Thesis Title: Subtitle

Affordances: Intimacy With Flexibility

Users get the most out of Facebook by being somewhat reflexively engaged. Users describe Facebook as a way of keeping up-to-date with what is going on in their social circle. They also value the way it makes it easier to keep in touch with those who are geographically distant. Facebook makes it easy. However, appreciating what Facebook has to offer also requires acknowledging its limitations. This means that users need to demonstrate an awareness of the affordances and limitations of Facebook. Along with the ease of communicating, Facebook also presents some potentially complex social situations. In order to manage these situations, participants take full advantage of Facebook’s architecture by using lists to keep various social circles separate from each other. This allows users to more accurately calculate the risk of engaging with others on Facebook. The flexibility of Facebook, albeit limited, allows users to construct spaces that best serve their needs. Thus users can reflexively manage their engagement in this space, by remaining invisible.

There are several ways to remain unseen on Facebook. Users can remain unseen by appearing offline of Facebook’s chat function; not reading new messages; and not interacting with other users’ content. So, by simply viewing Facebook, one can still keep abreast of what is going on without being seen. The village, which is analogous to the parochial configuration of Facebook, is significant as it is a departure from many late- modern forms of social life. Social life in modernity, it is argued, is characterised by differentiation and individualisation. Sociologists such as Putnam (1995) have decried the lack of cohesive community life through which individuals can harness social capital.

Putnam (1995) argues that the lack of community life in America, evidenced by the decline in neighbourly ties, has resulted in a lack of involvement in community groups as well as general political participation. Others like Bauman (2003) argue that in modernity personal ties are increasingly transitory and that we value ties that are easy to cut, rather than those that bind. Rampant individualisation has meant that close, intimate relationships are a mixed blessing as they alternately support and undermine the individual project (Bauman 2003). Thus the village-like atmosphere created by Facebook, reflects what is happening offline is users relationships and is contrary to what these theorists seem to suggest that we are suffering from an acute lack of meaningful social ties; that we would rather exist in individualized, and it is implied, anti-social spheres than be subject to the minutiae of other’s existence.
In this sense, the success of Facebook is somewhat surprising, for if nothing else the parochial space of Facebook is concerned with the mundane business of daily life. As I type this, my Facebook feed shows photos of nights out, children, news articles and work related rants. Little of this is inherently compelling, however it forms the fabric of my family’s, friends’, and acquaintances’ daily life. It can tell me what they are doing; what they are thinking about; where they are; and whom they are with. It is this type of persistent parochial intimacy that Putnam and Bauman both argue is missing in late modern life. The mundane aspect of information communicated on Facebook mimics to a certain extent the banality of village life. Despite their complaints, people find comfort in ordinariness of news communicated on Facebook. Even if we do not care terribly much for what is being communicated, it is the act of communication and even the associated complaining that may mirror some of the seductive certainty of the pre-modern village.
Facebook then, constitutes a reflexive re-imaging of pre-modern village life.
This unsettles previous understandings of SNS as public spaces. While some of the previous observations about the characteristics of spaces like Facebook still stand, conceptualizing them as parochial – a categorisation between public and private - calls for a reworking of some of our assumptions concerning how users navigate these spaces. For example, boyd (2011) argues that networked publics give rise to unprecedented visibility, invisible audiences and blurred boundaries between public and private, and collapsed context. Of these characteristics, the most keenly felt is collapsed contexts. This is unsurprising if we situate Facebook as a parochial space in which users must manage their presence in order to avoid reputational damage. For the participants observed in this study, their Facebook used did not appear to result in unprecedented visibility, but rather a visibility that mimics close community living. Likewise, the audience, as previously demonstrated, is visible in that users are aware of it and its diversity. Users comprehend this and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Rather than adjusting one’s action to suit an invisible audience with unknowable reactions, users adjust their behaviour to account for situations in which reputational damage would be most severe. Rather than trying to account for everyone, users picture a ‘worst case’ scenario, and use this as a yardstick by which they can moderate their behaviour on Facebook.

While Balandrier, Steinmetz and Sapiro (2010) contend that we are creating new worlds online, we are in fact (re)creating existing worlds in new places. Old social forms come around again, albeit tweaked and reconfigured by technological tools. In order to

understand these places, I suggest that rather than leaping forward into the new, we look for similarities across time and place as well as broadening our theoretical scope to include tools of understanding from other areas of sociology. Doing so would mean that we could potentially become more precise when considering how we analyse and account for these reworked social forms.