Every ‘like’ counts? Facebook as an arena of everyday politics

Critical Review of “A Pool of Dreams: Facebook, Politics and the Emergence of a Social Movement”

Crivellaro et al.’s paper [1] analyses the discussions held on the Facebook (FB) page “Friends of the Tynemouth Outdoor Pool” (FoTOP) to gain insights into everyday politics played out in social media. The case study is a derelict outdoor swimming pool for which the local council had put plans forward to convert the site into a multipurpose facility. The FoTOP opposed these plans and instead favoured a redevelopment of the old pool. The discussions on the FB page fuelled an active campaign against the council’s proposal, which was eventually withdrawn.

For analysis, the paper draws on Hauser’s work on ‘vernacular voices’ [3]. It frames politics not just as institutional discourse in a single public sphere, but extends it to everyday rhetoric that happens in many networked publics. It rejects Habermas’ model of a deliberative democracy built on consensus through rationality, favouring interested but reasonable rhetoric as an acknowledgement of a diverse society [2].

Using this lens, the discourse on the FB page, a “‘rubbing up’ of multiple, diverging opinions” [1] can be analysed as political acts generating a public. Three rhetoric themes emerge: First, there is reminiscence of the old pool, which popularised the page and built up support. Second, through controversial discourse a collective was shaped, with its own consciousness and a political potential to become active. Third, the political was activated by leaving the FB page, i.e. starting an official counter-proposal, organising a flash mob, and getting mainstream media coverage.

Discussing these results, the authors acknowledge that while the polyvocality of the discourse enabled the formation of a collective consciousness it also became evident that ‘what collectivises also excludes’ [1]. This went as far as censoring posts that were deemed “unconstructive” was at least discussed. As Hauser’s model operates on ‘reasonable’ rhetoric and a ‘common reference world’, the open question is how this is defined and achievable when there are discourse partners that do not share this common ground?

Furthermore, the authors reflect how quantified FB functionalities, such the number of ‘likes’, got appropriated to establish a bonded public. However, the FB group as such was not enough to persuade the council, the momentum built on FB needed first to be transformed into ‘officially’ recognised communication. Referring to existing critique on slacktivism [4] this transformation is, however, not made in all cases. Also, in my personal experience, controversial discourse on FB can escalate quickly, often resulting in personal insults or agreement to continue the discussion elsewhere, indicating that the modalities FB provides are not always suitable for polyvocality.

Third, the authors’ framing of ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ discourse reminded me a lot of Mouffe’s notion of an agonistic pluralism, where ‘politics’ refers to institutions to maintain order and the ‘political’ is the contestation of the first through human relations [5]. I would have liked to see what further insights the inclusion of Mouffe’s work might have brought to this research.

Finally, an ethical question not addressed in the paper is how the more than 8000 followers of FoTOP were given their informed consent that their data can be used for this study.

References

[1]      Crivellaro, C. et al. 2014. A Pool of Dreams: Facebook, Politics and the Emergence of a Social Movement. CHI ’14 (2014), 3573–3582.

[2]      Dougherty, T. 2012. Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres: https://timrdoc.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/hauser-gerard-vernacular-voices-the-rhetoric-of-publics-and-public-spheres/. Accessed: 1/11/2016

[3]      Hauser, G.A. 1999. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. University of South Carolina Press.

[4]      McCafferty, D. 2011. Activism vs. slacktivism. Commun. ACM. 54, 12 (2011), 17–19.

[5]      Mouffe, C. 2000. Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? Political Science Series. 72 (2000), 17.

Related Paper

The following paper relates to Facebook and raises, but not necessarily discusses, an ethical issue with it: It presents a now infamous experiment in which the FB news feed was manipulated in such a way that less positive or less negative news were shown to users. The results indicated that emotions via FB posts are like in the real word contagious, users were posting more writing more positive or negative posts respectively. One ethical issue raised only after the publication regarded the informed consent of the 689,003 users that ‘participated’ in the experiment. The paper argues that they consented by accepting Facebook’s Terms of Use, however, how informed that consent was given, remains questionable. A second point regards the manipulation of users’ news feed. The paper argues that the effect was very small and only detectable on an aggregated level, individual users were not affected. The media outcry after the publication of the study was condemning that the study was tinkering with people’s news feed. In any case, Facebook is however constantly tinkering with the algorithm that shows or hides posts in an individual’s news feed, it is not an “objective” representation of the world. This highlights with how much trust and credibility we give to a very socially shaped piece of technology. Relating back to Crivellaro et al.’s paper, one can read the above mentioned ‘appropriation’ of FB functionalities also the other way round: The FB functionalities steered and influenced the discussions and formation of opinions.

Kramer, A.D.I. et al. 2014. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 111, 24 (Jun. 2014), 8788–90.