Preface

Such is the astonishing overuse of low-paid casualised labour in UK universities that in April 2008, aged just 24, I was given the opportunity to teach master’s students in one of the UK’s most prestigious journalism departments, despite not having a master’s degree or any qualification in journalism, and having never worked as a journalist. Especially given the difficult things it gave me to think about, this is an opportunity for which I will nonetheless be forever grateful. In my under-qualified, youthful foolishness, I was thrilled with the flattering visiting lecturer business card, not realising the scale of the challenge I had accepted. My responsibility was to teach these students about online journalism, and the first task that this involved was to reverse engineer what good online journalism actually consisted of, so that my teaching of it would keep my passionate but demanding students happy.

I had been largely unaware of journalism’s existential crisis, particularly in relation to the internet, but it didn’t take long to figure out something was wrong. Already having a firm understanding of the web from a technical and a design perspective, my attentions focused on what journalism really and truly meant in an ontological sense, how that could look when expressed on the web, and what other people were doing in this area. As I explored the world of journalism beyond my department I found to my dismay that, where technology was not, at one extreme, being completely fetishised in the newsroom and was not, at the other extreme, inspiring utter fear amongst a technophobic old-guard, the emphasis was on the reproduction of existing journalistic practices in as faithful a way as the HTML medium would allow. Journalists, some of whose achievements in their own industry I respected enormously, seemed to think that they could start dictating the rules of this medium. As a digital native who had already been a keen web user for over a decade, I knew that this naïve, arrogant positivism about what they had always done would not fly, and that fetishising the technology would be no good either. Didn’t they realise that this isn’t how the web works? The web, I felt, had a culture, a way of working, and if journalists wanted to continue doing what was essential to their work — bringing people important information — they needed to pay attention to the ways in which the web functioned.

In the subsequent years, I disavowed myself of the idea that the web had a culture. Instead it seemed more likely that it was reflecting the culture of the moment in concentrated and variously distorted ways, like an old mirror. As the web quickly developed and became more and more integrated into people’s lives, I became increasingly sure of one thing: Besides the information super-highway (more of an information lane these days), it is the non-factual, non-informational uses of the web that would come to dominate. Those in the business of communicating facts for a living would need to pay very close attention, and consequently, so did I.

In the course of this enquiry, I have become fascinated with one question: If people don’t primarily use the web for information anymore, what do they mostly use it for, and why? What started with an interest in helping my students understand the flow of information over the web became a preoccupation with the use of networked media to learn something about people and society more generally. This runs somewhat against the tide of a significant proportion of research on social media, which has used behaviour to understand technology, instead of the reverse. Rather than just talking about journalism, we therefore needed to talk about the world in which journalism was trying to survive. To explain the true challenge facing my journalism master’s students, I consequently found myself drawing on an increasingly broad array of materials. The works of people as diverse as Benedict Anderson, Harry Braverman, John Berger, Natalie Fenton, David Harvey, Julie E. Cohen, Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca Mackinnon, Mary Poovey, and Lawrence Lessig often became our readings or informed my lectures, and incidentally it is in the same spirit of incorporating any interesting or relevant material, regardless of intellectual tradition, that I have written this book.

In my first few years of teaching, the journalism department in that particular institution was mostly preoccupied with reproducing the golden era of journalism. While I enjoyed some good conversations, other colleagues showed the same impatience, contempt, and desire to oversimplify that often colours the demeanour of journalists confronted with theory. Single-minded emphasis on graduates securing jobs within a shrinking journalism industry, drowning in its own dogma, did not help. If anybody had actually asked what I was teaching, they might well have been horrified by the outward-looking unorthodoxy, but for the most part I was sheltered by indifference. While I am pleased to say that this picture has much improved today as that department has become more well-rounded and forward looking, the enquiry that has followed that initial challenge has nevertheless been largely a conversation with academic colleagues from other disciplines, with friends and family, and with my students, who were far more open-minded, and many of whom became friends. In the end this was just as well, because the answers ultimately have only an indirect connection to journalism, even if they are directly applicable. Online media are the water in which journalists must swim; the party at which they must ingratiate themselves; the language in which they must gain fluency.

This book is the result of my explorations of our relationship to online media, and articulates the conclusions I have come to about human subjectivity, capitalism, and technology. I have made a series of arguments that combine the psychological and political, the philosophical and sociological. The arguments I present here will not accord with a conventional deterministic view of what social media are doing to us, or to our culture, politics, friendships, etc. Nor will they accord with more nuanced critiques advanced in the past about identity, mass self-communication, new public spheres, subcultures, and so forth.

As the architecture and features of the web have developed, it has become increasingly clear that so-called social media are the means by which access to information and other content is facilitated online. Social media, while often subjected to facile, deterministic analysis, are a fascinating and varied site at which to observe culture, psychology, politics, language, emotion, and abundant human creativity, and information still has an important role to play on them too. At the same time, there are worrying aspects to how they are used. The compulsive, highly dependent relationship that many people have developed with social media, while it must not be judged or sneered at, needs to be understood widely in order to be ameliorated. What this usage says about our states of mind and the state of our societies is not a lesson about technology so much as about society and human subjectivity themselves. The ways that our vulnerability in relation to these media is being taken advantage of by large, cynical corporations are also worrying. Again, these are more lessons about capitalism’s role in that society, rather than about technology. Similarly, whilst at times it will be necessary to give an account of the usage of social media and talk about how they are used, this is largely a book about why we use social media — a far more important question.

The five chapters of this book are a series of connected essays intended to provide a clear path through these questions, and the implications of their answers. Chapter One acts as an introduction and illustrates the breadth of this challenge in detail. It begins the process of making connections between how social media are used and the broader culture in which this often compulsive and self-detrimental usage takes place. Chapter Two looks in more detail at why so many people use social media, and what makes social media so hard to resist. It argues that we should see social media use as a form of hedonic media consumption, to which reward-seeking models of human behaviour can be applied, as with drugs or junk food. It explains how our relationship to social media is, much like these other forms of consumption, an attempt to compensate for poor emotional wellbeing. Chapter Three deals with the political and economic culture in which this compensation takes place — what are we compensating for when we use social media? What is making us unhappy? It was in a discussion of these questions that my friend Emanuelle Degli Esposti and I arrived at the idea of filling a void. Chapter Four focuses attention on the companies that develop and own social media platforms, and explores their business models and the trends in capitalism that they embody. It argues that social media platforms exploit our compulsive, emotionally-driven relationship to them, seeking surplus value in the misery that capitalism itself creates. Chapter Five returns to the problems raised above: If the primary role of digital content and internet-based media is a compensatory emotional one in which information is secondary at best, and the forms of capitalism apparent in social media need to make no serious investment in the cultural norms, veracity or democratic role of their content, what are the implications for our cultures and public sphere more generally of social media usage on such a large scale?

When taken together, it is my humblest hope that the arguments in these chapters provide a useful, clear perspective on what is really going on in our use of social media.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware

Planet Earth, November 2016

— ONE —

Towards a holistic enquiry into social media

That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

One morning at the end of June 2015, having finally managed to make it to a decent beach for the first time in several years, I saw a young woman taking pictures of herself in her swimming costume with her iPhone, standing half-submerged in the water. Aware of the harsh critiques of young women’s choices around how they represent themselves visually, and how the omnipotence of the smartphone camera has revealed new issues within that debate, I looked on and wondered what this young woman’s own opinion of those issues would be. Was she taking control of her own representation, objectifying herself, or just having a nice time? Now didn’t seem like the time to ask, and nor was I sure enough of my broken Italian. While I was struck by the intense concentration with which she posed for shot after shot, indifferent to the other people on the beach bearing witness to her digital self-portraiture, as a smartphone user myself I found the seeming nonchalance with which the device was handled in such close proximity to the water far more alarming. I didn’t realise you could do that! Still unaccustomed to how beach culture had evolved to include smartphones, I quietly hoped her phone was insured for water damage and went back to my reading, realising I was the odd one out.

As innocent as a few self-portraits or selfies gleefully taken on a beach during a hard-earned holiday might seem, some people take far greater risks than having to lie to an insurance company in order to get their phone replaced because they accidentally dropped it in the Mediterranean trying to get that perfect shot. That same year, 2015, more than thirty people died around the world in various predicaments while trying to take selfies. In 2016, it only took until the end of June to reach the same number. Many of the people who have been killed taking selfies have been in the developing world, where the culture of risk avoidance has developed less quickly than the culture of smartphone usage, and access to dangerous but impressive selfie-taking areas such as railway tracks, the habitats of unpredictable wildlife, and tall, climbable structures is less restricted. Whether it is up to your waist in sea water or with an oncoming train visibly speeding towards you, the juxtaposition of the person taking the selfie with an exotic, unusual, or far-fetched background is exactly what makes the shot worthwhile and gives it its meaning. Impending danger in the background is only one type of emotional context in which to take a selfie. Other emotionally salient contexts are also common. Numerous teenagers have been criticised in the press for taking selfies at sombre sites such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland or the memorial at the site of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. So many people have taken selfies at funerals, for example, that for a while there was an entire blog devoted to capturing them. When the blog’s editors decided to cease posting in December 2013, their final post featured former US president Barack Obama taking a selfie with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British prime minister David Cameron at Nelson Mandela’s memorial ceremony at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg. Former US president George W. Bush also took a selfie with U2 singer Bono at the same event. That same week, thousands of miles away, a tourist in Brooklyn, New York was widely criticised for taking a selfie as a man was attempting to throw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. Having been watching the unfolding situation for a few moments, she reportedly then photographed herself as officials attempted to talk the man down to safety behind her — successfully in the end. In September 2014 in Ankara, Turkey, a police official took a selfie showing in the background another desperate man moments from leaping to his death from a suspension bridge. The fact that such cases have tended to receive public outcry shows that we have not shaken a sense that some things perhaps shouldn’t be recorded in this way, yet they continually happen anyway, which suggests a degree of tension or ambivalence about such actions. There is almost something desperate about our desire to perform online. In April 2016, when mentally ill man Seif El Din Mustafa hijacked a Cairo-bound flight and diverted it to Cyprus, passenger Ben Innes approached the hijacker to take a selfie with him, subsequently sharing the bizarre image online to great acclaim. That Innes was a health-and-safety auditor whose job was presumably to point out risk in exchange for money only makes the story more hilarious and bizarre. The desire to use images of yourself in unusual or salient contexts can even get you arrested. In 2016, domestic violence fugitive Mack Yearwood was so pleased to have been named Wanted of the Week by the police department in the town of Stuart, Florida, that he posted a copy of the genuine wanted poster as his own Facebook profile picture, eventually leading to his arrest. Even if not a selfie as such, it is instructive to note just how strong the desire to share images of ourselves that will somehow impress or shock can be.

As authoritative selfie-taking expert Kim Kardashian, author of Selfish (a coffee-table book consisting only of her selfies), once said: I think it really takes about 15-20 selfies that someone takes on their phone before they post the right one. Similar to the numerous films in which a character holds up a recent daily newspaper to show that they are still alive, showing yourself in a given visual context is a way of emphasising your connection to a particular moment. Breanna Mitchell, one of the people shamed for taking a selfie at Auschwitz, told the press that she had shared the image in memory of her late father, who had had a love of history. You may be seeking validation, showing unity, making an homage, or it may simply be cool, but these different purposes all have in common that they make your appearance in that location at that time into something performative. The fact that people are willing to go to such lengths to get the right one tells us that their motivations must be strong enough to challenge the normal reservations over decency or taste, or safety for that matter. Facing possible death on a train track, being at Nelson Mandela’s memorial ceremony next to Barack Obama, looking fly in your swimwear on a beautiful Italian beach, or having a quiet but nonetheless highly public moment of homage at a former concentration camp all confirm this in different ways.

One can’t necessarily assume that all of these images are intended to be uploaded to social media or shared publicly, of course, and in some cases the capturing of such images may well have been for strictly private record, as Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie at Mandela’s funeral with Cameron and Obama — which never surfaced — seems to have been. The data suggest, however, that most selfies are for sharing with a wider group of people via the internet, like George W. Bush’s selfie with Bono at the same event, which was posted to image-sharing platform Instagram. Over three hundred million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, and 95% of young adults admit to having taken at least one such picture of themselves. It is even possible to take animated selfies, which have become a regular feature of media-sharing app Snapchat.

A bit like how Gulliver’s Travels is often abridged for children to only include his visit to Lilliput, the story of a selfie’s appearance on a social network is just one small event in a longer story, which doesn’t start with the snapping of the picture or stop at the successful distribution of the image to its intended audience. The full story highlights some of the broader issues with social media, and to illustrate this, we can take the posting of a selfie from the beach mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter and fictionalise based on real-life data to show where the story might go next.

Let’s say some hours after posting your selfie, you can’t sleep. You check your phone again and it’s 4am — the bright bluish screen of the device illuminating your face in an otherwise dark room. Not knowing what else to do with yourself and feeling that immediate sleep is unlikely, you open the Facebook app out of habit. How many more likes has the latest photo you just posted received? Has it reached a hundred yet? Why not? Has your current partner, who may be soundly asleep beside you, liked it yet? Why not? Did s/ he really not like it? Is it because you might have put on weight, or are starting to get crow’s feet? Perhaps you could never ask him/her directly, but you may very likely have wondered such things. We can go further still: Perhaps somewhere far away in another time zone, an old friend, who is suffering from depression, sees the photo in her news feed as she logs onto her Facebook for the fourth time in twenty minutes, looking for… she doesn’t really know what. As she closes the web browser to end her Facebook session, the social network has not given her whatever she was looking for, and she feels more despondent and empty than ever. Elsewhere, a worker in the Philippines, hired by a firm subcontracted by Facebook Inc., has also seen the picture as part of a review process to make sure it conformed with the social network’s community standards. These workers are sometimes paid as little as one dollar per hour — sadly not a fiction (Webster, 2012).

Later that summer, let us continue to imagine, Facebook launch an advertising campaign for their social network, using real photos shared to the site, licensed from their users’ profiles, including the shot you uploaded. Your likeness appears alongside others on billboards in London, Paris, New York, São Paulo, Rome, and other world capitals. To complete the narrative and provide some pleasing circularity, a friend, recognising you in the ad, takes a picture of this ad, posts it on Facebook, and tags you in it. You might be outraged by the usage of your likeness in this way, but permission for this type of usage has been repeatedly if unwittingly assented to every time you use Facebook, since this is when you agree implicitly to their terms and conditions of usage, which include the granting of a worldwide, non-exclusive license to use any of your content for any purpose. According to Facebook’s terms and conditions of usage, the only way you could have prevented this happening was to delete the precious selfie from Facebook. The story of a standard selfie, it would seem, is not a particularly happy one. When selfies are shared, they are published onto pre-existing networks that are controlled by powerful, distant entities, but which reproduce and interact with the dynamics of existing social relations so that you won’t notice. Your selfies and other materials are stored in privately owned databases whose owners grant themselves permission to use them in whatever way they choose, including in advertising. Social media platforms will mix your selfie in with content from other users, and provide a quantitative measure for others to leave feedback on each item in real time in the form of likes, shares, or retweets, simultaneously providing the platform’s owners with valuable real-time metadata and content