Thesis Title: Subtitle

Constituting Space and Place

When categorising Facebook as a space, it is often positioned as a public space. Arguments that position Facebook as public draw heavily on media and other

communications literature. This position allows scholars to build on previous technological theories such as Meyrowitz’s (1985) work on electronic media and place. Users’ agency in these spaces is not fully accounted for with these theories. As we know from sociology that examines urban spaces, these places are shaped and ordered both by the architecture and the subjective experiences and preference of those who use them. The internet, and by extension Facebook, are multifaceted technologies which serve a variety of complex social needs. Therefore, simply categorising Facebook as a medium may foreclose some other theoretical options available.

As with physical architecture, digital architecture shapes interactions although its building blocks are different. For example, boyd (2011) builds on the argument of Negroponte (1995), explaining that physical architecture is built from atoms, and digital environments like Facebook are built from bits. Negroponte (1995) argues that digitisation transformed media and information as digitisation means that information and media can be easily duplicated and transmitted, creating a different type of public. Boyd (2011) identifies these new spaces as networked publics. This is in a similar vein to Meyrowtiz’s (1985) oft-cited work on the effect of electronic media on place. Meyrowitz (1985) argues that electronic media dislocate people from place both physical and social.

This sense of placeless-ness means that all places become similar, erasing previous distinction and reducing privacy as previously sheltered ‘backstage’ places are revealed; becoming newly public. It is from this presumption that Facebook is conceived as an unsheltered public place, a networked public. Although Meyrowitz’s work may be a useful starting place for considering the proliferation of electronic media, it implicitly assumes that social change stems from technology that is external to society. The ideas that technology enacts change on those who use it is a rather deterministic approach (Fischer 1992), and as previously highlighted does not provide much space for understanding how technology and those who use it might be mutually shaping. The sense that individuals have some measure of agency in deciding how, when and where they engage with technology is somewhat lacking. Technology is also responsive to its user’s desires. This is minimally apparent with electronic media such as television. For example, unsuccessful shows get cancelled and previously cancelled shows may be returned if an audience is particularly insistent. However, digital technologies like Facebook have greater capacity for users to exert their agency, and to construct their space as opposed to other electronic

media like television. Thus, while media-based approaches like Meyrowitz’s (1985) represent important theoretical advances, they are understandably unable to be fully applicable to new technologies like Facebook, as this is not the focus of his work.

To date, much analysis of Facebook has neglected to challenge certain assumptions associated with space. While some research has interrogated the role of capital in creating sites such as Facebook through the lens of privacy and the monetisation of personal information (Edwards 2013; Trottier 2013), the nature of the space itself has remained largely unexamined. If we are to understand the integration between arrangements of place and space as manifest in new technology like Facebook, a closer examination of how places are structured, and how they become (social) spaces, is an important starting point. Presenting an understanding of Facebook that is not technologically deterministic requires exploration beyond some of the previous literature used to theorise Facebook. In order to account for users’ agency, I argue that we should move beyond scholarship on media and technology to other literature that might accommodate a concomitant focus on architecture and users’ agency.

De Certeau (1984) argues that we can understand the relationship between individuals and the places they inhabit by examining the practice of walking. Walking through the city has three functions. First, it is a “process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian” (de Certeau 1984: 97). Second, it is a “spatial acting-out of the place” (de Certeau 1984: 98). Third, “It implies relation differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements” (de Certeau 1984: 98). This means that the act of walking connects places to each other in ways that are constrained by their position within a network of other places. The spatial ordering of things offers numerous possibilities that constrain and allow movement in and between spaces.

However, the act of moving, of walking, means that only a few of these possibilities are actualised. Choosing one route of action over another brings these possibilities into being. For De Certeau, possibilities are not static, they can emerge and disappear, be moved or invented resulting in the act of walking (the ‘doing’ of place) having the ability to transform or abandon spatial elements. That is, spatial elements only exist insofar as they are made to exist. This is intrinsically linked to De Certeau’s distinction between place and space.
For De Certau, place is the physical properties of a social space. But as space is social, it only exists to the extent that people create it.
De Certeau (1984) helps to conceptualise Facebook as a place that is created by planners and as a social space that is practiced and produced by its inhabitants. Extending on this, Lefebvre (1991) argues that space is represented by producers and practiced by users/consumers. Lefebvre further argues that when analysing any type of space we should consider “…the dialectical relationship between demand and command, along with its attendant questions: “ ‘Who?’, ‘From whom?’, ‘By whose agency?’, ‘Why and how?’” (1991: 116). Along with this concept, Lefebvre also make a distinction between organic and abstract places. Organic places are those (such as traditional villages), which are created by and for their users, and function according to their own social logic³.
Conversely, Lefebvre (1991) argues that an abstract place is formal and quantitative. It is produced by capital and seeks to distance itself from its socially bound context and has little room for differentiation based on lived experience, since these places are not controlled by their users, but instead by their owners. Given its preordained structure and its commercial imperative, I argue that Facebook is an abstract place. It is formal, quantitative and produced by capital. However, absolute and abstract are not binary oppositions, they can be placed at either end of a continuum. While Facebook can no doubt be placed at the abstract end of this continuum, users can and do exercise a degree of agency over the ways in which Facebook is utilised every day. To account for this, it is useful to return to de Certeau’s understanding of the city-place, to account for individual action in these abstract places. Facebook, with its 699 million daily active users (Zuckerberg 2013) can usually be compared to a city; it has the volume and scope of a mega city in size and diversity. Despite this, users do not experience the other 699 million users when they log into Facebook. Therefore, further applying de Certeau’s work on the construction of social space to Facebook can provide a framework by which to understand how users experience Facebook as a place.

If walking is a “spatial acting-out of the place” (de Certeau 1984: 98), then an understanding of how users move within the space is essential. Using de Certeau’s three functions of walking, it is possible to map some of the spatial characteristics of Facebook. For de Certeau, walking is the process of appropriation, wherein human actors insert

³ Traditionally, this was an unreflexive process. However, there are examples of this happening in a deliberate way in contemporary places, which are also created by and for users. An example is a community garden in which users are reflexively active in the construction of space.
themselves (with some agency) into a pre-planned system. The act of choosing a path, or ‘doing space’, consists of both style and use. Style manifests on a symbolic level, referring to the individual’s way of being in the world; it is singular and individualised.
Use, on the other hand, de Certeau argues, is a social phenomenon in which “a system of communication manifests itself…it refers to a norm” (1984: 100). What style and use of space have in common is that they are both ways of operating. Style involves processing the symbolic; use “refers to elements of a code (de Certeau 1984: 100).” Together they form what de Certeau terms a ‘style of use’, which is a way of being and operating as well as meshing on particular individual symbolic forms and social norms. This is important to note, as it provides a way to differentiate between individuals and social norms or social context, while giving each due consequence.

Articulating the relationship between style and use, the symbolic and the practical, acknowledges the agency of users in constructing their own Facebook experience, while acknowledging Facebook has its own organic norms that also shape and constrain behaviour. So, a style of use examines how users get around within the architecture of Facebook. Some of these norms are explored below and constitute the architectural properties of Facebook. Recognising that the Facebook experience is one of agency and structure helps account for the particular ‘style of use’ of Facebook.

To further relate this to the non-corporeal realm of Facebook, the architecture of Facebook

– that is, the way it is designed – has limits that influence users’ subjective experience of Facebook. Facebook has certain objective architectural constraints to which all users are subjected. It is the object (the architecture of Facebook) that gives rise to the possibility of space. Similar to de Certeau’s description of users’ manipulation of spatial organisations, users of Facebook may manipulate Facebook in similar, albeit limited, ways. De Certeau describes the act of use (or walking) as a place being “neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) not in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them)” (de Certeau 1984: 101). As with the city, computer mediated communication (CMC) can only take place within the confines of the internet, and by extension Facebook.
However, the architecture allows these actions to take place within, but exists beyond them. That is, it is objectively present regardless of who walks its streets.