Visualising Facebook

Front matter

Daniel Miller & Jolynna Sinanan

PUBLISHED AND FORTHCOMING TITLES:

Social Media in Southeast Turkey Elisabetta Costa

Introduction to the series Why We Post

This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to specific field sites in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. The series also includes a comparative book about all our findings, published to accompany this title.

When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, and that they all have the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic.

This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible.

Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evidence of what social media has become in each place and the local consequences, including local evaluations.

Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social science books. Firstly, they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly, these monographs are not comparative, which again is vi the primary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. If you prefer to read above the line, each text offers a simple narrative about our findings. If you want to read a more conventional academic book that relates the material to its academic context, this can be done through engaging with the footnotes. We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read our comparative book - and perhaps some of the other monographs -in addition to this one.

Visualising Facebook stands out from the crowd. It is neither a comparison of all the sites nor an individual monograph. Instead this book allows us to focus upon a more systematic comparison of the images people post in two of our field sites. The sheer number of images included within this volume make it a slightly different contribution from the others within the series, to the degree that you can literally ‘see’ what we are talking about when we argue for cultural difference.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST

Acknowledgements

It is in the nature of anthropological research that we cannot name directly those to whom we owe our greatest debt. These are the people of El Mirador and The Glades who gave us their time, often friendship, trust, access to their private worlds and consent forms, without which this publication would not have been possible. We hope they will feel that this work does indeed help people around the world to appreciate and understand each others’ societies and contribute to the project of anthropology, which is the claim we made. Daniel Miller would like to thank Ciara Green who was his co-worker throughout the ethnography of The Glades.

All our research has been carried out as two of the nine team members of the ‘Why We Post’ project, and this book was written in constant dialogue and with extensive comments from Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman and Xinyuan Wang. We also had comments on the draft manuscript from Inge Daniels and Sheba Mohammid, Justin Bourke, Pilar Lacasa, Saffiyya Mohammed and Shireen Walton, and from the anonymous readers selected by our publisher. We are very grateful for the detailed edit conducted by Laura Haapio-Kirk, who created illustrations for Chapters 4, 6 and 8.

We would also like to thank the European Research Council for funding this research — grant ERC-2011-AdG-295486 Socnet.

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