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Testing the friendship: Feminism and the limits of online social networks
Short essay for the Commentary and Criticism section, Feminist Media Studies
Researching Web 2.0: Internet Social Networks And The Demise Of Gender?
Submitted by
Dr Melissa Gregg
ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower
The University of Queensland
QLD Australia 4072
m.gregg@uq.edu.au
p + 61 7 3346 9762
m + 61 4 0859 9359
f + 61 7 3365 7184
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With the use of online technologies now becoming a matter of course for many
middle-class professionals, research into online cultures and communities is
thankfully starting to move beyond mass media demands to diagnose internet
subcultures as the realm of pedophilia or pathology. Rather than fuelling parents’
fears about teen vulnerability or panics over privacy, a growing body of research
is demonstrating that online friendships and communities are a necessary
recompense for the intrusion of public-sphere demands on leisure time, the
widespread expectation of computer literacy among young people and the long
hours culture of the many engaged in computer-mediated information jobs (eg.
Alan Liu 2004; Mark Nunes 2006; Andrew Ross 2003). The extent to which
people choose to conduct significant parts of their personal lives online---from
finding the next book they should read to finding a life partner---shows that we
are witnessing a change in both the opportunities available for previous forms of
leisured activity and attitudes as to their reliability in providing satisfying personal
relationships.
What we haven’t seen develop in line with these shifts is a range of theoretical
tools for feminists to draw on to link these changes to established methodologies
of inquiry and critique. So far the bulk of research focused on social networking
sites has tended to explore issues such as surveillance and exploitation--particularly given that the regular user of social networking websites is often
young and female (Michael Thelwall 2007)---or the narcissism and vulgarity of
maintaining “silly” and “raunchy” homepages (eg Christine Rosen 2007), which is
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also suggestive of certain gendered stereotypes originating from an outdated
public/private sphere distinction. What internet studies research has offered in
quantitative measures (eg Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe,
2007) has been limited by the cultural specificity of the typically North American
slant of the most well funded research.1 While attempts have been made to
quantify the immaterial labour taking place on websites like Facebook (Mark Coté
and Jennifer Pybus 2007), it has been less common for commentators to
describe the relationship between social networking websites and already
existing categories of paid work, labour and class, especially as these are
experienced by women. This is surprising given that it is work-based or
vocationally-oriented locations these websites emerge from and are regularly
accessed within. Aspiring musicians were the driving force behind the popularity
of MySpace (the site’s key feature was to allow the free distribution of band
demos) while in Facebook, college and post-tertiary job locations have been
crucial to initial membership and subsequent exercises in displaying identity. The
fact that the academics producing presently available studies also inhabit these
latter venues, and often resemble the normative user of these sites, may explain
why labour and class issues have been downplayed. When offering personal
reflections and work in progress in relation to these constantly changing
websites, our capacity to understand their significance is in inverse proportion to
our ability to see beyond our own inevitably limited social networks.
1
See the Pew Internet and American Life Project at http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp which is both the
model and source data for much of the quantitative internet studies currently coming out of the US.
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Nonetheless what we can tell already is that social networking sites are a
manifestation of what Alan Liu has termed the “eternal, inescapable friendship”
specific to knowledge work (2004, p. 172). Sites like MySpace and Facebook
foster a new form of literacy amongst users – what I call a broadcast impulse –
which encourages them to articulate and communicate themselves with regularity
and ease. Here it is not incidental to remember that MySpace emerged as a
publicity website for aspiring musicians: this entrepreneurial impetus remains in
the mainstream uptake of the platform. The broadcast dimension means people
can ensure the image they project to others is a favourable one, while also
allowing them to become skilled in networking to create an archive of “contacts”
for the future. Indeed, more explicitly professional sites such as LinkedIn,
Doostang and Zubka combine the two functions of friendship and job opportunity
– the latter actually pays the user when he or she successfully recruits a friend
for an appropriate job, while a service like NotchUp pays users to be interviewed
by potential employers. These online hubs are able to mine the address books in
email programs on your computer or server so that any contact made over time
can be notified of your profile. Here the cloudy distinction between contact and
friend perpetuated by office software packages can be seen to play out in an
unfolding set of encounters: the boundaries between personal and professional
become blurred, just as the role of the career consultant becomes an everyday
activity.
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At the heart of social networking websites is the mutually affirming, reciprocal
“link”: friends are listed in blogrolls, “pinged” in “trackbacks” or displayed in
aggregated galleries to add value, demonstrate popularity and affirm credibility.
Gestures of presence and connection are the material reflections of a worthy
online self, and the confidence that one’s self is worthy of broadcast ties to
broader trends in neoliberalism that celebrate the positive virtues of
entrepreneurialism and self-assurance. In online communities, relationships
become part of the CV for which you are judged, and the testimonials of
“contacts” are central to maintaining status. In this way, what is most notable is
the extent to which these sites reproduce offline culture rather than threaten or
oppose it, and how feminist research already accounts for these processes very
well. Rosalind Gill (2007) and Angela McRobbie’s (2002) research on the
precarious labour conditions of the creative industries shows that such jobs are
highly competitive, very much premised on who you know as much as what you
know, and in spite of their glamorous image, demand long hours and a high
degree of sacrificial labour. Social networking sites have grown in tandem with
these conditions: are symptomatic of them as much as they perpetuate them. Yet
the precociousness they encourage from users---the self-reflexivity required to
broadcast oneself and the literacy of being able to distinguish “friends” who share
similar or desirable characteristics---chastens web enthusiasts’ claims that
“anyone can publish/edit/broadcast” online. So far, “broadcasting yourself” on
social networking sites has generally meant speaking to a community that is
already in existence, either geographically near to the user or already sharing his
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or her past or present preoccupations. The forms of community created in these
acts seem destined to perpetuate homogeneous networks of similar social
backgrounds (see danah boyd 2007; Jason Wilson 2007) even as they are
marketed as liberating us from this very constraint.
Social networking sites clearly offer positive short term benefits. The skills and
etiquette learned in online interactions positions users well for the kinds of work
they are likely to be striving for in the present or near future, just as the sites
themselves may act as a form of workplace solidarity amongst those currently
employed in geographically disparate cubicles of contemporary office culture.
Even if it were the case that only young people used these platforms,
participation in online communities is in many ways both sensible and valuable
preparation for the labour conditions currently flourishing in the network society -and thus the kind of economy to which educated, tech savvy, English-speaking
college graduates will continue to contribute.
But these same technologies are also poised to impact on a wider majority of
workers than simply the young, rendering us vulnerable in new ways. Firstly, the
potential for all interactions taking place to be monitored by friends and
colleagues is not unlike one’s social life being a constantly available CV -- part of
the “always on” persona that accompanies the uptake of wireless technologies
(Melissa Gregg 2007). Further, participating in online interest sites is beginning to
resemble a new form of surplus labour (Coté and Pybus 2007). By providing
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personal details of taste and consumption habits for others to see, such
information can be and is already used to develop and sell products back to the
user. The “work of being watched”, as Mark Andrejevic (2004) puts it, is the
typical explanation business pundits provide for why Rupert Murdoch bought
MySpace; meanwhile, the corporate deployment of MySpace and Facebook for
brand positioning and free publicity threatens to ruin what remains of the organic
aspects of the site’s networking features.
Feminists can welcome the fact that the rise of social networking is overdue
recognition for the affirmative, relationship-building skills that women have
developed over time -- often through media consumption and technology use -as a way of escaping their relegation to the realm of everyday life. Indeed, the
regularity with which commentators deride Facebook (including knowing
predictions of its demise, see Cory Doctorow 2007) seem attributable to the fact
that the default affect of the site has proven so cloyingly positive at the same time
as its routine encounters remain so unremarkable. These factors pose a major
challenge to the negative modes of narcissism, nihilism (Geert Lovink 2007),
cynicism or bombast that, by contrast, have been the hallmarks of blogging, and
have at times appeared close to being the only way of credentialing appropriate
participation in Web 2.0. The very banality of much social networking interaction
also questions the default version of libertarian politics accompanying internet
innovations from the outset. The democratisation of participation in online space
with Web 2.0 has revealed the elitism that haunted these earlier delusions of
radicalism.
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As participants and scholars of these new technologies we must now begin to
assess whether an overdue appreciation for the “wealth of networks” (Yochai
Benkler 2006) brings changes in institutional empowerment for women, or
whether social networking technologies merely help to assuage the position of
the many who still remain outside the circuits of privilege entrenched offline in the
Old Boys’ network of so many professions. We should also be aware of the
inequalities in access and use that are developing between women of different
educational and occupational backgrounds as those in desk-bound, computer
literate jobs set the pace and terms of engagement for others. Outside of the
middle class Anglosphere of much feminist scholarship, it is much harder to
discern the very different working conditions of women whose routine and often
dangerous manual labour provides the computing infrastructure for the webbased chatting between contacts and colleagues in the West. The convenience
of making online friends, like with like, in cultural and regional vacuums means
we will need to boost our efforts to seek out these voices and have them
populate our pages and RSS feeds much more regularly. Ultimately it is crosscultural analysis between feminists that will help us remain cognisant that while
the friendships we cherish on and offline may be premised on a form of loyalty,
the workings of capital and labour hire that continue to impact unfairly on women
across the globe are not.
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References
Andrejevic, M. (2004) Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Maryland.
Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms
Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven.
boyd, d. (2007) ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and
MySpace’, Apophenia, [Online Blog Essay] June 24. Available at:
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
Coté, M. & Pybus, J. (2007) ‘Learning to immaterial labour 2.0’, Ephemera:
Theory and Politics in Organization, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 88-106.
Doctorow, C. (2007) ‘How your creepy ex-co-workers will kill Facebook’,
Information Week, [Online] November 26, Available at:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573
&pgno=1&queryText=
Ellison, Nicole B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007) ‘The benefits of Facebook
“friends”: Social capital and college students’ use of online social network
sites’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12, pp. 1143-1168.
Gill, R. (2007) Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? New Media Work in
Amsterdam a Decade after the Web, Network Notebooks 47, Institute of
Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
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Gregg, M. (2007) ‘Freedom to work: The impact of wireless on labour politics’, in
‘Wireless Cultures and Technologies’, Special issue of Media International
Australia, eds Gerard Goggin & Melissa Gregg, no. 125, November, pp. 57-70.
Liu, A. (2004) The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information,
Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Lovink, G. (2007) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture,
Routledge, New York and London.
McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political
Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp.
516-531.
Nunes, M. (2006) Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis.
Rosen, C. (2007) ‘Virtual friendship and the new narcissism’, The New Atlantis: A
Journal of Technology and Society, Summer, pp. 15-31.
Ross, A. (2003) No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, Basic
Books, New York.
Thelwall, M. (2007) ‘Social networks, gender and friending: An analysis of
MySpace member profiles’, Unpublished paper, Available online at:
http://www.danah.org/SNSResearch.html
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Wilson, J. (2007) ‘“Digital white flight”? Facebook, class and social networking’,
University of Bedfordshire New Media Research Group Blog, [Online]
Available at: http://mad.beds.ac.uk/nmrg/?p=60
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