Profiles as Conversation:
Ethnography of Communication on Facebook
Abstract
Facebook.com, a popular online social network site, provides its users with a means for representing their identities in the digital world. With the “Profile,” each user can manipulate his or her online identity that concurrently delineates personal information and converses with other online identities or “Friends.” Gender, date of birth, hobbies, interests, and relationship status are some of the identifying pieces of information that users display to fill out their Profile. The Profile not only depicts the user, but also shapes the representation of other individuals on Facebook.
Scholars have recently begun to study the Facebook phenomenon using surveys and statistical analyses, but none have used ethnography as a means for analysis. This paper draws upon ethnographic data to provide a phenomenological explanation to the Facebook experience. It argues that the digital world is a large part of the experience of young Americans and that the Internet is more social than commonly thought. Moreover, this paper problematizes the static nature of the Profile, arguing that the Profile converses directly with others’ Profiles in a constantly changing digital context that is simultaneously recreated and interpreted.
Introduction
Embodied conversation between individuals begins when they weave performance and interpretation into an intricate dance that allows individuals to consider voice and body cues. Meaning is interpreted from the context of the conversation and nuances of body and gesture.
However, embodied conversation differs from computer-mediated communication, where individuals must write themselves into being. With the Facebook Profile, multiple forms of media attempt to bridge the physical and the digital worlds and recapture some of the interpersonal cues that have been filtered out by the medium. Ultimately, the digital conversation lacks the spatial and temporal rules that govern embodied conversation, creating ambiguity and uncertainty for the users. How is context created and interpreted? How is conversation initiated and maintained? What function does it serve? How does searchability affect the ways that online users perform conversations? These are some of the questions that this paper attempts to answer by focusing on the conversations on Facebook, an online networking site.
What is Facebook?
Facebook is an online networking site that allows its users to create detailed personal Profiles that link with other users. Features such as photo posting, commenting on other users’ “Walls,” and joining groups relating to a shared interest also form a large part of the Facebook experience. Facebook distinguishes itself from other social networking sites like Myspace and Friendster because its participation is determined by offline social networks. Initially requiring membership in a university community, Facebook more recently includes members from specific high schools, regions, and companies. Social browsing is limited to the Friends that the user lists and people from the user’s offline community (e.g. a university or city). Users can manipulate their Profile’s privacy settings to control access to their entire Profile, photos, wall posts, and other social information. Facebook has become a huge Internet phenomenon, with more than 7.5 million registered members at over 2,000 U.S. colleges. It is the seventh most viewed web site with respect to total page views. Facebook has achieved notoriety among college students, strongly figuring into their everyday activities and ways of speaking.
Creating and Interpreting Context
Users must negotiate unknown audiences that are not bound by the same temporal and spatial rules that characterize real-time, face-to-face conversation. The digital world does not afford the user the opportunity to scrutinize the audience for physical and acoustic cues. Furthermore, the changing nature of the audience makes it impossible for the user to determine future audiences based on the present audience. This ambiguity creates discomfort and uncertainty in how to perform conversations. The fact that the user’s audience is loosely bounded by membership to the university community does assuage some of the user’s concerns. The user does not have the burden of dealing with the perceptions of all Facebook users, rather only those of the Facebook members that belong to her university. In fact, the Profile becomes a digital body through which the user communicates. “Digital” body language provides the necessary cues for appropriate digital conversation.
Still, users limit or edit some of the social information that is included in the profile in an attempt to deal with these unknown audiences. Recently, the blurring of the parental and professional audience with the social one has jeopardized the Facebook user. For example, a Resident Assistant (RA) set her profile to private by only allowing her Friends to access her Profile. She intended to prevent the parents of her residents from viewing photos of her in compromising situations, such as at a party with alcohol. Other students limit their profile to prevent potential employers from accessing similar incriminating photos. Cognizant that the audience can extend beyond the intended boundary of the university community, students negotiate these uncertainties by regulating the information in their Profile.
Not all Facebook users take the display of their social information as seriously. Disruptive playful contexts are established when users report witty, false information about their religious views, how they met certain “Friends,” or even romantic relationships. One Facebook user declares that her religious views concern “His noodly appendage,” referencing the parody of religion that claims the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the supernatural Creator in protest of intelligent design. Her willingness to add a risqué element to her profile reflects the humorous context that some users create on Facebook. Another user mischievously describes how she met her friend in the first person voice:
They met randomly in 1957: we were both on the highway to hell, but our trips were cut short when erica got arrested for dealing ecstasy to illegal immigrants, and i got arrested for punching young’uns and stealing their candy. as fate would have it, we were cellmates in the slammer. we exchanged numbers, screennames, myspaces, facebooks, and even got matching tattoos on our shaved heads. prison life was hard, but cocaine and mozart kept us sane.
Fantastically inventing the story, the user creates a naughty narrative that is intended for the delight of others. She feels comfortable eschewing the seriousness of providing accurate social information and instead replaces it with good-humored fun. Finally, a Facebook user has humorously interrupted the Facebook context by declaring that she is in a relationship with “Everybody’s Moms.” In a sense, the user mocks the social expectation for monogamous, heterosexual relationships and instead pronounces that she is part of a polygamous, homosexual one. On another level, she escapes from the social awkwardness of having to declare her true relationship status in a digital world that contains unknown audiences.
However, not all attempts at disrupting the context of Facebook are lighthearted. Stalkers employ the “poke button,” which implies light sexual overtones, to annoy Facebook users. The “poke button” sends a digital “poke” consisting of an image of a hand with a pointing index finger to the Facebook user. A message reads “You have been poked by [name of Facebook user].” One undergraduate Facebook user states that she received multiple pokes from a graduate student, which she found annoying and alarming. Eventually she sent a message to the graduate student, demanding that he cease contact with her. Sexual tension can easily be introduced to the Facebook context. Fortunately, offensive comments, or “flaming,” do not often occur in Profile-Profile communication. In their essay that asks, “How social is Internet communication,” Watt, Lea, and Spears (2000) argue that in computer mediated communication, group norms are reinforced when group identity is salient. Since the university community is the salient group identity, norms that demand courtesy and respect when posting comments on Profiles preclude “flaming.” In contrast, discussions in Facebook groups such as “Is abortion right or wrong?” whose membership consists of Facebook users from many different university communities, often displays incendiary posts that mount personal attacks against Facebook users. Due to the weakened group identity, the norms that insist on politeness no longer exist, allowing for confrontational comments to occur.
Thus, the Facebook user must create and interpret the Facebook context. Although she cannot quite capture a complete sense of the unknown audience that views her Profile, she can manage the type of her information she displays and the privacy settings of her Profile to minimize potential risks. Furthermore, she can create her own playful contexts that go beyond the intended context of Facebook in order to explore and recreate the digital world.
Conversing Through Profiles
Users often describe their initial confusion about creating an acceptable Profile and interacting socially on Facebook. Over time, this is displaced with the increasing familiarization with other people’s Profiles and viewing the digital actions made by other users. Through imitation and with a bit of creativity, users navigate the digital world of Facebook, understanding the tacit rules that underline the conversations between the user’s Profile and other online identities. These rules concern the appropriateness of initiation, timing, content, use, and medium of digital conversations.
In order to begin conversation with others, the Facebook user must deal with the socially awkward process of digitally requesting another Facebook user to be his “Friend.” Facebook does not allow for the qualification of the strength of the friendship, which further complicates the digital “Friending” process. The user can only accept or decline the Friendship request, theoretically providing a more egalitarian network that does not privilege one Friendship over another. In reality, users often agonize over who to accept as their Friend. In their model of politeness, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) use the idea of social face to explain the reason for interaction between two individuals. They argue that speakers balance their concern for the other’s face with the desire to defend their own. Speakers avoid “face-threatening” acts through “positive politeness,” such as expressions of friendliness or approval, and “negative politeness,” such as avoidance strategies for the imposition on the other individual. On the part of the user that extends the Friendship invitation, social face is at risk, for the invitation might be rejected. On the part of the recipient of the invitation, social face is at risk, for rejection might signal pretentiousness. Users struggle over what Facebook Friendship means, trying to decide whether to exclusively include only close friends from an offline context. Eventually, most users accept requests from anyone they know or vaguely recognize. But the deceptively simple choice between “Accept” or “Decline” still provides problems for Facebook users. There is no simple way of defining the type of relationship between “Friends;” this creates confusion and ambiguity when these relationships are publicly displayed. Further complicating the matter is the friendship request’s implied invitation to converse. When a user wants to reconnect with old friends such as acquaintances from high school, a friendship request would be a mechanism for beginning a dialogue. But sometimes the old friend does not want to begin dialogue, but thinks that it is rude to ignore the friend request. Differing expectations between the two users and the change of social setting of the conversation create tension with the friend request.
Although the non-verbal cues of embodied conversation are filtered out by the computer-mediated medium, Facebook users manage to sustain dialogue that incorporates some aspects of turn taking. Digital conversations between users’ Profiles do not occur in real time and thus turn taking is an issue. With regards to face-to-face turn taking, Sacks et al. (1974) argues that syntactic cues, intonation, and non-verbal behavior such as gaze and gesture signal “transition relevance places” where utterances are potentially complete. At these transition relevance places, a new speaker could begin talking or the same speaker could resume the conversation. But how can intonation and non-verbal behavior be conveyed in the conversations? Some Facebook users ingeniously use punctuation to capture the speaker’s intonation and indicate these transitions. One user comments, “i didnt get to see you in the psych building today….” With the ellipses, she simultaneously indicates a transition relevance place and invites the other Facebook user to reply to the comment. Also, when she writes, “dinner…Friday?” the rising intonation of the comment is implied with the question mark, signaling yet another transition relevance place. The content of comment also invites a response that should not be avoided. The Profile also provides conversational anchors that can reinitiate or sustain conversation. One Facebook user declares that when he wishes to restart a conversation with another user that he is not particularly close with, he uses the user’s pictures or piece of social information from the Profile to stimulate conversation. For example, he writes “way to be a badass.” in response to another user’s profile picture that shows him at a concert with a bloody nose caused by a jostling concert-goer’s careless elbow. The Profile itself acts as a conversational catalyst that the user can take advantage of to maintain the dialogue. Thus, the content of the Profile and the stylistic resources of the user combine to overcome the problems concerning the mechanics of the digital conversation.
However, not all topics are broached and only certain conversational anchors can be employed. For example, the user does not always believe that gender and sexuality can serve as an appropriate conversational anchor that the Profile may communicate. The user can specify gender and sexual orientation by choosing between pre-set options for “Sex” and “Interested In”. If the user deems his or her sexuality inappropriate to display, the “Interested In” field is left blank or misleadingly filled in. Gays that are not “out” in an offline context, or gays that are uncomfortable discussing their sexuality in a digital context, intentionally discard this piece of information. Others who believe that the Facebook labels “male” and “female” wrongly reinforce the gender binary and inadequately describe their identity also choose to leave the gender field blank. Many gays fear that others might initially judge them based on their sexuality and that current and future social relationships might be damaged. Since sexual orientation can be searched for and viewed, many gays set their Profile to a private status. In this case, the power of the Profile to engage conversation can potentially be dangerous; some gays think that the disclosure of their sexual orientation would be a face-threatening act. On Facebook, a private and public space, it is too risky to include certain pieces of information.
Finally, conversation on Facebook is not limited to the networking site. Facebook spans many different channels, including email, cell phone, blogging, and newspapers. Each Facebook friend request and Profile comment sends an email through the Facebook site alerting the recipient involved in the digital social action. Facebook users upload photos taken with their cell phone. College students post blog entries about Facebook use and how it occupies a large portion of their wasted time. Newspapers report on the Facebook phenomenon that has extended to almost every college in the United States. But most importantly, Facebook shapes interactions that occur in the physical world. Users utilize Facebook to manage social events, inviting people to come to their party or their performance. They plan lunch dates. They plan study sessions. The gap between the physical and the digital worlds has narrowed to the extent that the two worlds have begun to come together. Photos from past performances are included in the Facebook event information for future performances. People make promises in embodied conversation to “Facebook” the other person and plan the next time they will get coffee together. The intertwining of the digital and physical communities underscores the social nature of the Internet and its large role in defining the experience of young Americans.
Conclusion
The Facebook profile serves many social functions albeit in a digital world. It initiates, negotiates, maintains, and extends social conversation with its descriptive data, photos, articulated friendship links, and Profile comments. Digital conversation, conceived of through the interpretation and creation of contexts, negotiates unknown audiences and creates new social situations. Finally, the Profile itself acts as a medium and agent for initiating and sustaining conversation. With Facebook, the extension of the digital conversation to the physical indicates the success of online networking sites to incorporate multiple forms of expression and bridge the gap between offline and online contexts.
Brown, P. and Levison, S., cited in Mesthrie et. al., 2004, Introducing Sociolinguistics, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 189.
