduces intermediary actions in terms of the visibility of the communication to those who will receive the message. The technology itself works in such a way as to create certain forms of noise (44).

I love the use of Serres, and in particular, the “noise” metaphor. However, the authors spend several hundred words delineating the existence of “context collapse,” a well-established concept which describes the blurring of network boundaries within social media, without ever citing the term, or engaging with its surrounding literature. Here is a short literature review, and etiology of context collapse as a concept. This exclusion is unfortunate, as the words spent describing context collapse could have been better spent connecting Serres’ metaphor with the existing literature. With that said, those of us interested in context collapse will likely find this article useful moving forward.

The second difficulty of technologically mediated embodiment, as identified by Goodings and Tucker, is that of an overly static and fragmented biography. They focus empirically on Timeline, and frame their discussion using the work of Henri Bergson. Specifically, they conceptualize the body using Bergson’s images. For Bergson, the social world is made up of an assemblage of images, or that which the body perceives. Images reside between things and representations. The body is a special kind of image, unique as the only image known from the inside.  Temporally, the body-as-image is a moving process, co-constructed along with other images, incorporating the whole of a past. The past, for Bergson, swells into the present and future, layering itself, atop itself. Timeline complicates this by fixing the past, selecting out documentable memories and presenting them in linear ways. The past, through Timeline, is no longer cumulative, stifling narrative movement and fluidity. The authors note that such fixing was present in earlier eras through photographs and home movies, but the contemporary era is unique in the visibility, volume, and so centrality, of these time-fixing documents. They state:

Knowing what somebody ‘did’ seems to be interactionally problematic as it mediates a fixed sense of the body, which follows along in a linear fashion and where all moments can be understood in terms of a succession of fixed points in the past. This function fails to grasp the ability for the past to be created anew in our daily attempts at reordering the past… The experience of Timeline relates to Bergson’s concept of ‘bodies as images’ which continually move, as opposed to being defined as stable spatial entities. For Bergson, the world consists of nothing other than images. Here the Facebook Timeline acts as a kind of force that spatialises past social media activity and goes against the virtual aspect of memory for Bergson, in which the past is not contained but endures, taking a temporal not spatial form. (46-47).

The authors are astute in their analysis of the affordances/constraints of Timeline. Social media are platforms through which we not only perform a self, but come to know and develop our selves. Fixing a past, especially a highly curated and selective version, alters selfing processes in significant ways. Pushing this further, and focusing perhaps on the other side of the coin, their analysis lends itself to a discussion of ephemerality. Perhaps social media tends to eschew ephemerality, upending its important role in a fluid selfing process. However, it need not. Users agentically avoid such fixing through things like whitewalling and purging. More recently, new technologies have come to the fore which embrace ephemerality. Snapchat is, of course, the quintessential example. This social media platform facilitates a body that is both technologically mediated and simultaneously ephemeral. It has a solution built in. It is part of the social media ecology through which users share the mundane, the private, the floating pieces.

I applaud the authors for their insistence upon avoiding binaries. Moreover, the work is highly useful and insightful as an analysis of Facebook Timeline in its own right. Further, the piece smartly incorporates the work of Bergson and Serres, locating these theorists, in useful ways, within discourses of new technologies. Moving forward, the context collapse literature can benefit from the integration of this piece (just as this piece could have benefited from the inclusion of context-collapse theorizing). Moreover, the piece offers a starting point for talking about fixidity, ephemerality, and the technologically mediated body.

Jenny is a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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Hello, Cyborgology…it’s been a while. I’ve missed you, but I haven’t quite known what to say. Which is weird, right? Strangely enough, I’ve got half a dozen half-finished posts on my computer—twenty-thousand someodd words of awkward silence waiting to be wrapped up and brought into the world.

Writer’s block happens to the best of us, or so I’m told. What’s been strange for me is looking back and realizing that the last thing I posted was my piece from the beginning of #ir14, the 14th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. I say “strange” because I had an amazing experience at #ir14, and left it feeling so excited about my field and my work and what I imagine to be possible. And yet, in the two months since, something’s been off. I’ve managed to submit to a couple of important abstracts, and I continued sitting in on a really cool seminar, and I’ve plunged into the work of helping to organize this year’s Theorizing the Web (a conference about which I’m passionate, to say the least). But my words went somewhere, have been gone.

I realized recently, however, that it’s not about some kind of post-#ir14 crash. It’s actually about what happened after.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not great about keeping up with all of my digital communication media (though I am ever-aspiring to do better). As I’ve at least insinuated previously, Facebook is pretty low on my personal Prioritized List of Digital Communication Media. It’s almost a fluke, then, that—back in Cambridge, in the week following #ir14—I happened to check Facebook, and to see a brand new post at the top of my feed that ended up being pretty important.

The post was from an old friend of mine (we’ll call him John), someone I hadn’t seen in probably a decade and with whom I’d only recently gotten back in touch. John was from one of the last batches of friends I made in the pre-“Web 2.0” era, before “social media” had become a widespread thing, before people moved or changed jobs and maintained at least basic “I know where to find you and have a general sense of what you’re up to” connections by default, rather than through deliberate effort. How we came to be back in touch via Facebook is a long and convoluted story, but it ends with rumors of his demise being greatly exaggerated and with me being greatly relieved, and happy, to see that he was alive and doing quite well.

John was posting, however, to ask if anyone had details about a memorial for another friend of ours, someone with whom he’d been quite close during the time that I’d known them both—someone with whom I too had been close, in a weird way, for a time. My first thought was no, it can’t be true; my first gut sense was that it probably was true. I tried to convince myself that, well, maybe this was like when the Cambridge grapevine thought John was dead; John would later say he’d thought the same thing. But I did the thing that one does in 2013 when one hears that perhaps someone has died, which is Google Compulsively. Inside of ten minutes, I was almost certain that our friend’s death was real, neither a misunderstanding nor a misguided joke. One person posting on the Internet about a death could be wrong; two people posting on the Internet about a death could be a prank. A whole community posting about a death is more real than an obituary.

I then did the thing that one does (or at least, that I do) in 2013, when one is alone in one’s apartment and hears that someone has definitely died, which is pour grief into one’s (private) personal Twitter account. It turns out there’s a big difference between when someone important drifts out of your life and when they actually, permanently, biologically die. It turns out that even when you’re used to not seeing someone around anymore, when you’re long-accustomed to knowing them only through second- or third-hand stories, that even knowing there will be no more stories rips you open, creates brand new wounds all its own.

At the same time, I found so many stories in my online searching—old stories, but stories that were new to me. Way back when, in one of the last extended conversations we had so very long ago, my friend had told me about how he’d just then gotten his first email address—and only reluctantly, only because others had made him, only because he was going so far away. He was proud of himself for having held out as long as he did—but in the intervening years, he’d apparently changed his mind about digital communication media. He’d found Twitter, and wow had he been on Twitter. He was on a podcast, one that people listen to, one that did a long tribute to him after he died. I sat at my desk and I listened to that tribute and I laughed, and cried, and cried and cried. His voice sounded the same. He was, in many ways, the way I remembered him; he also said a lot of the same things about Twitter and community that I say about Twitter and community, which I never would have imagined becoming true back in 2002. He told stories I hadn’t heard before, and stories that hadn’t happened then. And the community he left behind told stories, too.

There was so much about that whole experience that I wanted to write about, that I wanted to try to make sense of in a “social media theorist” sort of way. There was how I found out about his death, and how I convinced myself that his death was real; there was how I began to process my grief through long-form Twitter posting, and how digital media had given me a posthumous glimpse of the person he’d become. There was the double context-collapse of his informal memorial: I went with John, a close friend of theirs, and a couple of other people, all of whom had first known my deceased friend from far longer ago than I had; then, at the memorial, we met people our friend had been friends with in the present, many of whom he’d gotten to know through Twitter. One of his present-day close friends even Skyped in to the memorial for a toast. I imagine memorials and funerals are always context-collapsey, that it’s always strange to hear new friends use a new name to toast to someone you’ve loved—but for the friends I was with, the mediation difference seemed to sharpen the pain. The person being talked about was not, in all respects, the person they had known years ago; while part of this was undoubtedly due to time and to context, what my friends kept coming back to was the how of their knowing: that they had gotten to know him exclusively in person[i].

And yet, I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to write about this. Before social media, and especially before I began to study social media in earnest, I would have named my deceased friend—because I believe it is important to honor the dead, and because my friend had such a profound impact on my life (one that I would only realize fully years later, and one which I’m certain he never realized himself). At the same time, I’m too much a social media theorist to write about death in the way that I would as an ordinary person. Social media run on attention economies. To an extent, we all know that; especially as someone who also studies quantification, I can’t un-know that. And so I can’t shake the feeling that, here in 2013, it would be dishonorable to name my friend, to link to his tribute podcast, or even to point to the charitable organization his girlfriend and friends suggested for donations. To link might be to bring more attention to a person who was worth knowing and to a cause that is worth supporting, but to do so could also divert preexisting attention from those things to this blog, to this post, to me. Regardless of my intentions, it would feel opportunistic.

It feels as though there is a certain degree of Very Close that one should be with someone before one steps anywhere near the limelight of their passing, and while I don’t know where the shadows stop and the light begins, I am certain that in that attention is not my place. In a way, new attention is like thermal energy: It flows from where there is more of it to where there is less of it. Were I quite a bit more well known than my friend, then linking would seem appropriate (even though we had long been out of contact): Here, pay attention. Here, help. In 2013, donations of social capital can be made in memoriam, too. Under the circumstances, however, I’ve been at an awkward loss—and unlike when I don’t know whether to send flowers or what to wear to a funeral, I can’t call my mom up to ask about this one. I don’t think any of us know yet. And the questions aren’t going away.

I’m (finally) writing about this, I think, because it’s happening again. A few hours after my post-holiday flight landed in Boston, I sat down at my desk and just happened to catch a Gchat message from a close friend back in the Bay Area (where I lived for the first four-and-a-half years of grad school). “I’m sorry to tell you this through such an impersonal medium,” she said, meaning not face-to-face. “But I wanted to let you know before you found out through another, even more impersonal medium.” She was telling me that a mutual friend of ours, one of only a handful of people I saw socially during the last months before I moved back to Cambridge, had taken his life sometime that morning.

I have been learning these last few months what it is to express grief-in-the-moment through text. A decade ago, my distant third-person memory of that moment might have been a strange sound that came out of my mouth; now, it is the sound and feeling of my fingers pounding out “WHAT?” and “FUCK” and “no no no no no no no” all in quick succession, <send> as punctuation. And the questions, and their answers. And then even though I knew it must be true if this particular friend said it was true, I checked the Internet to see if it was true. And it was true.

I stayed on Gchat with my friend for a while. I cried. I texted with two people close to me, one of them another friend of the deceased. I poured grief into my (private) personal Twitter account—but this time I did so in context, because half the people that account follows had just lost the same friend. I watched news of his death spread through my stream, watched the shock and anger and sadness and anguish each come rolling as surging waves of words. I fail at keeping up regularly with my social media accounts, and especially at keeping up with my personal Twitter account, so I had to go back and read the last few months of my friend’s partner’s timeline. And then my friend’s timeline. And then, after that, I had a somewhat different picture than I’d gotten over the last 11 months of sporadic when-I-have-time Twitter-checking. And then I realized that the reason he no longer responded when I responded to his tweets was because he had no idea I was talking to him, because he’d stopped following that (private) account[ii].

And then I really, really regretted not sending out an actual text message or email when I visited SF last October, because he and his partner were high on the list of people I’d wanted to see—and I didn’t get to see them. The thing was that I’d felt awkward: I’d moved far away, and had been out of touch but for the occasional @-response or “Like.” Because I’m just Like That, I wasn’t sure if most of my Bay Area friends would want to see me anyway. Yet as I tweeted about how kind my friend and his partner had both always been to me, how they had made me feel welcome and safe at a time and in a place where I rarely felt either (and how much that had meant to me), I suddenly realized how stupid I’d been in not getting in contact with either of them directly when I was in town. And I went back to reading my Twitter stream, where everyone else who’d missed a chance to spend time with him was feeling some version of the same thing. For once it was really hard not to be in the Bay Area, as so many of his other friends gathered to mourn him together, in person. At the same time, being able to gather in the nebulous, intangible living room that is Twitter has been invaluable to me. As I quipped wryly via text yesterday, “If there were gold stars for staring at the wall, petting the cat, and being caught up on Grief Twitter, I’d be downright spangled.”

It’s been a few days now, and my media theorist self is starting to murmur observations. I’m dimly fascinated by the way Twitter has come to figure not just in how I experience some of my communities and personal connections, but how I process my very experiences themselves. I’m fascinated by the unspoken social norms: how none of us named my friend at first (even though many of us have private accounts), and how carefully I weighed saying anything publicly (and did so only after other friends began to do so). I’m remembering that odd moment Friday night when I thought, “Wait, am I doing it wrong?” My initial response was to speak (unidentifiably) of my friend, of his kindness and generosity toward me, and of my shock and sadness that he had died. A large portion of the affected people I follow on that account, however, were speaking in a generalized way to a/the (?) community, messages like, “Hugs to you all.” I wondered if I’d violated a separate social protocol, one of which I hadn’t been aware; I wondered what boundaries the speakers might imagine for the communities they addressed, and whether those boundaries included me or not, whether I was supposed to adopt those norms in the first place. I thought again, too, about a sort of unspoken hierarchy of communication media: While a number of us convened in overlapping, Tweeted parlors, the two members of my inner circle who experienced the same loss got in touch with me though other means (SMS and Gchat), even though we were also talking to each other on Twitter. Even locked-down Personal Twitter has its “front stage” and “back stage.”

Somewhere in the background of my head, I’m wishing now that I’d been to more (any) of the panels at #ir14 on death and grief. I’m sure most of my observations aren’t new, and far more importantly, I wish I had any external sense of what the etiquette norms for Grieving in the Digital Age might be. I know that there are no hard and fast answers, no fail-safe rules; I know that the “rules” will continue to evolve, even on a case-by-case basis. Just over the last four days, I’ve watched a series of stages wash through my personal Twitter stream: Generalized community support and/or declarations of disbelief; Stating that someone has died; Stating who has died, and how; Speaking about my friend, and determining times/places for collective, in-person grieving; Speaking about being at these events, individual requests for assistance, and some affected friends beginning to tweet about other topics; Beginning to organize collective memorial projects and collective support for his family; Beginning to speak publicly—and with new language—about my friend, his life, and his passing.

I still don’t know what to do about attention economies and naming the dead. On the one hand, some of our friends have pulled together to collect donations of both time and funds to help my friend’s partner and infant daughter get through the next few weeks (and in 18 years, college); on the other hand, what belongs front and center is my friend and the family he left behind, not my tangential struggle with what to do in response and what it all means. I’ve ended up helping to collect photos and videos of my friend for his daughter to have as she grows up, because that’s something I can do from 3,000 miles away—and yet, I’m not sure if it’s my place even to do that. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, though I’ll tell you that you can find a link to that website and a link to submit photos of him in my recent (main, public account) tweets (which, since I’ve been quiet lately, will be an unusually straightforward process).

I don’t know what to do, and there is little comfort in knowing that this will be far from my—or anyone’s— last chance to figure it out.

Whitney Erin Boesel is on Twitter twice, primarily as @weboesel.

Images from here and here.