Abstract
According to Daniel Miller, the study of social networks is nothing new. In Tales from Facebook, Miller explains that anthropologists have always looked at the types of connections people forge with one another, but with the advent of social networking websites, these relations are handily mapped out in virtual spaces. In approaching the study of social networks through this anthropological perspective, Miller’s book starts from the position that Facebook is not an object in and of itself, but rather a product of the various users that inhabit the site and the particular types of practices they develop around it.
Miller demonstrates this perspective in the first part of the book through a series of twelve vignettes that introduce the reader to several Trinidadian facebook users and describe their individual habits, preferences, and theories about the site. Miller’s initial chapters read like pages from an ethnographer’s field journal, documenting his interactions in great depth and detail, and demonstrating ethnographic strategies for the study of social networks. Miller presents these vignettes with cursory analyses that foreshadow the conclusions he examines more directly in Part II.
The book opens by introducing the reader to Marvin, one of the many characters whose Facebook stories will demonstrate the complex and diverse ways users have experienced the site. Marvin blames Facebook for publicizing his flirtatious interactions with women and thereby provoking his wife’s jealousy, which results in an end to his marriage. Explaining that “the compulsion of technology is wedded to the compulsion of desire” (p. 14), Miller claims that while jealousy and suspicion are hardly new elements of Trinidadian romantic relationships, one should not dismiss the important and new role these social media play as well. In this opening, Miller establishes the analytical approach that will shape this book. In each instance, Facebook is not presented as an independence actor or a force, but rather is situated as one element in the complex set of human relations that may influence these connections in novel ways.
Through these various stories, Miller provides fascinating portraits that speak to larger theoretical questions of internet and social media studies. In one example, Miller recalls his interactions with Dr. Karamath, a charming man of east Indian descent who once led a very mobile and public life, but later experienced health problems that resulted in the loss of his voice and the use of his legs, thus cutting him off from the social circles he once inhabited. Facebook, for Dr. Karamath, became an important medium for maintaining social connections and allowed him to continue engaging in the progressive political discussions he used to enjoy in face-to-face contexts. Throughout this story, Miller introduces the reader to considerations of material and virtual embodiment, and promotes an optimistic perspective on the internet’s ability to liberate bodies in meaningful ways.
Similarly, Miller introduces Vishala, whose experiences online serve as evidence of the ways users come to recognize the performative nature of identity through their experience online. Miller credits Vishala for providing him with a theory of truthfulness on Facebook. Vishala finds people tend to open up and talk more deeply when engaging through the medium, but she also imagines the technology reveals truths about people that they would have otherwise kept hidden, particularly through the sharing and tagging of photographs which can often become mechanisms of surveillance. Furthermore, she argues that the truth of a person lies in the labor they exert to construct their personas, thus demonstrating how people come to understand identity as a performance through the process of constructing an online profile. In this example, as in the other vignettes, Miller constructs stories that speak to complex and longstanding theoretical debates in anthropology, but does so in accessible and thought provoking ways that begin to map the terrain for future studies in the realm of social media.
By opening his book with these tales, Miller establishes his commitment to new media scholarship that prioritizes user experience and meaning rather than proposing a static definition of the technology. His preliminary observations set the stage for Part II of the book, entitled “The Anthropology of Facebook.” This second section is more analytical and seeks to construct a general, yet nuanced, theory of Facebook based on evidence from the various vignettes of Part I. In the opening pages of this section Miller states explicitly what has been implied throughout the first section, namely, that Facebook is not an object in itself but rather an aggregate of different users’ experiences with the site.
In keeping with his preference for context and diversity, Miller spends the greater part of the second section proposing fifteen theses of what Facebook might be. Referring to his interviews, Miller suggests theories of how online social networking can transform relationships, notions of the self, call into question traditional notions of privacy, and also alter user’s relationships to time and space. Miller only devotes a few pages to each thesis, prioritizing breadth of inquiry over depth on any particularly theory. While in some ways this choice can be frustrating to an academic reader desiring deep analysis, Miller’s unusual strategy not only demonstrates his commitment to contextual and specific observation, but in some ways mimics the form of Facebook itself by introducing readers to a continuous yet truncated stream of information that inspires curiosity and invites further reflection and consideration. In this way, the very form of his book demonstrates a commitment to his thesis, while also suggesting productive strategies for scholarly writers to account for the changing nature of information and knowledge in a contemporary digital context. In all, Tales From Facebook is a unique and important contribution to a relatively new object of research, but also an important reminder of how best to contextualize that object as a product of culture.