Tales from Facebook [Paperback]

These days, it is increasingly hard to escape Facebook, whether or not one is actually signed up to it or not. Even the main news stories carry occasional stories about Facebook, most of them negative. Yet Facebook can also be a force for good, although the good stories don't generally make the headlines. This book is the first serious study that I've read about Facebook. It illustrates the impact through twelve short stories, averaging about twelve pages each, each focusing on an individual, their use of Facebook and how it affected their lives. A thirteenth short story focuses on a food that has its own Facebook fan page.

The thirteen stories are all from Trinidad, a former British colony in the Caribbean whose inhabitants have (it seems) taken Facebook to their hearts. While one may argue about the choice of Trinidad as a research base, it does allow the author to add interest to the book by telling us about various aspects of Trinidad, its people, their life and culture. That said, if you really want to learn about Trinidad, there are plenty of other books devoted to the subject. With the 50th anniversary of independence from Britain due in 2012, there may be more coming soon. While Trinidad is very different in many ways from any major industrialized country you care to name, there are enough similarities to make it a viable research base. People still have the same basic needs even though they may express them in different ways.

The first story here focuses on a marriage that might have been in trouble anyway, but Facebook usage destroyed it. Some of the detail may be Trinidadian, but the basic story could easily be British or American. On a more positive note, a man who becomes wheelchair-bound discovers Facebook and finds that he can still communicate with the outside world. I was already aware of the contributions that disabled people make to the internet via blogs; the story here merely confirms that the internet is a godsend to such people.

Another of the stories focuses on one man's devotion to Farmville, one of those addictive games that Facebook is noted for. I didn't get into Farmville, but I spent a lot of time on Zoo World (not mentioned in this book) and eventually suspended my Facebook account to get away from it for a while. That was in January 2011, and I am in no hurry to return. Among other things, I didn't like the way the rules were continually changed, so what had once been fun gradually became irritating. I get the impression that Farmville is a bit like that too, but perhaps not as bad.

Perhaps the scariest story among the twelve is the one about the church that embraced first the internet and later Facebook. They decided that God created the internet, so it was up to the church to use it to spread the word. More interesting to me is the story abot the businessman who is worried about the breaking down of the boundaries between business and pleasure. Although it doesn't say so in the book, Facebook doesn't allow us to have more than one account each. There is clearly a need to be able to have separate accounts for different purposes. There are ways round this, either by using privacy setting or by setting up accounts with fake names and addresses, but it would be better to allow openly separate accounts. It's not like Amazon where there are good reasons to disallow multiple accounts.

Following the thirteen short stories, there is an analysis. All of it is opinion and some of it a bit heavy going at times, but this is a serious academic study so is to be expected. I don't agree with it all but in any case, Facebook is still less than a decade old.

One problem I have is that the research looks at Facebook and at real life, but almost completely ignores other internet activity. It is as if the researcher selected people who use the internet only (or mostly) to access Facebook. Some people who use Facebook not only use it as an extension of their real life, but also use it as an extension of their other internet activities.. We can expect better research when Facebook has further matured, but this book offers a good starting point.

It is easy to find fault with this book, but it is also easy to see why some people love it. I am therefore not surprised that it has attracted very divergent opinions regarding its worthiness. I hope that this review tells you enough to help you decide whether this book is for you or not. I loved some of the stories and liked the others, but the analysis was less appealing while the avoidance of the other internet activities was also a negative for me. So it's something of a mixed bag that ends up with three stars, but looked as if it might be better than that based on the early chapters.

It's one of those brilliant ideas that you kick yourself for not thinking of first. "Ok, so for my next trick project, I'm going to spend six months in Trinidad trying to understand the impact Facebook has had on the island's culture." Genius. But that's precisely what UCL Anthropology Professor Daniel Miller has done - and it's not quite as random or self-indulgent as it might at first appear. Desptie the rather anodyne title, and the faintly ridiculous cover image, his book Tales from Facebook contains some very helpful and interesting insights into the effect of social networking.

But for all my jibes, Trinidad is actually quite a shrewd subject - it is relatively small and self-contained, it is non-western, and most significantly, has perhaps the second highest per capita proportion of Facebook users in the world (second only to Panama). So it does lend itself to this sort of study. And Facebook must be studied - for its growth from a privileged frat house site to a global phenomenon has made its mark on all our lives whether we've a facebook account or not.

Being largely ignorant of the disciplines of anthropology, I learned a fair amount - and in contrast to some of the things I've read on Facebook which are either a bit too pop-culture amateur, too generalised, or too moralistically luddite, this study at least had some sort of rigour and methodology to it. I didn't always quite connect with the book's style, and inevitably it is often anecdotal. But still, a number of helpful things resulted from this research. 3 interesting surprises, in particular, stood out for me, suggesting that Facebook's most hostile detractors are mistaken, at least some of the time. So this is not so much a review as a reflection on some of his points.

THE FRIEND PHENOMENON
I've heard many get all jumpy, overcritical, or just plain snooty (or all three) about the business of Facebook friends. Miller speaks sense here.
"Much of the most tedious literature on Facebook concerns the question of whether a friend on Facebook is a real friend. This blithely ignores the vast spectrum of people we may choose to call friends in offline worlds. There is no one so stupid as to presume that all their 700 friends on Facebook are suddenly equivalent to close offline friends. One rather neat academic paper showed college students being impressed by peers whose Facebook friends numbered up to 302, but over this number the esteem in which they are held falls again." (p166)

As he continues, it is merely another medium for expressing friendship (with all the inevitable pitfalls and benefits that any new medium offers):
"There is the fear that we are all becoming more superficial, that Facebook friends, represent a kind of inflation that diminishes the value of prior or true friendships. I see no evidence that this is the case: close friends are even more intensely in touch." (p167)

Miller gets to know various different people in Trinidad to see how it impacts their working and personal lives. They are unexpected people: From a previously active but now housebound professor in his sixties (whose interactions and relationships have been vasty deepened through FB) to a socially awkward dropout who finds that Farmville has actually enabled him to find real friends; from church leaders using facebook to get augment their ministries to those whose relationships have been seriously damaged by facebook obsessions. There is little doubt that real world lives and friendships are deeply affected by Facebook (for worse and actually for better). The evidence is on every page.

But Miller I think is right to point out that the wide range of online friendships merely reflects the wide range of offline friendships - from the very intimate to the passing acquaintance. This has certainly been my own experience. Where there is a difference though is the access to one's personal and even inner life that the most tangentially connected now have. Thus people's biggest concern with Facebook is of course privacy - both in terms of what we share, but also what gets shared about us by others.

THE PRIVACY PROBLEM
There is surely a need for care - as I've posted before, we can't ever easily erase what we put online. Encouragements and training for responsible online activity are vital. But the surprise is that posting often and even personally doesn't necessarily entail over-exposure or forfeited privacy. Miller takes the example of one, Ajani (not her real name), whom he rather delightfully calls a DJ of facebook posting (p71) because of the way she constantly mixes up the serious, trivial and personal in her posts. As he comments:
"Within Facebook people largely live their lives as they have always done, but in real time they toss forth images and items that are evidence of that co-presence in the world, They are open to reciprocity, such as the exchange of comment or at least ticking the `like' box attached to those comments. Mostly, they are people one also knows in offline worlds, though not necessarily. But Facebook thereby achieves something compared to which all previous media now seems mere simulacra - the relationship we feel through the co-presence of another person." (p74)

Ajani's posts are an illustration of what he later goes on to describe:
"There was something genuine and appealing about this modest bric-a-brac that was being shared: what has been termed `ambient intimacy'." (p128)

And then he concludes with this counter-intuitive suggestion:
"A critical lesson Ajani has taught us about Facebook is how constant exposure through restless posting can enable rather than diminish a person's privacy. Facebook has revealed an unexpected capacity to work with and on the heterogeneity and complexity of persons." (p77)

The reason is that Ajani is an intensely private person, who has a wide public profile - of which she is in total control. And that is the point - I suppose it means that she is a mini-celebrity in control of her profile. That has its acute dangers and so on - but it suggests that the shrewd and canny need not be over-exposed.

I wasn't 100% convinced by this point (if i've got him right) - but it at least alerts us to the the more counter-intuitive aspects of FB.

THE COMMUNITY POTENTIAL
The most common objection that i've heard is that people will get so sucked in to social networks that they will retreat further from the offline into some sort of cyber-vortex. That was one of the cautionary themes of the now rather dated Sandra-Bullock-thriller The Net - Collector's Edition [DVD] [2002]. But far from being something that detaches me from people, I've certainly found that FB (re)connects and cements offline relationships. This is also what Miller has found.
"So, although the fear was often expressed, there was no evidence in Trinidad that people spent less time together as a result of Facebook. Rather, Facebook is assumed to be a facility people used to coordinate and organize offline events, from occasional family reunions to daily discussion of homework." (p183)

What was particularly interesting from a western perspective is how FB reflects (as well as influences) the prevailing culture of a society - and Miller argues that FB has great positive potential here:
"By contrast, Facebook, as a form of social networking, is one of the most powerful challenges in quite some time to that individualism." (p198)

That is the polar opposite of what its many detractors suggest (namely that it merely serves to aggravate our individualism). So FB has a role to play in more corporate societies because:
"A Trinidadian never meets another Trini as an individual; they always see them as a node within this larger network. Whether you take them seriously or not is going to depend much more on what you know about their family or group you think they might be part of, than anything about them as an individual personality." (p115)

And whether we individualistic westerners like it or not, we really ought to understand ourselves and each other through our corporate identity more than we do. Could FB have a role to play in this? It's certainly possible. The inter-relationship between FB's impact and a particularly cultural context is always going to be complex. So Miller picks up this striking contrast:
"The use of Facebook often reflects pre-existing modes of normative control. The earliest established extensive social networking site was probably that of Cyworld in South Korea, a country often regarded as one of the most conformist societies in the world. Soon after its inception, there were reports of an intensification of social conformity through social networking. For example, a person who allowed their dog to foul the street was photographed on a mobile phone. This was then posted and quickly identified online, allowing almost the entire country to unite in condemnation of what was seen as anti-social behaviour. Trinidad is a land of comparative licence. It will take some time to determine whether Facebook independently increases or decreases the pressures of conformity. In all likelihood, we will find instances of both." (p198)

IN CONCLUSION
All in all, there are some very helpful insights in this book. I don't necessarily think it is something for everyone to go out and buy - but it is certainly important reading for any trying to grapple with our brave new cyberworld. Miller is refreshingly open to whatever he finds - despite his prejudices (which I share) against Farmville, for example, he was prepared to explore its appeal to see whether it had any potential benefit other. than being a total time waster! Read more ›

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated one. Facebook is like a walled garden of friends and family, where you can find out everything about them; it is like a slower cycle to find things out. Once you add a friend to facebook friend list, then you will always know everything about his/her life. You become a part of your friend's life.

The book "Tales from Facebook" by Daniel Miller is not an analysis of Facebook but is an anthropological view of presenting how Facebook has become a small scale society, where people can construct a field or set of relationships. For example, the first story of the book looks at a marriage that might have been in trouble because of Facebook. We can see from the first chapter that Facebook has become the "place" that people or families can meet each other. From this perspective and as anthropology tends to analyze a set of relationships as kinship, we can argue that Facebook nowadays has become the tool which can observe kinships through social networking. As a result, we are realizing that Facebook has turned out to be something much closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship studies. What I am trying to say is that this book is a serious academic study so is to be expected.

This book is the first anthropological analysis of Facebook. It illustrates the impact of thirteen different stories from Trinidad, which, in each different story, try to reflect an aggregate of an individual's private sphere where each friend or a family member is presented in the same space, in the same community or even better in the same home.

However, in my opinion this book tries to demonstrate what Marilyn Strathern (2004: 5) argues about the study of anthropology that "The value of a discipline is precisely in its ability to account for its conditions of existence and thus as to how it arrives at its knowledge practices".

Therefore, "Tales from Facebook", illustrates that Facebook presents the main tenets of anthropology because it has enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers.

Additionally, it is not only a book for academics but it is a book for everyone, because the style of Miller's writing in- "Tales from Facebook"-it is accessible for people who want to have a serious study about Facebook. So I believe that this book offers a good starting point of understanding how SNS as Facebook affects our lives.

I hope that this review, even if it does not describe each chapter, helps you to decide whether this book is for