From intimacy to anonymity: scalable sociality

In Chapter 1 it was argued that the particular form taken by polymedia within social media can be termed ‘scalable sociality’. The initial example from the English field site was based on school pupils. In our Brazilian field site many older people have limited access to the internet due to poor education and economic factors, so social media can be construed as a young person’s space for creating peer-based collectives and displays of modernity avoiding the adult gaze. Here, as elsewhere, social media often becomes a place for designating intimate relationships (ties of kinship, close friends, couples), where it is relative intimacy itself which is scaled, experienced, maintained and reinforced. In the south Indian field site social media works like ‘fictive kin’, where many people come to be seen as ‘aunties’ or ‘cousins’ (even though not biologically related) in the tradition of extended families and caste. So kinship is used as the idiom to express how far up a person has travelled on this same scale of intimacy.

In Sinanan’s field site in Trinidad many households have parents, children or siblings living abroad, and the use of social media is vital to the maintenance of basic family relationships. Indeed in some of our field sites social media has also allowed families who do not live in the same household to create more emotional bonds; they can spend more time together online than they might have done if actually living together. For example, teenagers in some Western countries may live at home, but sometimes with very limited family connectivity; for example, they may write notices forbidding parents to enter the teenager’s room. Most of their sociality extends from the screens in their bedrooms, a space kept quite separate from the rest of the house. While they live in the same house as the rest of the family, therefore, it can be argued that these teenagers do not live ‘together’ – any more than they live ‘together’ with the people with whom they socialise online.

Haynes found in the north Chilean field site that WhatsApp has become incredibly important for mineworkers in negotiating periods of separation from families while they are working away. Yet while social media solves the problem of separation for some families, it may also bring problems for others. Some miners reported that social media increases feelings of jealousy among male partners of (the few) female miners; in other cases it may exacerbate already problematic family relationships. However, Haynes also reports that miners see social media as bringing an element of the outside world to the ‘asylum’ of the mine, giving it a sense of humanity.

In the industrial China field site some couples who maintained a long-distance relationship with each other even found that their partners appeared to be more caring online, free from the mundane concerns of physically shared everyday life. Some junior family members also reported that they found senior family members to be more easy-going and funny online, thanks to their use of cute ‘emojis’ on social media – whereas in face to face encounters with seniors these relationships were supposed to be far more serious and respectful.¹⁷ Once again, so far from being separated from offline relationships, social media has become a primary mode by which traditional close-kin relations are in different cases sustained, retained, reinvigorated, but also in certain cases transformed. In all these cases scalable sociality encompasses the possibility that social media can be more intense and intimate than offline relationships.

Another reason this can become highly significant is when people become immobile. Miller included within his field work an extensive study of how a hospice communicates with patients, who mainly have a terminal diagnosis based on advanced cancer. He found that immobility has had a pronounced impact even in a rural area because of the particular nature of English sociality. Sociality in the village follows a general pattern in which people are highly sociable in public, but fiercely defensive of the private sphere; this combines with a strong sensibility among older people that they do not want to become a burden on their relatives and friends. As a result there is a surprising degree of isolation and loneliness. As an applied project, this led to recommendations to the hospice for encouraging the use of social media and easy-to-use devices such as the iPad, particularly at earlier stages of the disease in which people are more amenable to support and assistance. Having established that the cause of loneliness is the dualism of private and public sociality, the specific definition of social media as a form of scalable sociality that bridges between the private and the public makes it a particularly appropriate part of the potential solution to this problem of loneliness in the context of English social reticence.¹⁸

In some cases, the closer the relationship the more forms of different communication platforms and technologies are supported. Broadbent’s¹⁹ study shows that the proliferation of social media does not necessarily give rise to the extension of new social connections in the region (Switzerland) where she worked, ‘but rather the intensification of a small group of highly intimate relationships that have now managed to match the richness of their social connectedness with a richness of multiple communication channels’.²⁰ As is often the case with our project, this generalisation works only in certain regions and not others.

Scalable sociality can be related to many other dimensions, such as the degree to which people want or feel they need the kinds of sociality made available by social media. Nicolescu found in the south Italian field site that for most residents their prior social networks were seen as both stable and sufficient. While the majority of people’s Facebook contacts are also from the town, co-residence meant there was little need for social media as a mode for maintaining these relationships. As a result most people saw social media as making very little difference to their lives. However, Nicolescu also noticed that for a small group of people who had experience of higher education in big cities and had far more diverse social networks outside the small town, returning to the town often meant losing this extended social connectivity. For these people social media played a vital role in retaining such wider connections, often also seen as more important than everyday offline relationships.

Generally speaking, as found in our survey in Chapter 4, people view the way social media facilitates social relations positively.²¹ For close relationships it is commonly a place where trust and affection are cultivated and expressed. At the same time people are aware of another side to this coin, in which the increased visibility of relationships leads to jealousy and surveillance.

Compared to these more common attitudes to the use of social media within intimate social relationships, we see a very diverse response to the potential of social media for connecting with strangers. The Chileans tend not to use dating websites or apps such as Tinder and Grindr, now becoming increasingly popular in England; here people sometimes seem to have less mistrust of strangers as potential sexual partners than as people who might view their social media postings. Instead the Chileans rely on friends of friends on Facebook when searching for romantic relationships online. In both sites strangers will not become online contacts without offline endorsement, for instance knowing the person offline or knowing someone who knows them well.²² Otherwise strangers were a focus of suspicion.

This contrasts with our rural Chinese field site, where McDonald notes that prior to using social media interactions with ‘mosheng ren’ (‘strangers’) were generally far less common. Now young people may friend ‘luanjia’ (‘large numbers of strangers’) randomly, though others, especially married couples, maintain a comparatively cautious attitude toward strangers online.²³ Similarly Costa found out that in Mardin social media, especially Facebook, has been used to expand an individual’s social networks to ‘yabanci’ (‘strangers’) – whereas traditionally people’s social relations mainly included either ‘akraba’ (‘relatives’) or ‘koms¸u’ (‘neighbours’), and for some categories of people also ‘arkadas’ (‘friends’).²⁴

A transformation in attitudes towards strangers online was also observed in the industrial Chinese field site. Here many see entirely online friendships as ‘chun’ (‘purer’) relationships, since they do not incur the pragmatic demands that often feature heavily in offline relationships and are less infused by social hierarchy. As Feige, a factory worker, put it:

They [online friends] like you and talk with you because they really like you being you, not because you are rich so that they can borrow money from you, or you are powerful so that they can get a job from you. Here [online] everything is much purer, without power and money involved.

A parallel sentiment was expressed by some factory owners. They suggested that they sometimes avoided attending school reunions in fear of requests for financial help from their old classmates. However, they were happy to talk with online strangers on WeChat to release the stress that they believed could not be shown to their subordinates and family members. Although the factory owners and the factory workers represent the two extremes of income in this field site, they have similar reasons for wanting to friend and communicate with strangers online. In both cases online relationships are seen as more authentic compared to offline relationships, which in many cases are highly mediated (or ‘polluted’, as people say) by factors such as wealth and social status.

In the case of more public social media, the online exposure of relationships has also to be interpreted as an ‘official verification’. In our south Indian field site, the relatively close and intimate communications facilitated by WhatsApp were used for communication between family members. On the other hand Facebook, as the most public platform, is the place where family and kinship ties are consciously performed to the audience of non-family contacts. For instance, a Facebook update of a new-born baby is usually followed by many ‘likes’ and comments from family members, even though all of them have already sent congratulatory wishes via phone calls or in face to face situations before posting. Such social media performances are tailored for non-family and the wider public that share Facebook. Haynes explains that in north Chile a romantic relationship will only gain its ‘official’ validity by being published as a Facebook ‘relationship update’ or through informal posting of love notes on the wall of one’s significant others. Similarly in industrial China young couples constantly need the online audience on QQ to witness their romance. In some cases young factory migrants even set up QQ groups which include all of one’s online contacts in order to say ‘I love you’ in public (on the online group chat) to their girlfriend or boyfriend. Such confessions online are viewed as one of the biggest commitments in a relationship. In this way social media can make us more conscious and self-conscious of both our relationships and ourselves. In these cases offline relationships have now become dependent upon their recognition online before they are accepted as ‘real’.

If we take these examples together, we see that social media has entirely contradictory consequences across the range of field sites. Yet this is partly because the term ‘social media’ conjoins a wide range of platforms. If we treat them as polymedia, that is as a general range within which each has its complementary niche, then a bit more consistency emerges. There is the use of platforms to create an opposition between more public and more private sociality, as well as the exploitation of either different platforms or different genres of usage within the same platform, to help organise one’s social world into separated categories. This includes south Indian teachers’ differentiated attitudes towards WhatsApp, depending on whether this is directed to school or family, the use of Facebook by Brazilian teenagers to gain autonomy from the control of adults and Chilean lovers gaining official verification from the widest public. From the maintenance of intimate relationships to the possibilities of forming relationships with strangers, social media can be seen as a form of ‘scalable sociality’ enabling people to better control their social lives. This may be through adapting existing social norms to different contexts or allowing for the creation of entirely new forms of social relations and sociality by exploiting this register of degrees of intimacy and distance.