Networked technologies as emotional resources? Exploring emerging emotional cultures on social network sites such as Facebook and Hi5: a trans-cultural study

How to deal with culture affecting technology adoption and usage?

Due to the multidimensional process of contemporary globalization, elements such as modernism, traditionalism and fundamentalism (Meyer, 2002: 66) are constantly in conflict within every society and this has rendered obsolete dichotomous conceptions of ‘the West and the Rest’ (Rottenburg, 2006: 33) as well as associated concepts of socio-centrism and individualism (e.g. Shimizu, 2001). This insight has led to theoretical as well as methodological challenges as to how to deal with differences without ‘Othering’. One way to approach these conceptual difficulties is a social constructionist perspective, which views ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as the effects of discursive practices, while it is essential to analyse how human and non-human actors collude in order to understand differences and similarities (Latour, 1993).

The complex interplay of local and global cultural elements yields ‘third cultures’ (Featherstone, 1990: 2), where traditional arrangements of norms and values might be re-affirmed and contested simultaneously. Within this process, ‘the work of imagination’ (Appadurai, 2004: 13) as ‘a space of contention, in which individuals and groups try to integrate the global into their own practices of modernity’, plays an important role. Everyday experience is increasingly ‘mediatized’ (Krotz, 2007), as it is permeated by digital media technologies and contents, especially in the lives of young people.

SNS might be regarded as technologies of imagination creating ‘communities of sentiment’, groups that ‘imagine and feel things together’ (Appadurai, 1996: 8). Boyd and Ellison (2007: 1) define SNS as:

web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Basically, ICTs enabling seamless connectivity (Plant, 2004: 61) represent relationships with other users (Vincent, 2006) and can therefore be regarded as ‘emotional resources’. Moreover, systems like the internet illustrate the idea of post-social forms – ‘forms of human interaction mediated by and constituted through communication technologies’ (Knorr-Cetina, 2001: 533). In post-social environments, objects take on the role of interaction partners. Therefore users feel more and more emotionally attached to their personal communication devices, their profiles on virtual platforms like SNS, and the hybridization of both, to the point where the profiles seem to form a part of their ‘selves’ (Hjorth, 2006).

Although previous articles concerning SNS address a wide range of topics, as, for example, displayed on Boyd’s blog, ² relatively few studies (Boyd, 2007; Livingstone, 2008) focus explicitly on intimacy and emotional expression practices on SNS. Likewise, the role emotions play in socio-technical systems has scarcely been researched so far, with a few exceptions (e.g. Gomert and Hennion, 1999). The potential media technology has to positively influence mood has been addressed as mood management (Zillmann, 1988). The mobile phone as an affective artifact and the role(s) it acquires in intimate relationships has also been the subject of several studies (e.g. Raiti, 2007). As the online articulation of intimacy may resonate differently in different cultural settings, a more detailed examination is needed.

We propose that SNS form ‘cultural objects’ (Denzin, 1992: 81) that are surrounded by practices reflecting meaning. As research has already shown, online environments can be considered ‘third places’ (Soukup, 2006). According to Oldenburg (1999: 20), third places are ‘gathering places’ with a prevailingly playful mood that are perceived as an escape distinct from other settings of daily life. These comfort zones facilitate being sociable by providing a neutral ground for conversation in the sense of communication, free of strategic thought and fostering ‘more informal, even intimate relations among people than could be entertained at home’ while similarly enabling users to keep a certain distance from other people (Oldenburg, 1999: 23).

Third places are also levellers, as they do not set formal criteria for membership and exclusion, thereby expanding possibilities for meeting new people. As Soukup (2006: 431) remarks, ‘third places cannot eliminate status and power: however, the types of conversation in third places can expand the opportunities for obtaining social capital’. In particular, virtual third places as defined by the characteristics of accessibility, localization and presence (Soukup, 2006) exhibit emotional qualities, enhance feelings of security, and can provide opportunities to overcome emotional barriers due to their ‘disinhibiting effects’ (Suler, 2004). Since users from different cultural communities may interpret cultural objects in different ways, we aim to examine which aspects determine if an SNS is perceived as a ‘third place’.

Culture – emotion – emotion culture

In order to effectively analyse how emotion culture is affected by networked technologies, this section will elaborate on how individual levels of emotional expression and experience relate to societal levels by outlining Hochschild’s (1979) ‘feeling rules’, as well as Illouz’s (2007) concept of ‘emotional capitalism’.

Generally, culture can refer to the entirety of lifestyles and life conditions, as well as the ways in which people give meaning to their lives (Hall, 2002: 96). More specifically, cultures can be referred to as discursive formations, which are based on diverging systems of interpretation and classification (Woodward, 1997). Cultures not only provide a spectrum of potential ideas and concepts about the world, but also frame the ways in which emotions are perceived and constructed, thus giving meaning to emotional experience (Hall, 1997a: 2). One principle that ‘regulates culture’ (Hall, 1997b: 234) is normativity, which guides human action by defining what is acceptable or unacceptable. As with other social practices, emotional expression is also regulated by the norms epitomized by the ‘feeling rules’, which, like an emotional vocabulary (Burkitt, 2002: 151), are acquired by individuals through socialization. As a part of emotion ideologies about appropriate attitudes, feelings and emotional responses within basic spheres of activity, these feeling rules form the basis of each ‘emotion culture’ (Hochschild, 1979). Each society displays a dominant emotion culture, as Kotchemidova (2012: 208) showed in the U.S. As an element of ‘cultural models’ (D’Andrade, 1985), that is, selected combinations of signs, emotions can invoke culturally accessible scenes and scripts, therefore leading to different perceptions and actions.

Expressing emotions, the logic of intimate relationships and the transformation of feeling rules

Forming the basis of attachment, emotions are commonly viewed as the glue that ties people together and thus renders social structures and systems of cultural symbols viable. Expressing emotions builds the basis of intimacy in the broad sense, which arises when ‘two individuals exchange their views thereby presenting at least a part of themselves’ (Daub, 1996: 124). The expression of emotion can also be regarded as an element of sociality, which can be described as ‘the sum of social behaviors that permit the individual to traverse from the state of individuality to that of sociality and fellowship’ (Papacharissi, 2011: 316).

Reciprocity is perhaps the most important principle regulating the ways that information and emotions are exchanged within social relationships (Stegbauer, 2002: 19). The traditional Thai norm of reciprocity follows a mechanism of obligation (bhun khun; Mulder, 2000: 47) that implies that the individual must give services in return to (superior) people who have shown benevolence to that person. Inside–outside relationships also play an important role within the classical canon of Thai feeling rules. As relationships with the outside are pragmatically motivated by a desire for material gain (phonprayot), self-display and self-orientation dominates interaction within this context. In contrast, interaction with intimates is inspired by consideration (krengchai) and, at its most intimate level, ‘by a feeling of mutual understanding and cordial relaxation’ (Mulder, 2000: 60). However, it is an important Thai feeling rule that personal problems, frustrations and deeper feelings should remain unvoiced in intimate relationships. Conversely, in situations of mutual informality (khwam pen kaneng) people are not required to keep their façade of presentation and are permitted to speak more openly and to experience fun (sanuk). This example shows that feeling rules go hand in hand with ‘display rules’ (Ekman and Friesen, 1975), which regulate acceptable ways of expressing emotions.

While in Thai society Buddhism is the main religious tradition that can be regarded as an element influencing emotion culture, the traditional canon of feeling rules in western societies is predominantly shaped by Christian morality traditions alongside secular traditions, which respect external law as the basis for morality (Foucault, 1988). When trying to grasp Austrian, often classified as ‘European’ or ‘western’ feeling rules, it must be taken into consideration that European values are influenced by diverse traditions, including Christian-Jewish, Greco-Roman and Islamic traditions (Huber, 2005: 70). Foucault (1988: 16) considers the normative feeling rules of western societies, which are implicitly aimed at regulating sexual behavior, to be subject to ‘rules of secrecy, decency, and modesty’ and the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.

In the course of individualization and fragmentation processes, western European societies have undergone a constant change in values in the post-war era (Joas, 2005). This has resulted in a gravitation towards post-materialist values such as self-realization, a loosening of feeling rules and a broadening of concepts on potential personal relationships (Giddens, 1992). Due to the ongoing informalization of emotion (Gerhards, 1988), postmodern emotion cultures are characterized by great diversity, which also includes a change in moral principles. Illouz argues that this process of self-emancipation goes hand in hand with a commodification of selfhood, reflecting the ‘culture of emotional capitalism’, where ‘emotions have become entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained, quantified and commodified’ (2007: 109). According to Illouz, the concentration on technologies of self, practices individuals apply ‘to transform themselves in order to attain a certain desired state’ (Foucault, 1988:18) points to an increasing rationalization of intimate relationships.

Since the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, traditional concepts of Thai sociality have also been challenged by new technologies of ‘imagination’, such as the internet (Fongkaew, 2002). These technologies are strongly associated with the discourse on globalization, which is dominated by anxiety about the levelling out of Thai-ness (Reynolds, 1998: 141) and the destabilization of those feeling rules that maintain traditional gender roles. This has led to a paradoxical situation, where governmental initiatives try to counteract the lamented decay by preserving ‘traditional Thai values’ (Kriengsak, 2006) in the digital age, while young people seem to embrace new possibilities for bypassing the normative order of traditional emotion culture.

Virtual third places may even reflect third cultures, thus giving rise to new configurations of ‘emotion culture(s)’ (Hochschild, 1979). In this study, therefore, we investigate whether the social networking practices of young people living in Thailand and Austria, two countries with very different traditional morals, values and feeling rules, yet connected via global flows of media, people, capital, technology and ideology (Appadurai, 1996), transform or proliferate normative emotional constructions.

Digital reciprocity and lifelogging practices: SNS as viable virtual third places?

Considering the ‘third place’ as a metaphor to analyse how users relate to technology, we focus on the emotional qualities Oldenburg (1999) outlined as characteristic of third places: third places provide a context for sociality, spontaneity and emotional express-iveness, and exist outside one’s home. We address the question of whether users attach those emotional qualities to SNS and how this influences their relationship experience and practices of emotional expression. First, we will examine if SNS feature the key characteristics of virtual third places. Second, we will discuss what meanings the users attach to emotional experience and expression on SNS.

Concerning the first aspect of ‘viable virtual third places’ (Soukup, 2006: 433), that is, accessibility, we have to consider that in 2010, 74% of the Austrian population used the internet, while in Thailand only 26% did (Internet World Stats, 2012). But while rural areas in Thailand are still poorly equipped, internet saturation in Bangkok, the ‘global media city’ (Appadurai, 1990), is comparatively high. The participants in the current study mostly represent the Bangkok middle class. As all the Austrian and nearly all of the Thai interviewees had a private computer with internet access, SNS were easily accessible for them.

The second criterion necessary for transforming an online environment into a viable virtual third place is that the context of computer-mediated communication must be localized or situated within a specific cultural milieu. In this context ‘localization’ means not only that interaction is situated within an existing geographic location, but moreover that it takes place within a shared symbolic space. SNS represent a symbolic space and potentially enable users to communicate with people all over the globe. However, most of the respondents use these services ‘to keep informed about the lives of their real-life friends’ (T: 82%, A: 86%) and ‘to stay in contact with their old friends’ (T: 94%, A: 97%), as a form of ‘maintained social capital’ (Ellison et al., 2007). They keep in touch with people they usually shared locality or share localized interests with, as Thomas, a 22-year-old student from Vienna explains: ‘I can keep in touch with people whom I know from my childhood. Or I can contact someone I got to know recently when going out or at a party.’

Concerning the aspect of presence, the third and perhaps most important aspect of viable virtual third places, we argue that practices involving SNS not only support ‘social archiving’ but more importantly, also make ‘presence streaming’ possible. This brings to bear a new type of reminiscence, which alters the ways we construct collective memory. This transformation of memory practices not only affects the way we (re-)experience our ‘selves’, but also how we relate to others. Hence, experiencing intimacy is closely interlinked with sharing and absorbing emotional experience via (networked) technologies. As we will show, the ways of establishing an online presence may vary according to the ‘emotional needs’ of the users. One common motive among the Thai and the Austrian interviewees is what Smart et al. (2007: 16) call lifelogging, that is, ‘the capture, storage and distribution of everyday experiences and information for objects and people’. Sherry, ³ a 22-year-old woman who grew up in Bangkok, moved to Germany, and is now studying in Vienna, describes how she uses the digital records on her blog as a kind of ‘backup memory’:

Every now and then you read the things you wrote again and think: Oh – what kind of crap have I written then? You notice, what kind of mood you were in. I don’t do it that intensively, but I know people, who have tags for this type of occasion, that specific emotion, this occasion in connection to that emotion …

By enhancing the memorability of objects, emotions are inseparable from memory within individual life experience. While individual memory has always been bound to and informed by external storage media and cultural practices (Assmann, 2003), lifelogging technologies seem to re-mediate traditional forms of self-narration like autobiographical literature and diaries, which try to preserve a snap-shot of the self by storing biographical memories.

The content on SNS not only represents life experiences but also the emotional state of people associated with it. It is consumed repeatedly with the purpose of managing moods in the sense of improving them or re-experiencing an emotional state. As stated by Plaa, a 20-year-old undergraduate student from Bangkok, when explaining why she likes to browse other users’ profiles, it is not only about gaining information about the lives of one’s friends, but also the emotional experience associated with it that is ‘worth sharing’:

My friends write about something that recently happened, so I know what recently happened about them and their emotions especially; if sometimes I am happy or not happy, I write about it and then – my classmates and me, we talk about it in class.

But while diaries, and mobile phone messages, are kept secret or only shared intentionally in a reciprocal act similar to gift-giving (Taylor and Harper, 2003), memories on SNS are stored and shared within ‘networked publics’ (Boyd, 2007: 8). Ingo, an Austrian student, describes the process of ‘social archiving’: ‘I like watching pictures, as these pictures reflect memories. Also, I like it, if someone shares pictures of an event, which I also attended.’ As lifelogging technologies enable collaborative sharing and aggregation of life experience, memories are no longer exclusive, personal records of the past but are instead networked (Van Dijck, 2007) following a principle of overwriting and reconstructing (Assmann, 2003: 20).

The results show that, while Thai and Austrian respondents use ICT equally to manage their relationships in a multifaceted way, the Thai population is more likely to perceive these technologies to be liberating. Offering the opportunity to have sanuk (fun), in contrast to social interaction in formal relationships and familial bhun khun relations, SNS are appreciated as what Oldenburg (1999) calls ‘third places’, where one can enjoy the companionship of others in an informal setting.

Emotion cultures of networked sociality – transformation or proliferation of feeling rules?

Generally, the increasingly public nature of interpersonal relationships can also be regarded as a symptom of the global proliferation of capitalism generating an emotion culture that fosters people’s will to self-disclosure (Illouz, 2007). Illouz (2007) points out that practices on SNS are to be seen in line with this culture of emotional capitalism, which is articulated in therapy and television programs depicting people’s inner problems. This emotion culture stresses technologies of self such as the linguistic management of emotions, where the semi-public expression of emotions becomes a part of the continuous act of performing identity.

Although sharing emotional experiences with others has always been a constructive element of intimacy, practices of sharing intimate thoughts and emotions within networked publics appear to contradict the feeling rule of secrecy and exclusiveness in intimate relationships prevalent in western European societies (Foucault, 1988). As trust is the basis for the willingness to exchange emotions and information in friendships and intimate relationships, a relationship is only considered intimate if it involves people (mostly two) who want to disclose at least a part of themselves to each other exclusively (Prøitz, 2005: 192). In contrast, traditional Thai sociality conceptualizes the relation of intimacy and the exchange of emotions and information in a different way. Most interviewees from Thailand mention that they could not disclose intimate thoughts (about sexuality, romantic relationships or morality) to their close friends or family members in face-to-face situations without ‘losing face’, especially if the expressed emotions were considered to be negative. This is illustrated by the following quote by Tum, a 20-year-old undergraduate student from Bangkok:

I write about my feelings which I cannot talk about. Mostly I write about bad feelings, more than about good feelings. Because good feelings one can tell and bad feelings one can’t tell.

Accordingly, SNS are imagined as ‘third places’ representing spaces of freedom and an uncomplicated way of establishing relationships in a situation of khwam pen kaneng, or mutual informality (Mulder, 2000: 64). As an opposite pole to the cultural definition of spaces within which social interaction is regulated and strictly hierarchical, these spaces are of great significance within ‘Thai cosmologies’ (Reynolds, 1998: 141). As particular ways of thinking about the world, these cosmologies might also be expressed in cultural products, as we will see when exploring aesthetic aspects of SNS profiles.

When the first in-depth interviews were carried out in 2009, the social networking service Hi5 was the most popular one among young people in Thailand. Facebook then took over the lead among Thai users in spring 2010, a fact reflected in our survey’s statistics: 68% of Thai respondents preferred to use Facebook, while only 32% used Hi5. Hi5 provides a great amount of space for the articulation of what Burgess (2007: 28) has termed ‘vernacular creativity’, that is, ‘everyday practices of material and symbolic creativity such as storytelling and photography’. As Chanakan, a 23-year-old graduate student from Silpakorn University, explained in the first round of interviews, members of Hi5 enjoy the possibility of designing and altering the visual characteristics of the online environment:

If I compare Facebook and Hi5? I cannot decorate Facebook, right? It’s really not impressive. The first thing that people look at on your blog is the layout. If it is striking, they start to look at it. But while you can’t do many things in Facebook, in Hi5 you can create a lot of things. My friends spend around ten hours just decorating their profiles. So it is a lot of fun!

Visual tools support processes associated with localization and presence by evoking a feeling of ‘home-ness’ (Soukup, 2006: 435), which also enhances the third-place experience described by Oldenburg (1999). It is characterized by affective qualities like warmth, casualness and cosiness, as well as spontaneity, playfulness and conversational liveliness. The Thai respondents attached more importance to the visual surface of the profile than the Austrian respondents. For them, the practices of decoration represent creativity and self-evolution, which is discursively constructed as an element of ‘Thai-ness’, as emphasized by Breeze, a 22-year-old Thai male: ‘Hi5 is so popular in Thailand! It is so easy to decorate it, easy to incorporate everything you like. That is what Thai people like–creating.’

Hi5 offered more functions to playfully relate to each other, which supported emotional connectedness, for example, ‘poking’ could be regarded as the virtual equivalent of touching, and was quite popular among the Thai respondents. While 60% of them used ‘poking’ on Hi5 often or sometimes, only 4.8% of the Austrian respondents had even tried it. Noi (female, age 19, Bangkok) explained that she likes ‘poking’ because it helps her overcome her shyness and express emotions: ‘It’s cute! I can express the feelings I have for my friends, express emotions, which I can do in Hi5 but not in real life.’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Hi5 profile (from 2009).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Facebook profile (from 2011).

The fact that expressing emotions online is of high significance to the Thai population was also made evident by the results of the online survey. For 72% of the Thai respondents, one reason they used SNS was ‘to express their emotions’, which was not the case for over 75% of the Austrian respondents. Also, 66% of Thai respondents approved of the statement ‘There are some things in my life that I can only express online’, while only 5% of the Austrian population did. ‘Pointing out personal views’ was also a strong motive for using SNS for the Thai respondents (nearly 80% agreed or strongly agreed to this statement). The Austrian respondents did not consider this to be very important (only 37% agreed or strongly agreed).

The Thai interviewees felt a kind of cosiness when on SNS, which stimulates their expression of emotions. Still, some of the interviewees based in Thailand also described their discomfort with the rising number of people using Facebook as an ‘emotional trash bin’, a channel for expressing feelings that are regarded as negative (anger, depression or sadness). This coincides with the feeling rule that positive feelings can be shared with others, while negative feelings are to be kept inside. This is also illustrated by results of the online survey showing that appearing humorous is equally important for both Austrian and Thai respondents, while evoking the impression of being ‘happy’ is more important for the Thai population.

While all interviewees appreciated equally that emotional barriers were easier to overcome via SNS, the Thai respondents were significantly more interested in ‘meeting new people online’ (T: 43%, A: 14%). Patty (female, age 20, Bangkok) explains: ‘I like Facebook because I can get to know new people, I can chat with and sometimes I can build up a relationship and then I can talk to this person about everything!’ Most Thai respondents were looking for informal online connections or even strangers to express difficult issues or serious problems.

While some Austrian interviewees also described SNS as ‘contact zones’ (Winfried, male, age 22, Vienna) our survey data showed that Austrian respondents are less likely to accept friendship requests from strangers than Thai respondents. While 14% of the Thai students never ignored a friendship request, nearly all Austrians sometimes did so. The Thai respondents knew fewer of their online network friends in person (95 people on average) than the Austrian respondents (145 people on average). Austrian interviewees hoped to profit from their online connections in terms of knowledge, educational path and future employment, and their friend lists were thus less arbitrary. The Austrian interviewees’ online networks were also largely identical with their personal and physical relationships, which is similar to what Leiner (2010) showed for young people in Germany.

While the Thai interviewees stressed the affective components of SNS, in the in-depth interviews most Austrian respondents described SNS as tools of strategic communication aimed at accumulating social capital. The interviewees explained that the loosening of reciprocity norms enables them to decide who to keep a distance from, which, according to Oldenburg (1999), is a precondition for being sociable. Peter (male, age 22, Vienna) regards this type of ‘distanced connectedness’ as being:

very comfortable. You have some kind of contact, but this relationship is somehow not that close. I think this fits the needs of many people who do not want to be so close with others. […] If a person asks you something face-to-face, it might be impolite if you do not answer. If he writes you on Facebook writing back is not compulsory.

Most of the interviewees from both Thailand and Austria experienced SNS as ‘disinhibiting’, which is characteristic of most online environments (Suler, 2004). Disinhibiting effects are the result of fewer social obstacles, less external control and fewer privileges, all factors arising from the anonymity and pseudonymity of online environments. This disinhibition bolsters characteristics emotionally valued as positive – such as openness, honesty and friendliness. However, while other computer-mediated environments such as chat rooms and MUDs constitute areas of informal social interaction distinct from professional and familial contexts, SNS proliferate the relationships of everyday life. The results of our online survey show that most Thai and Austrian respondents want to appeal to others ‘like they really are’ (T: 76%, A: 70%) in the sense that they want to express authenticity and convey a desired and desirable self-image. The qualitative interviews painted a more differentiated picture, where ‘identity tuning’ is admitted to be a common practice, especially when SNS activities are aimed at initiating romantic partnerships, for example by improving photos with picture editing programs. As internet reputation is inseparably linked to a young person’s offline image, the pressure to represent rises (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Even though individualization is a global phenomenon resulting in increasingly mobile lifestyles, young Thais are still strongly embedded in their familial relationships. The majority of Thai respondents lived with their family (70%), while only 25% of the Austrian respondents did. These strong family bonds are also reflected online, with the majority of Thai interviewees being connected to their parents and relatives on SNS. However, although the Thai interviewees generally added people from formal and familial life to their friend lists, they still stressed that they feel less inhibited on SNS. Austrian respondents were more concerned about privacy issues, and some have already had negative experiences. Most Thai respondents did not even consider that the boundaries between informal and formal spaces could be crossed. As one interviewee expressed: ‘We can put everything we want on our profiles. Many times we lie because we don’t think it is like a formal site, it’s just for friends–so we don’t worry about it.’

These differences might show, on the one hand, that traditional concepts of sociality and the associated feeling rules are transferred to computer-mediated environments such as SNS. Drawing on a religious perspective, as Jaruhirunsakul (2010) does, is a possible way of interpreting these differences. Many Thai respondents may follow the karmic belief that meeting one’s soul mate is a fated coincidence. Conversely, the tendency of the Thai interviewees to emphasize the ways that technology enables emotional expression can be interpreted as counteracting the normative emotion culture derived from broader patterns of kinship and community. This emotion culture is based on the rules of modesty that regulate gender relations. For example, in courtship and marriage, men and women are not permitted to touch in public and youth are not encouraged to ‘date’ alone. Even if the situation is changing in Bangkok, rules like this persist even in the present-day (Wilson, 2004: 94). On the other hand, the above-mentioned differences can also result from differing stages of habituation and digital literacy: as outlined above, the real-life connection of SNS is quite strong. As users become more ‘digitally literate’ (Buckingham, 2010: 60), disinhibiting effects may also decrease.