Everyday life, Web 2.0, and Maria Bakardjieva

A talk by Maria Bakardjieva is always a highlight in my life but today's short overview of her current probe into the "everyday life" of Web 2.0 "produsers" (Facebook and bloggers, so far) was particularly interesting, and though provoking, as usual. I have some notes from my attendance as well as my reaction to some of her comments about Facebook, below:

Internet Society

Maria Bakardjieva, the author of Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life, is one of the smartest critical commentators on the internet these days. Her recent work has been digging into the real, embedded life of bloggers and facebook users, working with her "both sides of the screen" approach to the everyday lives of uses of participatory media. Andrew Feenberg, a Canada Research Chair in our school, invited her to give a talk at our school today, and I managed to catch it and take some notes. I am sharing these in the hope that they will be useful to others.

The talk began with some background into her research methods and the number of people interviewed, which I don't think we need to get into here, but one of her opening remarks struck me as quite important. She pointed out that some of the people on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list are not willing to concede that "Web 2.0" is any different than earlier stages of the web, and that participatory culture has been a hallmark of online life since the beginning. I will come back to this issue of a lack of certainty on what is actually being studied at the end of these notes, but for now we should acknowledge that the term is a bit of a contested concept.

The second important thing that Maria covered - for me - was a short synopsis of the "everyday life" approach that she uses. I think it is easy to think about everyday life in everyday terms (ahem) and thereby lose some of the nuance and power of this form of scholarship. (If you haven't been working in the area, you might be interested in some of the background reading from de Certeau or Schutz.) According to Maria, there are three (or four) major elements to her use of the concept:

1) acknowledge, and learn about the agency of the user (Schutz)

2) recognize the importance of the embeddedness of virtual phenomena (life on "this side" of the screen, or, as the gamers call it, AFK)

3) look for the meaning, as found by the users (de Certeau)

4) all of these (1, 2, 3) come together in an everyday lifeworld that exists on a social, political, and economic plane and it couldn't be otherwise.

Maria's work is very preliminary and she didn't spend a lot of time on "findings" in this presentation, but she did suggest that one of the important early results is the extent to which people are reorganizing their offline and online social worlds to incorporate the exigencies of their participation and participatory environment. She mentioned a few of these reorganizations:

• erosion of the zones of anonymity (Schutz) in life
• the tendency of (bloggers especially) to take on a public personality
• the extent to which technologies such as Facebook and blogging are technologies of the self, a term coined by Michel Foucault. See also http://theory.org.uk/ctr-fou6.htm
• lack of support and erosion of "strands" in Facebook, especially.

The last point is one of the most prominent adjustments that people are having to make, Maria argued, relates to the lack of support for, and even active erosion of, the notion of "multiple strands" in an individual's social networks. What she means by multiple strands is epitomized by Facebook's default setting in which all of your friends are mashed up together. This may suit the 20-something college student with homogenous social networks, but older (and younger) users who are used to keeping parts of their life separated and some people deliberately in the dark about aspects of our lives, find it unsettling to say the least.

I didn't have time (wasn't feeling very well, either) to get into a discussion with Maria about this, but I think - like many things on the internet - Facebook's lack of support for strands is probably more symptomatic of "perpetual beta" attitudes than any end design. In other words, they haven't gotten around to it yet. In the case of software, there is good reason to build something simple that serve the needs of most of your users (see 37 signals on this), and that might be all that there is to explain why Facebook is the way it is right now.

I would also like to argue for a more detailed and nuanced investigation of Facebook, using the principles that Maria espouses: namely, what is the experience of the users, and how do they exercise their agency in managing that experience. If you look closely at support for "strands" of relationships in Facebook you might find that there is some support:

1) you can delete, or ignore a friend request or accept the friend request and then delete the person

2) you can add a friend but assign them to a group who sees only your "limited profile"

3) you can manage your behaviour on facebook to contain only a single strand, leaving support for other strands to other media (for young people this is the mobile phone and text messages);

It is also worth noting that the "groups" feature, which came out about a month ago, allows you to put your friends into named groups. This is quite clearly the infrastructure for finer grained privacy/strands support which is probably under development, but I am sure the site developers have to balance the flow of new features with the inevitable complexity it could add, especially for new users which in the case of Facebook is a very large number because so many people are still joining.

On my way home, I also thought of turning this problem on its head (is that Hegelian, Bill?). What about support for strands in the real world? How many times do we, in non-virtual life, find two different faces of ourselves coming into contact with each other, as happens when you meet up with your parents while out with your friends, or mistakenly leave your diary out where your mother can read it. The notion that we can keep things separate in the real world but that it is much harder online is not necessarily true and certainly isn't the absolute that came out in this talk.

During the question and answer period Maria acknowledged that some internet researchers are skeptical about the whole "Web 2.0" notion - and to their credit, several of my students are among those critics. There is a good case to be made that "Web 2.0" is more of a business strategy / model and a marketing or branding term than an actual thing. Maria reminded the critics, however, that there is good precedent for an omnibus term even when we know very well that what we are talking about is much more complicated that the surface name indicates. As an example, Maria pointed to Raymond Williams famous book on Television, still available 35 years after it was first published. Williams' book helps us appreciate that we need to see media forms in terms of 1) technology, 2) institutions, and 3) cultural forms.

It is still too early to tell how this will finally end up for the web, let alone "Web 2.0," but I think we can appreciate Maria's work for starting us along the road of better understanding of how the web fits into people's lives.