It has been exactly a year since finishing 15 months of fieldwork in Trinidad. Stories for this blog have moved further and further away from cool stuff that was coming out of the field and living in Trinidad, to the far less exciting but far more intense process of endlessly thinking and rethinking the material and drafting and redrafting articles, book chapters, and books (yes, all plural) from three years of research.

So it’s kind of like experiencing the weather from the ground, how it looks and what it feels like, and then looking at the weather from the sky and how the movement of clouds influences what is happening below. This is what moving from the field to writing feels like, moving from experience and observation to the more abstract.

I have been drawing on my field work in Trinidad for, among other things, edited book chapters on different topics, from emotions and technology to social networks in small communities to social media and ethnography. What has been most striking about working on these condensed pieces of writing and stories from the field is the focus of on the everyday, what is normal in the places we lived and what people in those places take for granted. When we started this project in 2012, we didn’t want to look at isolated, spectacular social media events that seemed to be the thing at the moment, whether it was the Kony 2012 campaign or the Ice Bucket Challenge, although these sort of one off things did appear throughout the research. We were far more interested in normal social media practices and if something came up that everybody talked about, shared or commented on, we were able to contextualise it in everyday relations.

Yet, it is these types of spectacular social media events that attract the most attention. It’s like reading about media in media, which reminds me more of the anxieties of post-modernism and post-post-modernism of the 1990s, where social phenomena is likened to simulacra. From the comparative studies of nine societies (a lot of people) one of our key conclusions is that the use of social media can be generalised as being generally unspectacular. There is a previous blog post on how memes can be a visual means to reinforce social norms and morally acceptable behaviour. Humorous memes also provide a safe and popular way for people to express their views without coming across as too self-righteous or taking oneself too seriously.

Memes are just one example of visual posts, others that show food, outfits, places and events again show the everyday. The more exciting or idealised aspects of the everyday, but the everyday nonetheless. And when the idealised aspects of the everyday are shown, they usually conform to a shared sense of what living the good life means, around consumption and lifestyle, which is particularly important given that for several research participants, especially in the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Trinidadian field sites, upward mobility is a genuine aspiration. Again, not surprising that aspirations around lifestyle would be more obvious in the sites in countries that are commonly called ‘developing’ or in ‘the global south’.

The other half of posting (at least visual posts) around social norms is that the audience for these posts are one’s social peers and networks, social media simply makes these forms of expression more visible. Prior to social media, normativity and social visibility have had a long interrelationship and was explored with much more depth by thinkers such as Georg Simmel and more recently Agnes Heller. One of our findings summed up in once sentence is that people care what other people think and say about them, especially if they are from small towns where more people know each other and live alongside one another. There might be social media events that capture participants’ attention for a short time, but by and large, social media usage is, well, normal.

Image Courtesy: @mkstalin and image shared on Saravanan’s Facebook profile

Personal brand building through social media requires a strategically planned presentation of oneself to a general audience. This is by no means new within Indian politics. Consider the way Mahatma Gandhi first wore suits, and then other forms of dress before ending up with the well known hand-spun garments of an ascetic. In contemporary India, Twitter seems to be the most popular choice of medium for such an exercise, as exemplified by the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is active both on Twitter and Weibo and is even hailed as an Indian social media superstar with 14.8 Million followers on Twitter. However, in my own fieldsite at Panchagrami, the aspiring Politicians who are likely to be school dropouts find that Twitter requires a level of English that is intimidating. For them, the architecture of Facebook offers more possibilities, and the greater importance of visuals makes this a more appropriate tool for them and their followers.

Saravanan, aged 28 years, is an eighth grade school dropout and now works as a water supplier for a local village governing council (called ‘Panchayat’ in India). He also assists the president of this council in matters relating to the area. Saravanan, is an active member of the current major opposition party in Tamil Nadu and an arch rival of the ruling state party to which the Panchayat president belongs, though, personally they get on well with each other.

Wanting to establish himself as a politician, he had little by way of funds, but realised that the current local politicians had failed to forge links with the new middle class migrants to the area. He recognised that social media would be the best tool to help bridge this gap. Further, it would also help link with the increasing numbers of locals from the lower middle classes who were using Facebook.

What stands out in his profile is that it is very visually oriented and has very little text. He posts pictures that show him as a person who is always working for other people and demonstrating his devotion to public service. He always wears a white shirt with a black pant, an accepted professional dress code for politicians, he regularly posts pictures of himself in party meetings with atleast 500 to 600 members in attendance and some of the the well-known party high command in view.

Saravanan is pretty active in friending young people and the new middle class using Facebook to develop his social circle. A final advantage of this strategy is that by working through these visual associations and not overtly projecting himself he is less likely to antagonize the present members of the board. For him the effective use of social media is to use visual means to create and cultivate his image as that of “a common man” always in the service of people.

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.

Image courtesy of J.G.

Danny and I are in the midst of looking at hundreds of Facebook profiles and in his case, Twitter and Instagram feeds as well to start writing the first book to come out of the project so far, What They Post. The project has always intended to be an anthropology of social media, but as we presented at the Royal Anthropological Institute a couple of months ago, instead of studying social media, we can also see social media as an unprecedented opportunity to study the wider anthropological context.

This is the premise of the book we’re (or at least I’m) muddling through at the moment. By looking at visual posts on social media- photos and self-generated or collaborated images (memes etc.) we can see an alternate route to doing ethnography. We are comparing our two field sites, The Glades in the UK and El Mirador in Trinidad. We’re not comparing Trinidad to the UK, it would defeat the purpose to take the values and cosmology of one society as the bedrock to which all others are compared. In our study, the use of social media by the English looks just as ‘exotic’ as uses of social media in China, Turkey or India. By looking at what people post, we can demonstrate the contrast between Trinidadian and English posting as the best way of showing that posting is in many respects Trinidadian and English.

We have now looked at thousands of images posted on social media and are starting to work with about ten comparative themes. Some are directly taken from the content of images, such as counting how many times alcoholic drinks appear, either with people or images of drink alone. Others are bigger themes that have been more subject to academic study we have big question marks next to that will need deeper analysis, where an images says something about gender or class but we’re not sure what yet.

One of the themes that has stood out to us is the way that women pose in photos. Danny has noticed a pattern where women over the age of around 30, do not overtly pose. They may try to look pretty, attractive or feminine, but they don’t show their bodies in any particular way. Posing years seem to be for teenagers and young adults, but certainly not for adult women.

It is quite the opposite in Trinidad. Women of all ages post images of themselves on Facebook, they pose to the side, they show their behind, they may have a hand of their hip or a leg slightly turned out diagonally from the body, but they show themselves.

And this is where it is very important to not take the values of any one society as the cornerstone to compare others. We have all seen countless journalistic articles that feed into the anxieties we have with the introduction of any new media, usually from a psychological perspective. That social media encourages, or brings out latent narcissistic tendencies, that we are all obsessed with our own image and we are all become more exhibitionist, photographing and sharing everything that we do.

But when I ask women why they post photos of themselves, I get a number of responses like ‘I was in a good mood’, ‘I felt like it’, ‘I liked my make-up’ or ‘I liked how I looked that day’ followed by ‘and I wanted to remember it.’ Trinidad is a society where people strive to be seen and we can’t contextualise that desire in contexts of Western mediatisation or celebrity phenomenon. Because of its own history and experience of modernity, being seen is to be acknowledged that one exists as a person. Visibility has far more existentialist implications in Trinidad than simply wanting fame.

I would also argue that Trinidadian women are generally kinder to themselves and to each other about their bodies. You don’t have to have a certain look to post lots of selfies, young women aren’t ridiculed by their peers for posting selfies or posing in photos if they aren’t thin or pretty enough, they don’t need to look like celebrities to celebrate themselves. Trinidadian women generally have a healthier sense of body image than we have observed with their UK counterparts and it all comes across when we take a comparative look at the photos they post.

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

Football fandom in the Glades. Images by Daniel Miller

Viewing the world cup from the perspective of  a relatively homogeneous English site, The Glades, a dual village with a total population of 24,000, North of London, seems to bring out the ‘Englishness’ of this site compared to others around the globe.

At the time of writing England are already out of the World Cup, and most of the overheard conversation is about failure. England is ranked below the two teams, Italy and Uruguay, that beat them. Most experts felt they played quite well. So the results are pretty much in accordance with expectations. But this is not how things are seen here. Social bonding seems most effective when everyone agrees that England are ‘rubbish’. The humour on social media is typically self-deprecating, for example, a picture of the tour bus on sale with signs such as ‘only used twice’.

On social media we looked at all posting on 30 Instagram, 40 Twitter and 65 Facebook accounts during one week. This provided very clear support for my earlier claim that Facebook is no longer a peer to peer media for youth but has migrated to older people. Of the forty teenage Facebook profiles only one person used it for extensive football comment and this was because all his Twitter posts were set to also show on Facebook. Two others made a single relevant posting, one posted twice and that was it. World Cup references are more common for older users of Facebook with two people posting 11 times and one six times.

Instagram is only used to post ones own photos so the World Cup was not relevant. The core to young peoples posting today is Twitter. Of forty teenage sites, of those who posted during this week there were 5 males who posted frequent comments throughout the week. 11 males made just a few comments often around 3 to 5 while only 1 male made no comments at all. Of the females none posted extensively, half posted a few and half posted no world cup related tweets. Males tend to post either exclamations at events, general comments such as: ‘Why were Uruguay and Italy so poor against Costa Rica?’ Also popular is humour or critical remarks, such as:

‘I don’t get all the people that say England are good, we are shit, you just don’t want to admit it… when was the last time we won anything?’

‘Any coincidence that nations who sing their anthems with pride and feeling put in spirited performances, rather than our pathetic effort?’

Humour, as well as being self-deprecating, is often sarcastic, such as:

‘”BREAKING – Steven Gerrard to retire from international football after the World Cup” what a shame.’

Females add a gendered perspective, with posting such as: ‘why are all the Uruguay player’s shirts so so so tight? lol’, or cute pictures of the Brazilian player Oscar. If they comment on the football itself it may be apologetically such as ‘Uhh ohhhhh!! trust it to be Suarez (like i actually know what i’m talking about)’. Only those who comment extensively tend to mention games other than those played by England, or if they have connections such as family in Portugal and therefore support that team.

As well as self-deprecation the English qualities of modesty and reticence are much in evidence. There is relatively little public display. Across the two villages only 3 shops had extensive world cup influenced windows (see photos), 3 more had minimal and around 80 had none. Apart from an electrician, it was either the most traditional English butcher and pub or ethnic minority restaurants (Indian or Chinese) that had displays. There was only one example of commercial exploitation, a supermarket that had a selection called ‘tastes of the world cup’ with Brazilian watermelon Ivory Coast cocoa etc. Less than 1% of homes or cars displayed flags.

Going to pubs during the games when England were not playing one rarely saw more than 3 or 4 people that looked like they might have come especially to watch that game. During the England game one pub was crowded with 140 people another less than half that. The atmosphere was subdued. Apart from the collective shouting and celebration when the English goal was scored, there were no instances of people making remarks loud enough for anyone to hear other than their own companions.

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

Photograph by Razvan Nicolescu

To start writing a blog post how people in the Italian fieldsite watch the World Cup and how the competition is reflected on social media, I started off on the streets of Grano looking for a place to watch Italy’s opening game in the competition.

The town seemed to be much less concerned with the game than I expected. I counted just three Italian flags, one adorned by a young tifoso on his balcony and the other two guarding a van that was selling hot-dogs and hot panini near the railway station. The game was scheduled at midnight local time, when basically all cafés and a few bars where the game could have been screened were closed. I think that in the entire town, there were less than half a dozen public places where you could watch the game.

I chose a place where the biggest crowd in the town might have gathered. Most people knew each other quite well, being either family, friends, or neighbours. The audience of around 30 people was split in two. Half were men above forty years old who watched the game sitting in comfortable armchairs in front of the biggest screen in the bar. The other half were much younger and included two women; they were standing around the bar and watched the game on a normal flat screen, which hanged on the wall opposing the big screen. The two groups of people were literally watching the game back-to-back. All throughout the game, some six to eight women were sitting in the inner court of the bar waiting for their partners while a few kids were excitedly running everywhere.

The main explanation for the relatively few public places where the World Cup could be watched is that people really prefer to watch it at home. This has a lot to do with the fact that they always have, and the World Cup doesn’t seem to be the best time to change. Then, there are the credenze (beliefs, superstitions). A good friend of mine in her mid-thirties explained to me that she had to watch Italy’s opening game at her parents’ house because that is where they have been watching the World Cup since 1994. Each of her family members had to occupy more or less the exact places as when Italy played at the previous World Cup. This time, her younger sister had no boyfriend, so she had to call a friend and ask him to come and sit where her boyfriend four years ago used to sit: on the coach between herself and her mother. Despite the late hour of night, my friend’s father did not allow her to go to sleep or to have some fresh air on the balcony from time to time. Finally, she managed to find a moment when she could sneak out and go home straight to bed. When her partner came home after the match asked him in her sleep who had won. She exclaimed in a quite frustrated way that her family is more united during the World Cup than during Christmas. Actually, the World Cup has more to do with the house and family than I would have expected.

In this context, maybe is not unusual that there were so little posts about World Cup on social media among the people I am working with. Even those who are otherwise quite active football supporters did not post much on Facebook. In the first days of the competition when Italy played two games I took a brief look over more than 100 Facebook profiles and I counted only around 20 posts about the World Cup. Almost all were about the Italian national team: half of the posts were uploaded in the actual days of the games and expressed in different ways the famous supporting slogan ‘Forza Azzurri!’ The other half were comments on the games, which varied from enthusiastic ones celebrating the victory against England to rather negative ones after the defeat against Costa Rica. If the first were serious and posted by ‘experts,’ usually men, the second posts were more humorous and provocative, where women were relatively well represented. A female teenager commented that the end-of-school examination in mathematics was as ‘disgusting’ as Italy’s defeat against Costa Rica.

This is the moment I noticed the first posts against Italy’s national team. By the time of the third game where Italy competed, there were already half a dozen people who were either mocking the national team or were supporting their opponents. These people were known among their peers as being in different ways anti-mainstream.

On the day of the decisive game against Uruguay, I counted around 20 supporting phrases, that is around twice more than was in the first two games added together. After Italy lost the game, a small avalanche of posting about the game was uploaded on Facebook. In two days I counted a total of 30 posts related to the game, out of which 21 were status messages, 4 edited photos, 4 not edited photos, and one film – all shared from Internet. The three main themes of these postings were: 9 referring to the moment when the Uruguayan striker Luis Suárez bit one Italian defender, 8 about the game itself and 6 negative comments about the Italian team. ‘The bite’ scene seemed to be more present as 7 of the 9 posts were photos. Even though it looked like people were active about the World Cup in Facebook, the 30 posts were posted by less than twelve people, with three most active, uploading 8, 7, and 4 postings respectively.

Some of the memes circulated on Facebook

I don’t have the scope to discuss it here, but it is interesting to mention that if mainstream media in Italy discussed the relative high impact of the games on social media it was mainly because of how the main commentators tweets* were shared and commented on by the same mainstream media (a technique also used in the case of celebrities and politicians). However, as I wrote in a previous blog post, the penetration of Twitter in Grano is extremely low. This is just an example of the difference between what media claims that ‘happens on social media’ and what actually happens.

At the same time, it seems that not many WhatsApp messages regarding the World Cup were sent as in many cases most of the people such messages would have been sent to, have been watching the game together anyway.

A few questions rise from this short investigation into how the World Cup is represented on social media: how, when and to what extent is the private represented online? What is the relation and why is there such a big difference between mainstream media, which in this case is saturated with World Cup, and the way people use social media? What kind of sociality and individual acting is social media currently constructing?

Note
^* The controversial tweet of the Italian striker Mario Balotelli before the game with Costa Rica is a good example for the impact of celebrity tweets on media. According to reports, this allegedly made the Italian manager Cesare Prandelli ask to his players: ‘Less social networking and more goals’.

Interesting statistics on the number of tweets during the game Italy vs. Uruguay can be found on an article in the main Italian sport journal Gazzetta dello Sport (methodology explained in Italian).

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 cityofstrangers (Creative Commons)

I don’t really want to study social class, every researcher on English society seems obsessed with it, as are the general public. Consider the recent reaction to the BBC Great British Class Survey or books such as Watching the English. But after just two months fieldwork in The Groves I am immersed in a whole slew of such differentiations. How far do the people of High Grove look down on those of Low Grove? Is everyone now using the term ‘social housing’ as a proxy for not just lower class but all sorts of problematic behaviour they associate with that class? Can I ignore stories of parent’s weeping when their child fails to get into their chosen school? I would like to have focused on something more original, but the integrity of ethnography starts with ignoring what you would like your study to be about, and going with your evidence.

When I do research on class I find I fluctuate in my perspective. Sometimes I see through welfare glasses where class looks like differential life chances, and the sensibility of fairness. I remain incensed by the degree that it is still the mere luck of being born to lower income families and lower educational expectations that largely determines life’s opportunities and the likelihood of suffering and deprivation. This remains true of the UK where inequalities still mainly stem from chance not ability. But I also see class with other glasses that pick up all sorts of nuances and playfulness of style as social differences which make up a fascinating tapestry of distinctions in clothing music and style, without necessarily meaning a whole lot in terms of objective life chances.

I may have inherited this duality from the French anthropologist/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Much of his research concerned poverty and the relationship between education and subsequent social mobility. Others, such as his book Distinction are associated with issues of taste. The recent BBC Great British Class Survey is a pop version of the work of Mike Savage which is in turn a pop (or updated) version of Bourdieu. But Bourdieu was less divided since with the legacy of Marxist writing he still saw taste and life chances as two sides of the same coin, which guaranteed the status of class as an object of study.

How will class relate to the study of digital communications? Differential digital literacy may still reflect class as welfare. Other differences are more complex. Some quite hip young people are into Instagram used for all sorts of ‘edgy’ photo effects. But others with a serious interest in photography see this as an inauthentic cheat that devalues photography as art. Maybe this is typical of the democratization of skill? There are early indications. There seems to be a stronger digital presence generally including higher usage of Instagram in High Grove. Does this run parallel with evidence its high street has the delicatessens and art galleries, while Low Grove has few such class markers?

I am suspicious of correlations as evidence of cause. My work with the hospice suggests that it was often high status families who were most reserved and cut off from social communications and ended up suffering social isolation as a result. So higher status may not translate as advantage. Class is cross-cut by gender and age, and Facebook seems to be migrating from younger to older. Also social differentiation fragments into many different competitions. As Bourdieu once put it there is a struggle for hierarchy between the different hierarchies. So things will be complex, but that is the nature of ethnography, and if don’t manage to tease out these tangled threads, who will. Fortunately we have another two years to try and make sense of such things.

by Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan

Image courtesy of Beth Kanter, Creative Commons

Photo by Camille Rose (Creative Commons)

Online Social networking use by businesses is already quite well established. With newer avenues, business expansion and marketing ideas to a ready audience of other net-workers happens effortlessly, even for cash strapped small scale businesses. Entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs are finding avenues to market and spread the word about their ventures, and create brand value at almost no cost by using social network or media websites. The social network, fan and follower base that these entrepreneurs end up building for their local businesses through globalised internet tools is inspiring.

For example, a local kiosk chain in India, which serves wraps for people to eat was at some point of time known more from its Facebook page than through other means. In fact, the owner of this chain uses Facebook and other social networking sites as his main marketing and branding tool. A strategy adopted by such new food chain entrepreneurs with limited budget in India is to get a few well known newspapers or magazines carry an article about them in the Lifestyle section. They make sure to mention their brand’s Facebook or Twitter page in such articles and end up getting a considerable number of fans or followers online. How much of this converts to business is an aspect to consider, but, the mission of creating a brand value at almost no cost is accomplished.

The use of social network as a knowledge network by entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs is yet another area of interest. With existence of several interest groups and knowledge sharing groups or networks, it is well known that these social networks have gone on to help several of its members by bringing together strangers separated by physical distances onto a common platform. Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurs have found this platform an extremely viable medium through which knowledge of business processes, technicalities, laws, organisation culture and so on can be shared extensively in a cost effective manner.