Weibo: share your thoughts with the world (assuming, of course, you actually want to). Photo: bfishadow (CC BY 2.0)

I read with interest Celia Hatton’s BBC News article published in February, which hinted that real-name registration on Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo may be the death knell for the social media platform, which Hatton claims was already losing popularity owing to increasing government control over the platform that was ‘once the only place to find vibrant sources of debate on the Chinese internet’.

Hatton’s argument is important and interesting, and it likely accurately reflects significant changes occurring in social media use in urban China. However based on my experience of carrying out 15 months ethnographic research on social media use in a small rural Chinese Town, it’s also worth bearing in mind that the situation in the Chinese countryside is very different from urban areas. China’s rural populations have tended to display little interest in Weibo.

While Weibo has dominated much media and academic analysis of China social media, in reality ‘most microblog users are mainly young, urban, and middle class, and geographically concentrated in the coastal regions’ as research from Lund University has noted. A separate study (in Chinese) showed that only 5% of microblog users in China live in the countryside, despite the fact that 27.9% of internet users are rural residents.

Why did Weibo never appeal to rural users in the first place? People in the rural town where I conducted my study explained that they preferred social media platforms such as QQ (and to a lesser extent, WeChat) over Weibo. These platforms were popular precisely because they were ‘closed’ platforms, where people could share things only with their friends – most of whom were people they knew in their hometown. For these people the thought of sharing their postings with the entire internet held no appeal whatsoever.

These findings are interesting because they appear to challenge assumptions that people – especially the those at the bottom of Chinese society – would naturally desire to use the internet to ‘express themselves’ to the rest of the world. Rather than presuming that social media are destined to be technologies of liberation, such accounts highlight the importance of also paying attention to how technologies are actually used by rural Chinese people within the context of their own lives, where they are often put to use towards achieving aims and aspirations that may differ greatly from those we expect of them.

Photo by Mike Licht (creative commons)

As Ethan Zuckerman noted in The Atlantic (14/08/2014) even though many groups and initiatives really didn’t want to go down that route, targeted advertising has become the default funding model for the internet, as people failed to find an alternative. A combination of developments such as big data and mining information from sources such as search engines and social network sites means that today it is possible for ads to be honed quite precisely to the interests of individuals as revealed by their online activity.

It is not at all surprising to find that English people who, as many of my blog posts have argued, are hugely concerned with privacy and keeping people away from their homes and intimate worlds, vociferously complain about the development of targeted advertising. The two most commonly quoted examples are Facebook and the supermarket chain Tesco. A typical complaint was ` Google will change your settings on your cursor, so that every time it goes back and tells them what you are using it for. Then they send you certain adverts….If you join Tescos, every time you go through the till it records everything you’ve brought. And suddenly they start sending you vouchers to buy meat… or this persons a drinker. Everything you do.’

In our project we anticipate cultural variation and it was interesting to read an article in the Financial Times recently (28/01/15) that suggested in China customers of WeChat felt personally insulted when they were not included in a targeted advert for BMW. This leaves us with at least two interesting possibilities. The first is that people say they resent the advertising but actually find them convenient and use them, which is why they continue to spread. Alternatively corporations tend to follow technological advances and do this simply `because they can’, even if in actuality these adverts did not in fact work. When I studied businesses (Miller, D. 1997 Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach) I found that fear of what the competition might do was much more important than evidence for what customers actually do in understanding business practice around advertising. The academic work on the topic is still slight, and it is starting to look like targeted adverts in some combinations might actually be sending people away from companies rather than building their profits (e.g. Goldfarb, A., and C. Tucker. 2011 “Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness.” Marketing Science 30.3 (2011): 389-404). In the meantime I have been faced with some of the most egregious examples of such advertising through my research with hospice patients. As one put it `I’ve joined the moving-on group now, since I’ve finished treatment, try and move on. Sometimes I get a lot of feeds and it does get a bit much. Don’t want it in your face all the time, keeps coming up, so I had to stop a lot of the feeds, otherwise every other thing was cancer cancer cancer and I’m not moving on. Think I’ll get rid of these off my Facebook.’

boys in the fieldsite hang out after school and look at Facebook on a mobile phone

As I begin to write my book about social media in Northern Chile, it’s great to see little insights emerge. One of the first of these insights is that interaction is essential to the ways people in my fieldsite use social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are the most widely used, with 95% of people using Facebook (82% daily), and 77% using Whatsapp with frequency. But with other sites or applications, use falls off drastically. The next two most popular forms of social media are Twitter and Instagram which are used by 30% and 22% of those surveyed respectively.

So what makes Facebook so popular but not Twitter? My first reaction was that Twitter doesn’t have the visual component that Facebook does. This was partially based on the fact that many of my informants told me that they find Twitter boring. Yet Instagram is even less well-used than Twitter. And as I began looking more closely at the specific ways people use Facebook and Twitter, I began to see why they feel this way.

People use Facebook most frequently because they are most likely to get a response on that platform. In fact, this forms a sort of feedback loop in which people perceive that others use it more, so when they want the most feedback they use Facebook, which in turn keeps others coming back as well. As this cycle continues, people know that if they want their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even enemies to see something, Facebook is the place to put it. This is also what attracts older generations to use Facebook—if they want to see what is going on with younger generations, they join. But as their age-peers join for the same reasoning, they begin interacting with them as well. In essence, Facebook is the most truly social of the social media for people living in Alto Hospicio.

This desire for interaction is exemplified by the fact that far more important than writing statuses, or even posting photographs, memes, videos, or links to websites of interest, is the commenting in which people engage. It is not unusual to find a single sentence status update that has more than twenty comments. Many comments are positive and supportive. When a young woman posts a new profile picture, it will usually receive more than ten comments essentially expressing the same thing: “Oh [daughter/niece/ friend/cousin] you look so pretty and happy!” When someone expresses a complaint, like neighbours playing music too loudly, comments usually range from “How annoying!” to “Do you want to borrow my big speakers so you can show them your music is better?” These comments generally serve a function of staying in contact and supporting friends and family by simply reminding them that you are paying attention and care about them.

This type of cohesion has impacts beyond social media as well. Many friends of friends actually get to know one another through such comments on social media, so that by the time they end up meeting in person at a party or group outing, they are already familiar with one another, friendly, and if they’ve interacted enough on the same posts, may have already added one another as friends on Facebook. Thus, Facebook is not only a space for interacting with old friends, but making new ones as well.

Aside from helping me to understand how important sociality is to people in my fieldsite, this realization also serves as an excellent example of the ways quantitative and qualitative research support one another. Quantitative data from my survey alerted me to the fact that Facebook was popular not just for it’s visual uses. But I had to go back to my qualitative research to find out why exactly this might be. As I continue to analyze and write, I find that I keep bouncing between the two, reassuring me that without both aspects, this project would not have been complete.

For more on the confluence of qualitative and quantitative data, here are examples from England and Brazil.

Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

On 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela died. At the time, I was reviewing about 50 different Facebook accounts of people living in my Northern Chile fieldsite to see in a systematic way, what exactly they posted about on Facebook. I noted that only a few posted about Nelson Mandela. Those that did made funny ironic references to actor Morgan Freeman, who portrayed the South African politician in a film biography, while more politically socialist users posted old photos of the politician alongside their hero Fidel Castro. Yet these posts represented only 6 of the 50 users I was concentrating on, or 12%.

That same week Paul Walker, a film actor of The Fast and the Furious fame, also died. More than 20 of the users whose activity I was observing posted about his death on Facebook. As with Mandela’s death, no one linked to obituaries or news articles, but instead posted photos of the actor, or at times posted photos of their own cars with quotes from The Fast and the Furious or other commentary suggesting that the films had inspired their love of automobiles.

From this, along with Presidential elections which had just taken place in Chile, I got a sense that people were much more likely to post something on Facebook when they felt personally affected by it. While people recognized the significant contributions of Mandela to peace and humanitarian efforts, he had not affected Chileans’ daily lives, while Walker had been an important hero for many people. One young man posted about both. On the day of Mandela’s death he simply wrote “QDEP Morgan Freeman” [Rest in Peace Morgan Freeman] in an ironic and humorous attempt to conflate the politician with the actor who had portrayed him. A few days later, when news of Walker broke, he wrote, “I’m watching The Fast and the Furious on TNT (television channel)…in honor of the movies that inspired my Honda, and more importantly in memory of Paul Walker.” Clearly this user had reserved the more sincere and personal message for Walker who he characterized as an inspiration.

My insight that personal connection was more important than world impact has been put to the test again with the unfortunate death of a local celebrity. Arturo Mejía Koo, the son of Chinese immigrants to the region, was locally known as the authority on chembeques—a kind of pastry made of corn flour and honey. Though chembeques can be found in almost any outdoor market in the region, Koo’s shop was something of a pilgrimage point for those who love the dessert. Perhaps then, it’s not surprising that Facebook has been littered with homages to Koo. At the time of this writing, about 1/5 of the posts that appear on my Facebook timeline are related to Koo’s death. People post links to the local paper’s story with a simple comment of a frowning face, or no comment at all. Others post links with the comment “Noooooooooooooooo!!!” Responses are lacking in eloquence, but the sheer number of them is impressive.

Among my highly educated, urban, middle-class friends in the United States, posting about the death of a highly iconic politician such as Mandela was an act of both proclaiming political stance and being “in the know.” Yet in Chile, it is much more important to be “in the know” about local events. While in both places I see memes that circulate with text such as “If you didn’t eat/watch/play [insert local favorite], you didn’t grow up in [insert local area],” Northern Chileans take to heart this mentality. They experience the death of world icons with a grain of irony, likely owing to the distance they perceive between that person’s life and their own. Yet a local hero’s death is experienced as a personal heartfelt loss.

This makes clear that for most Northern Chileans, Facebook is an outlet for performing personal and local affiliations, rather than a platform for interacting with global discourses. Mandela’s death was noteworthy for a few because he was a world figure. Yet lacking in a personal connection, emotions were expressed through irony or affiliations with other more regionally relevant politicians. Walker’s death was important for some because he had been a Hollywood hero, yet was still expressed at a distance through reference to his film roles. But in the instance of Koo’s death huge numbers of people in the region feel personally affected because eating his pastries had been an important part of local belonging. Facebook then was an appropriate place to express the very simple emotions of sadness and disbelief that emerged from the loss that felt so personal. The outpouring of public response to Koo’s death then demonstrates the ways that Facebook may reflect local affiliations much more strongly than global awareness.

Photo by Jolynna Sinanan

In these weeks, many of the world’s eyes are trained on the new football stadiums in towns around Brazil as one of the great global sports spectacles unfolds in its most recent manifestation. Of course not all are watching just to cheer on their national team or see who wins. Many are curious (and critical) about the ways the global football federation, FIFA, has commodified the event. Some are hoping for a glimpse of why so many people discuss the art of Messi and Ronaldo rather than being bothered with the details of the offside rule. Still others are attentive to news about human rights abuses that have targeted poor urban neighbourhoods, sex workers, and workers in informal economies, especially given local protests aimed at government spending on the event. Some have a new appreciation of Brazilian music as a result of programmes dedicated to the event. But these groups are not mutually exclusive. Many people who love football are also interested in this wider context, both cheering their ream and reading biting critiques (or indeed, critiques about biting). What is new is the degree to which we can directly listen into these conversations on social media

Many of us are inspired by the ideal that football is becoming a truly global game, spanning continents, class, race, religion and, outside the world cup, even gender. Sadly the evidence found by the Global Social Media Impact study does not support such a lofty transformation. We also find little to suggest that football is an aspect of a growing homogenization of the world. These reports make clear that cultural differences are reflected even in the ways people experience the World Cup. For example, in south-eastern Italy, watching football is a private family event held in the home, while in Trinidad, known for Carnival and spectacle, World Cup viewing is indeed a social event. In Chile, no matter how you watch the match, showing your national pride by wearing a red shirt and yelling local slang is practically a law while the English are relatively sedate.

Our primary focus, however, is on the coverage within social media. This shows that given the time difference with Brazil, World Cup viewing in China is often solitary, with friends only able to chat through social media messaging. Indian fathers use the World Cup as a chance to bond with children over YouTube videos of players’ techniques. And working class Brazilians use social media to celebrate their upward mobility as individuals and a nation, and great pride that the event is happening in their own nation, even if they could never dream of being able to attend a game.

In most cases there is little to suggest that people transcend local interest to celebrate this as a global event. Rather we see how sport becomes an expression for intense nationalism. In Turkey lack of local representation results in apathy. On the other hand while Chinese migrant factory workers may not engage, some men in the more settled village population of China do seem to use football to connect with the wider world, and in several of our sites football does provide an opportunity for local social bonding and enjoyment. This may not correspond to what has now often referred to as the “beautiful game,” although in compensation most sporting enthusiasts have found the level of football itself is much more open and exciting than in the previous World Cup. And indeed our reports positively suggest that watching how people discuss the World Cup on social media is actually a rather good way of understanding how the world around us is changing if always in terms of these constellations of local concerns.

THE WORLD CUP ON SOCIAL MEDIA WORLDWIDE

This article is part of a special series of blog posts profiling how social media is affecting how ordinary people from communities across the planet experience the 2014 World Cup.

• Brazil: “Why aren’t they protesting?”: low-income Brazilian’s views on the World Cup
• Chile: Seeing red: watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
• China (North): Online and under the covers: the World Cup and social media in rural China
• China (South): “Watch the World Cup – watch the fun and the world”
• India: Football World Cup 2014: Observations from Panchagrami
• Italy: ‘We are more united for the World Cup than for Christmas!’: the World Cup in Italy
• Trinidad: “It ain’t ova till its ova” – Spectacular sports and social media: the World Cup in El Mirador
• Turkey: “Turks have no other friends besides the Turks” – a Turkish saying
• United Kingdom: Englishness, the World Cup and the Glades

Photo by Nell Haynes

The latest music craze here in Northern Chile is actually a song from 1993. Italian band Corona’s Rhythm of the Night has been stuck in the collective brain of young Chileans for the last two weeks. Though reading the song title or artist’s name might not immediately ring a bell for blog readers, the song reached number 11 on the US Billboard chart and number 2 on the UK singles chart for 18 weeks in the early 1990s. The song is admittedly catchy (to refresh your memory: the original music video on youtube ). But the circumstances of it’s recent popularity in Chile are both coincidental and very much due to a convergence of typically Chilean sociality and the ways social media functions in relation to Polymedia.

During the first week of April, a young man called into a radio station in the Dominican Republic and requested a song. In a classic misinterpretation of lyrics, he asked for a song with the lyrics “Esas son Reebok o son Nike” [Are those Reebok or Nike]. After a bit of back and forth discussion between the announcer and the caller, the disc jockey Brea realized he was referring to The Rhythm of the Night (though usually pronounced Nī-kē in English, most Spanish speakers pronounce the athletic brand Nīk), and happily played the song as he laughed at the misunderstanding.

Luckily some enterprising radio listener in the Dominican Republic was recording the interaction, and it quickly landed on Youtube. The “original” posting of the sound clip, accompanied by static graphic of Reebok and Nike logos, includes an explanation that the user received the sound file via Whatsapp and was so humored by it “I had to publish it” (hear the video). Hundreds of parody videos quickly appeared. From there it was picked up by Chilean radio stations, who began playing the sound clip along with the full version of the song. Chileans then did their own Youtube searches, which were quickly passed on through two popular Tumblr-like blog sites that generally publish links and photos pertaining to sex, drugs, drunkenness, humor, or some combination of the four. Among my over 100 Facebook friends in northern Chile, none published a link to the Youtube videos or sound files that circulated. Yet more subtle references popped up, such as the comment on a profile picture in which a pair of shoes is visible: “Esas son Reebok o son Nike?”

I didn’t understand these comments, and did not even notice them until April 10^th, when I was invited to a cookout. As we waited for chorizo to heat on the grill, my friend Miguel asked if I had heard “Son Reebok o Son Nike.” Having no idea what he was talking about, a conversation equally as awkward as that between the radio announcer and caller ensued. But shortly, with his Samsung Galaxy phone in hand, Miguel played the radio clip for me. For the rest of the night, everyone was humming the tune. I found it the next day on Youtube and discovered it had almost 4 million views (compared to the original song’s less than 380,000 views). By the next weekend, when I went with some friends to a nightclub in Iquique, the entire dance floor erupted in screams of pleasure when the original song was played late in the night.

Clearly, this story illustrates the ways different forms of media, both online and offline, interact, and in fact depend upon one another to spread. The phenomenon started on the “traditional” media of radio, spread through personal Whatsapp message, was transferred to social broadcasting site Youtube, further spread through blog sites and word of mouth, and found it’s apex on a club dance floor. Rather than being eclipsed by Youtube or other online-based music platforms like Spotify or Soundcloud, music on the radio provides one way in which online music gains a hold. Users of Facebook and Youtube now take the place of radio disc jockeys in deciding what becomes popular. The content is both user-filtered and user-distributed. Yet, in taking on this role, comes the responsibility of being aware, and making others aware as well. If you don’t know why the song’s being played in the club on Saturday night, someone will be happy to tell you, and perhaps even show you the video, but not without a bit of social shame.

At the same time, there is something very Chilean about the importance of recognizing the song. Part of what’s being performed with screams of delight is not simply expressing that the song is good for dancing, but a performance of knowing why it is being played. A performance of being sufficiently socially connected, whether face to face (as I learned of the lyric misinterpretation) or via social networking, to sing along with “Son Reebok o son Nike” instead of “It’s the rhythm of the night.” Chances are, the song’s popularity will not last 18 weeks this time, but the song has found new exposure not only because it’s catchy, but because there is a story—and a funny one at that—that accompanies it.

Photo by Jolynna Sinanan

If Facebook is a visual platform-one where people can show aspects of themselves through words in posts, or what was status updates or comments and in photos that they have taken themselves or photos taken of them in posts, uploads and albums, or share something made by someone else in memes, clips, audio and video-then we also have to think about how people engage with each other through visibility.

Since returning to field work in Trinidad last week, I have been continuing working with Dr Gabrielle Hosein at the University of the West Indies on spectacular politics, work which started when I documented the hunger strike of Dr Wayne Kublalsingh last year.

Now, we are thinking about how people engage with each other though the Facebook tools: Like, Comment, Post and Share. What can these things say about how social life plays out on Facebook? Trinidad is well versed and have a language for degrees of visibility. The most extreme, the spectacle, is played out for four days of the year, culminating on Carnival Tuesday. Playing Mas is about being the spectacle and being the show, ‘playing yourself’, externalising a true self that can’t be enacted the rest of the year, on the festival of disruption and inversion of the usual social order. The literature on Carnival speaks to how people come to exist through visibility, being seen and being in stage, whether or not one is being seen as themselves, or through a mask (Lovelace, 1979, Birth, 2008, Mason, 1998, Franco, 1998).

As Carnival has specific understandings within Trinidadian culture, the cultural understanding of the usage of Facebook is less about Facebook, than an enactment of a cultural world that is Trinidad (Miller, 2011, Miller and Sinanan, 2014). So what can ‘likes’, ‘comments’, ‘posts’ and ‘shares’ tell us about the degrees of visibility? The first very important factor to note is the research that is informing this pre-theorising is based in a small town. El Mirador has all the ideals and frustrations of small town life. It’s a town that is considered to hold ‘traditional’ family and community values and most people know each other or at least know of each other and each other’s families. El Mirador can be too social, where everybody knows everybody’s business.

We’re starting to ask people when and how they use ‘likes’, ‘comments’, ‘posts’ and ‘shares’ and we are finding there is a distinct correlation to ‘offline’ social life. ‘Like’ represents the benign sociality of the local idiom of ‘liming’, hanging around, gentle acknowledgement and visible presence, and the other end of the spectrum is ‘post’, which is really putting yourself out there, on show. The majority of posts are sharing of moods, what people are doing, where they have been, holidays, family events, parties etc, there is very little political comment or commentary. When asked when they would not engage with something someone has posted, that is when they ‘do nothing’, the majority respond around ‘TMI: too much information’- when people are too visible. ‘Sharing’ is directed to specific groups or individuals, there is less sharing on an individual’s wall, but more general sharing that would resonate with certain individuals or groups. ‘Commenting’ is more personal, it is one degree down from posting, people comment when they feel strongly about something: ‘if it affect me’.

If usage of Facebook is embedded in existing social relations and spaces, it is worth unpacking the nuances of what ‘posts’, ‘comments’, ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ connote. The hazards of becoming too visible, even through online engagement on Facebook invites controversy and invites attacks on the self, whereas gentle acknowledgement, hanging around and being present is, in this context, more socially acceptable.

References:

Birth, Kevin, 2008, Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in Trinidad, Durham and London: Duke University Press

Franco, Pamela, 1998, ‘Dressing Up and Looking Good: Afro-Creole Female Maskers in Trinidad Carnival’, African Arts, Vol. 31, Iss. 2, pp. 62-67

Lovelace, Earl (1979), The Dragon Can’t Dance, London: Longman

Mason, Peter, 1998, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad, London: Latin America Bureau (Research and Action) Ltd

Miller, Daniel (2011) Tales From Facebook, Cambridge: Polity

Miller, Daniel and Sinanan, Jolynna (2014) Webcam, Cambridge: Polity

Photo by Nell Haynes

When Daniel Miller came to visit my fieldsite in Northern Chile a few weeks ago, I took him on a walking tour of the city. He had just arrived from his own fieldsite in Trinidad, and as we walked he kept remarked that two places are quite different. They share certain aspects: warmth, nearby beaches, revealing clothing, and gated homes. Yet, he told me that compared to the razor wire or broken glass-topped fences in Trinidad, these just didn’t seem as intimidating. Similarly, we discussed the ubiquity of car alarms as the continuously sounded that evening as we sat in my apartment. “Are they really protecting anything if one goes off every three minutes?” I asked.

A few days after Danny left, I was having coffee with a Catholic priest in a nearby neighborhood. Telling me about his perceptions of the town after living here 6 years, he lamented the lack of “confianza” or trust between neighbors. “Neighbors like each other, but there’s not much trust between them.” He suggested this is a product of the fact that the city is new. It has only been incorporated for a decade. None of the adults who live here grew up in these neighborhoods. The fences are high but there is no neighborhood watch group here.

In a lot of ways this explains the ways I have been warned about safety here. People just don’t seem to trust what might happen in public space. The fences around houses may in fact be a way of delimiting the private from the public in a way that leaves no questions as to where the boundaries lie. And by claiming the space as private rather than public, perhaps that makes it a little safer.

One thing I noticed right away upon arriving here is that people rarely use their phones in public. Not in the plaza, on the bus, or while waiting in line at the supermarket. When Danny and I visited the local market near the municipal gymnasium, we asked a group of vendors about this. One woman, who has a clothing stall in the market told us people never have their phones out in public because they are afraid someone will come by and swipe it. The most recent statistics I could find were from 2008, when 1,236 non-violent robberies (the type that might result in having their cell phone stolen from their hands as they sit in the plaza, or their pocket in a busy market). This is not particularly high, roughly matching national statistics, yet I am given pause that perhaps many such thefts go unreported. About a year ago, online security company ESET reported almost 60% of Latin American residents have had at least one cellular phone stolen. The Catholic priest also told me that the most recent statistics he has seen suggests that about 40% of Alto Hospicio residents have had some personal effect stolen in the last year. “Probably because their billfold or phone is sticking out of their pocket in a public place.” While statistics like “40%” and “1,236 reported” might not necessarily reveal much, I do sense that cellular phone theft is quite common and the vendedora is correct: people know this and protect themselves by not using their phone in public.

So, I wonder then, if there is a certain “privateness” to the cell phone. And perhaps to the internet in general. Though one may interact with their friends though social media, that is generally something done while in private space. Even the local call center/internet café provides patrons with rather large cubicles while they use the computers. Though you might be airing your dirty laundry on facebook for all of your friends, the person physically next to you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) know.

So these walls, these fences, these car alarms, and these cubicles provide a sense of delineation. A car alarm may be tripped just as easily by someone doing a bad parking job or a ball thrown amiss as by someone trying to steal it. Fences can be jumped. Cubicles can be peeked around (at least one young man quickly turned off his pornographic video as Danny and I walked by in the internet center). But that is not the point. The point, perhaps, is to say this is mine, and this is private. If you touch this, walk past it, or look at my screen, you are transgressing a boundary. So however social, social media might be, for these Northern Chilean users, it ideally retains a sense of the private.

Photo by Island Capture Photography (Creative Commons)

I want to suggest that conventionally when we consider the role of the photograph in society, we see this as a kind of three stage movement. First there is the practice of photography itself. We have assumed that this was merely the requisite technology, largely the handmaiden to the desire to have a photograph. Then there is the object, the photograph, and that was assumed in turn to be the handmaiden to the ultimate aim, which was to record something. The photograph was there to serve as an object of memory, a technical facility to retain an image beyond the relatively poor ability of the brain to accurately retain images of the past. It could be as an art, but it was more often a wedding or holiday.

Today most photographs are taken for their use in social media. Figures quoted online vary but it is suggested around 350 million photos are shared per day on Facebook, 55 million on Instagram, 400 million on WhatsApp and 450 million on Snapchat.

I want to suggest that as a result, we need to completely turn on its head our conventional understanding of photography. Memory has been reduced merely to the legitimation of having a photograph, but the photograph itself has lost its position as the aim of the exercise since mostly the photo is merely the excuse for what now takes centre stage which is the act of taking a photograph. Photography as an activity has moved from background to foreground. Fortunately we can see this sequence more clearly because it corresponds to the development of three social media sites in sequence. The movement from Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat/WhatsApp.

Photography on Facebook
Facebook now appears as the convenient bridge between more traditional photography and the more recent social media. Facebook places considerable importance on the photo album and the collecting of images. Everything shared whether tagged or not is also stored. One of the reasons Facebook’s long term future is likely to be older people, is that it is very effective in this role, certainly compared to conventional photograph album and the analogue photo. As Xinyuan recently noted you can turn to QQ to see yourself as you looked ten years ago when you first joined QQ, soon this will be common on Facebook.

Photography on Instagram
Photography on Instagram has a much more transient feel than Facebook. In working with young people I find that Instagram gives them a kind of creative project. All day they can think about what would make a good photograph? (similarly, what would make a clever tweet?). If they don’t see anything else, they can always take a Selfie. This gives purpose to the day and becomes a bulwark against the constant concern with being bored. As such, where once we framed the photograph, now we use photography to frame experience. Here we see the reversed sequence. Storing the photo, as in Facebook, is exposed as mere excuse for having a photo, which in turn is mere excuse for the real purpose, which is the project enacted by the act of photography itself.

Photography on Snapchat/WhatsApp
It was Snapchat that bludgeoned to death our conventional view of photography. If the photo can only last for a maximum of ten seconds, then we can’t even pretend it’s about memory or even about the image. The point about Instagram is now made explicit. It can only be the act of taking that matters. Except that on Snapchat/WhatsApp we realise that this is not just individual experience it is a social act, we take pictures in order to share, and to see the response to our sharing. We have to take the word ‘Snapchat’ literally – the photograph is just a form of chat, saying Hi, a more interesting emoticon. WhatsApp is a bit less violent a repudiation of the photograph, but still highly transient. Clearly we may work with all three of these social media and all three of these relationships to photography.

As I will argue in a more extended paper, the mistake is to think this makes photography more superficial, actually I will argue this makes photography more profound.

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

Social media photography in my field site in south-east Turkey is extremely self-oriented. I have recently been asking friends and informants why people post specific images, and the answer has always been the same: “They want to become popular!” For example food is a very common image on Facebook and it is always represented in similar ways: in special occasions during dinner with friends or family, as soon as the wonderful food is ready and put on the table or on the floor someone takes the picture and posts it on Facebook. In few cases I had to wait up to twenty minutes before eating because everybody wanted to take a picture and upload it on Facebook, or keep it on their phones to show it to friends. When people organise dinner with friends or extended family and the food is particularly good-looking, taking a picture and making it public is a must. As everybody told me, the main goal is to appear awesome and become popular. On Facebook there are not pictures of ordinary food during ordinary dinner, or pictures with amazing food eaten with ordinary family members. It’s always a combination of good food and good people, the best way to impress the public. Even when the picture portrays a group of friends or family members, the picture is more oriented toward increasing the popularity of the person than to strengthening social ties with others.

In Dry Rock Town people spend hours looking at the Facebook walls of acquaintances and gossiping about them. This activity is socially accepted, and usually done together with friends or relatives. Women especially enjoy their time together in front of a smartphone or preferably a laptop, commenting about other people’s life as based on what they see on their Facebook walls: “She became fat…He got married to that beautiful woman…He is still single…She always wears beautiful clothes…He has a good job…He became rich…She always goes to the hairdresser…etc, etc, etc.” People gossip in particular about acquaintances or distant family members with whom they don’t have daily interactions, and that are Facebook friends of friends. In a town of 80,000 inhabitants where everybody knows all of the families in the town (and consequently everybody recognizes everybody as a member of a family), Facebook is the best way to get updates and have fresh information about other people’s lives. Because of gossiping, chats, and rumors, the content Facebook walls often ends up being what people know about a certain person. For this reason Facebook visual material is accurately chosen and updated in order to improve self-images, increase respectability and honor. Facebook is used as an identity card to present the self to friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and eventually the whole town and the extended family.

People are continuously involved in the practice of updating new pictures that can increase their social reputation. Thus the very practice of posting photos of amazing dinners and holiday trips is one of the main pleasures derived from these activities. It surely increases the their social fame within the town, and with friends and relatives.