DRAFT VERSION: PRE-PUBLICATION
January 2008
Testing the friendship: Feminism and the limits of online social networks
Short essay for the Commentary and Criticism section,Feminist Media Studies
Researching Web 2.0: Internet Social Networks And The Demise Of Gender?
Submitted by
Dr Melissa Gregg
ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower
The University of Queensland
QLD Australia 4072
p + 61 7 3346 9762
m + 61 4 0859 9359
f + 61 7 3365 7184
With the use of online technologies now becoming a matter of course for many middle-class professionals, research into online cultures and communities is thankfully starting to move beyond mass media demands to diagnose internet subcultures as the realm of pedophilia or pathology. Rather than fuelling parents’ fears about teen vulnerability or panics over privacy, a growing body of research is demonstrating that online friendships and communities are a necessary recompense for the intrusion of public-sphere demands on leisure time, the widespread expectation of computer literacy among young people and the long hours culture of the many engaged in computer-mediated information jobs (eg. Alan Liu 2004;Mark Nunes 2006;Andrew Ross 2003). The extent to which people choose to conduct significant parts of their personal lives online---from finding the next book they should read to finding a life partner---shows that we are witnessing a change in both the opportunities available for previous forms of leisured activity and attitudes as to their reliability in providing satisfying personal relationships.
What we haven’t seen develop in line with these shifts is a range of theoretical tools for feminists to draw on to link these changes to established methodologies of inquiry and critique. So far the bulk of research focused on social networking sites has tended to explore issues such as surveillance and exploitation---particularly given that the regular user of social networking websites is often young and female (Michael Thelwall 2007)---or the narcissism and vulgarity of maintaining “silly” and “raunchy” homepages (eg Christine Rosen 2007), which is also suggestive of certain gendered stereotypes originating from an outdated public/private sphere distinction. What internet studies research has offered in quantitative measures (egNicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and CliffLampe, 2007) has been limited by the cultural specificity of the typically North American slant of the most well funded research.[1] While attempts have been made to quantify the immaterial labour taking place on websites like Facebook (Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus 2007), it has been less common for commentators to describe the relationship between social networking websites and already existing categories of paid work, labour and class, especially as these are experienced by women. This is surprising given that it is work-based or vocationally-oriented locations these websites emerge from and are regularly accessed within. Aspiring musicians were the driving force behind the popularity of MySpace (the site’s key feature was to allow the free distribution of band demos) while in Facebook, college and post-tertiary job locations have been crucial to initial membership and subsequent exercises in displaying identity. The fact that the academics producing presently available studies also inhabit these latter venues, and often resemble the normative user of these sites, may explain why labour and class issues have been downplayed. When offering personal reflections and work in progress in relation to these constantly changing websites, our capacity to understand their significance is in inverse proportion to our ability to see beyond our own inevitably limited social networks.
Nonetheless what we can tell already is that social networking sites are a manifestation of what Alan Liu has termed the “eternal, inescapable friendship” specific to knowledge work (2004, p. 172). Sites like MySpace and Facebook foster a new form of literacy amongst users – what I call a broadcast impulse – which encourages them to articulate and communicate themselves with regularity and ease. Here it is not incidental to remember that MySpace emerged as a publicity website for aspiring musicians: this entrepreneurial impetus remains in the mainstream uptake of the platform. The broadcast dimension means people can ensure the image they project to others is a favourable one, while also allowing them to become skilled in networking to create an archive of “contacts” for the future. Indeed, more explicitly professional sites such as LinkedIn, Doostang and Zubka combine the two functions of friendship and job opportunity – the latter actually pays the user when he or she successfully recruits a friend for an appropriate job, while a service like NotchUp pays users to be interviewed by potential employers. These online hubs are able to mine the address books in email programs on your computer or server so that any contact made over time can be notified of your profile. Here the cloudy distinction between contact and friend perpetuated by office software packages can be seen to play out in an unfolding set of encounters: the boundaries between personal and professional become blurred, just as the role of the career consultant becomes an everyday activity.
At the heart of social networking websites is the mutually affirming, reciprocal “link”: friends are listed in blogrolls, “pinged” in “trackbacks” or displayed in aggregated galleries to add value, demonstrate popularity and affirm credibility. Gestures of presence and connection are the material reflections of a worthy online self, and the confidence that one’s self is worthy of broadcast ties to broader trends in neoliberalism that celebrate the positive virtues of entrepreneurialism and self-assurance. In online communities, relationships become part of the CV for which you are judged, and the testimonials of “contacts” are central to maintaining status. In this way, what is most notable is the extent to which these sites reproduce offline culture rather than threaten or oppose it, and how feminist research already accounts for these processes very well. Rosalind Gill (2007) and Angela McRobbie’s (2002) research on the precarious labour conditions of the creative industries shows that such jobs are highly competitive, very much premised on who you know as much as what you know, and in spite of their glamorous image, demand long hours and a high degree of sacrificial labour. Social networking sites have grown in tandem with these conditions: are symptomatic of them as much as they perpetuate them. Yet the precociousness they encourage from users---the self-reflexivity required to broadcast oneself and the literacy of being able to distinguish “friends” who share similar or desirable characteristics---chastens web enthusiasts’ claims that “anyone can publish/edit/broadcast” online. So far, “broadcasting yourself” on social networking sites has generally meant speaking to a community that is already in existence, either geographically near to the user or already sharing his or her past or present preoccupations. The forms of community created in these acts seem destined to perpetuate homogeneous networks of similar social backgrounds (see danah boyd 2007; Jason Wilson 2007) even as they are marketed as liberating us from this very constraint.
Social networking sites clearly offer positive short term benefits.The skills and etiquette learned in online interactions positions users well for the kinds of work they are likely to be striving for in the present or near future, just as the sites themselves may act as a form of workplace solidarity amongst those currently employed in geographically disparate cubicles of contemporary office culture. Even if it were the case that only young people used these platforms, participation in online communities is in many ways both sensible and valuable preparation for the labour conditions currently flourishing in the network society -- and thus the kind of economy to which educated, tech savvy, English-speaking college graduates will continue to contribute.
But these same technologies are also poised to impact on a wider majority of workers than simply the young, rendering us vulnerable in new ways. Firstly, the potential for all interactions taking place to be monitored by friends and colleagues is not unlike one’s social life being a constantly available CV -- part of the “always on” persona that accompanies the uptake of wireless technologies (Melissa Gregg 2007). Further, participating in online interest sites is beginning to resemble a new form of surplus labour (Coté and Pybus 2007). By providing personal details of taste and consumption habits for others to see, such information can be and is already used to develop and sell products back to the user. The “work of being watched”, as Mark Andrejevic (2004) puts it, is the typical explanation business pundits provide for why Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace; meanwhile, the corporate deployment of MySpace and Facebook for brand positioning and free publicity threatens to ruin what remains of the organic aspects of the site’s networking features.
Feminists can welcome the fact that the rise of social networking is overdue recognition for the affirmative, relationship-building skills that women have developed over time -- often through media consumption and technology use -- as a way of escaping their relegation to the realm of everyday life. Indeed, the regularity with which commentators deride Facebook (including knowing predictions ofits demise, see Cory Doctorow 2007) seem attributable to the fact that the default affect of the site has proven so cloyingly positive at the same time as its routine encounters remain so unremarkable. These factors pose a major challenge to the negative modes of narcissism, nihilism (Geert Lovink 2007), cynicism or bombast that, by contrast, have been the hallmarks of blogging, and have at times appeared close to being the only way of credentialing appropriate participation in Web 2.0. The very banality of much social networking interaction also questions the default version of libertarian politics accompanying internet innovations from the outset. The democratisation of participation in online space with Web 2.0 has revealed the elitism that haunted these earlier delusions of radicalism.
As participants and scholars of these new technologies we must now begin to assess whether an overdue appreciation for the “wealth of networks” (Yochai Benkler 2006) brings changes in institutional empowerment for women, or whether social networking technologies merely help to assuage the position of the many who still remain outside the circuits of privilege entrenched offline in the Old Boys’ network of so many professions. We should also be aware of the inequalities in access and use that are developing between women of different educational and occupational backgrounds as those in desk-bound, computer literate jobs set the pace and terms of engagement for others. Outside of the middle class Anglosphere of much feminist scholarship, it is much harder to discern the very different working conditions of women whose routine and often dangerous manual labour provides the computing infrastructure for the web-based chatting between contacts and colleagues in the West. The convenience of making online friends, like with like, in cultural and regional vacuums means we will need to boost our effortsto seek out these voices and have them populate our pages and RSS feeds much more regularly. Ultimately it is cross-cultural analysis between feminists that will help us remain cognisant that while the friendships we cherish on and offline may be premised on a form of loyalty, the workings of capital and labour hire that continue to impact unfairly on women across the globe are not.
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DRAFT VERSION: PRE-PUBLICATION
January 2008
References
Andrejevic, M. (2004) Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Maryland.
Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,Yale University Press, New Haven.
boyd, d. (2007) ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’,Apophenia, [OnlineBlog Essay] June 24. Available at:
Coté, M. & Pybus, J.(2007) ‘Learning to immaterial labour 2.0’, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 88-106.
Doctorow, C. (2007) ‘How your creepy ex-co-workers will kill Facebook’, Information Week, [Online] November 26, Available at:
Ellison, Nicole B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C.(2007) ‘The benefits of Facebook “friends”: Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12, pp. 1143-1168.
Gill, R. (2007) Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade after the Web, Network Notebooks 47, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Gregg, M. (2007) ‘Freedom to work: The impact of wireless on labour politics’, in ‘Wireless Cultures and Technologies’, Special issue of Media International Australia, eds Gerard Goggin & Melissa Gregg, no. 125, November, pp. 57-70.
Liu, A. (2004) The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Lovink, G. (2007) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture,Routledge, New York and London.
McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 516-531.
Nunes, M. (2006) Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Rosen, C. (2007) ‘Virtual friendship and the new narcissism’, The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Summer, pp. 15-31.
Ross, A. (2003) No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, Basic Books, New York.
Thelwall, M. (2007) ‘Social networks, gender and friending: An analysis of MySpace member profiles’, Unpublished paper, Available online at:
Wilson, J. (2007) ‘“Digital white flight”? Facebook, class and social networking’, University of Bedfordshire New Media Research Group Blog, [Online] Available at:
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[1]See the Pew Internet and American Life Project at which is both the model and source data for much of the quantitative internet studies currently coming out of the US.