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Facework on Facebook: The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life and Its Role in the US Elections Author(s): Steffen Dalsgaard Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 24, No. 6 (Dec., 2008), pp. 8-12Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20179963Accessed: 27-04-2015 05:20 UTC
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Facework on Facebook The presentation of self in virtual life and its role in the US elections
Steffen Dalsgaard Steffen Dalsgaard is a PhD student at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His thesis is on state formation and
leadership in Papua New
Guinea, and is based on 18 months offieldwork in Manus
Province, PNG. He may be contacted via Facebook or
email at [email protected].
facebook ho
Fig. 1. The front page of a
Facebook user (the author). It is mainly filled with links to news as to the doings and
whereabouts of one's friends. Facebook urges users to write what they are doing right now as a way of feeding news to their friends. All
personal names and faces apart from the author s have been obscured in this and the
following images, except for those that are freely available to the public at their web
addresses.
What are you doing right now?
x Feed Filters
News Feed Status Updates Photos Posted Items Uve Feed
?. - syne s godt sidan nogle studerende kunne virke lidt mere taknemmehge. Oe skulle lige vide hvor lang tid jeg bruger pa at forberede undervisningen. SO minutes ago - Comment
^ * har ikke noget internet. Clearwire-boksen er kortsluttet? 2 hours
ago - Comment
A * ? *? -* ' * er klar til endnu en uge, og det er jo ikke s? ringe endda :0). y hours ago - Comment
and * ? are now friends.
<*?* * joined the group Du ved du er fra Calten nkr.... Comment U
X ***' * ** ? people who love her to stop sending apps (flowers 4
karma are nice but the apps require too much online bandwidth for this lo-tech locale...) 11 hours ago - Comment
P * .,. ? commented on *-. 's photo.
Jeg tror faktisk -- ? , hvis jeg skal vaere helt xrlig, at bade ridder og rayban gik af mode for S00 ?r siden. Jeg kan tage fejl?:0
?g * -... % ^ and - v* are now friends.
!!* ->- joined the group *NIKKI BEACH LUXURY WORLDWIDE TOUR BELGIUM* . Comment
? added new photos. Options RI
?: !
Requests
f?fl 1 event invitation
C^ 97 other requests
Applications
(Ql) Photos
H Croups
03 Marketplace
: 1 regalos antropologic request
*$ video
(?j Events
tft Cities IVe Visited
Invite Your Friends Invite Your Friends
Use our simple tools to enable you to quickly invite and connect with your friends on Facebook.
Birthdays fW Tomorrow
?ft. ?*? /* .f m -f*r
People You May Know
Add as Friend
Add as Friend Du og gik i skole sammen p?
I Aarhus Universitet.
Add as Friend Du og gik i skole sammen p? Aarhus Universitet.
Invite Your Friends
(^ Invite friends to join Facebook.
I am indebted to Keir Martin, Mark Mosko, Ton Otto, Toke Bjerregaard and the
anonymous AT reviewers for
inspiration and comments on
the theoretical perspectives, and I am grateful to those of
my friends who were willing to share with me some of their
experiences using Facebook,
MySpace and Linkedln.
The title of this article could just as well have referred to
MySpace or any other of the by now numerous websites
that are used to connect people who know each other and
want to demonstrate this connectivity to the other users
of the worldwide web. Linkedln, Orkut, Bebo and Hi5 are other examples of such web utilities known as social
networking sites, but MySpace and Facebook are the best
known on a worldwide basis.1
What I want to discuss is two recent shifts in the public and the private presentation of self that have occurred
with the proliferation of these websites. One is the ten
dency for persons to exhibit themselves on the internet by
showing their relationships on these sites. The second is
the increasing tendency for politicians to focus on mobi
lization via such sites, as has been evidenced in particular
by the overwhelming success of the Obama-Biden cam
paign, which mobilized millions of active campaigners and donors worldwide through sophisticated networking
techniques, such as through the my.barackobama.com site
built for the campaign by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of
Facebook (Stirland 2008).
Social networking sites Within a given web utility (e.g. Facebook), people build
a web page with links to the pages of their 'friends', or
in the case of politicians to their 'supporters'. As a social
phenomenon, exhibiting one's relations seems like a very new development in the West, but it is in fact not that novel
when considered through the ethnographic or anthropo
logical lens. These two shifts point in turn towards a theme
of hierarchy, which seems under-explored in many schol
arly discussions of the internet.
The proliferation of websites focused on persons as
nodes or nexuses in networks is an innovation to the
Western world, but is at the same time a natural conse
quence of a development that has been under way for some
time in the West. For the last two centuries, individualism
has been the dominant mode in the understanding of social
identities and personhood in the West, but this individu
alism is now beginning to be exhibited in new ways that
in fact mirror forms of sociality as they are experienced
every day in other parts of world, particularly Melanesia.
Where others (most notably Mosko 2007) have argued in favour of applying classical anthropological theory (espe
cially the so-called New Melanesian Ethnography) to
understand modern consumption in a Melanesian context,
I will attempt the reverse move and argue that the same
theory could illuminate novel forms of consumption in and
of cyberspace in a Western context.2
In her book The gender of the gift ( 1988), Marilyn Strathern, as the main proponent of what is today known
as New Melanesian Ethnography (cf. Josephides 1991), presents the thesis that people in Melanesia 'are as divid
ually as they are individually conceived' (1988: 13).
According to Strathern, Melanesians consider themselves
'partible persons' in that they are made up of parts that they
8 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 6, DECEMBER 2008
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Fig. 2. Requests for 'exchanges' with friends on
Facebook. Most of these
exchanges take place through applications generated by the users of Facebook, who
thereby create the content of their own pages. Reproduced via the author s Facebook
profile.
Fig. 3. The Friend Wheel. This is an example of an
application which has been created by a Facebook user.
It displays your name in the centre of a circle, with the names of your friends extending like rays of the
sun, and threads connecting those of your friends who know each other. This is the author s wheel (with names
obscured). Reproduced via the author s Facebook profile.
Fig. 4. An example of a Facebook application
facilitating exchange as it has been known to
anthropologists since the
early days of the discipline (created by Ryan Schr?m, an
anthropologist working in
Melanesia, and reproduced here with his permission). Reproduced via the author s
Facebook profile.
have been provided from others -
from their social rela
tions such as parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and other part ners with whom they engage in social transactions. The
Facebook phenomenon is in many ways comparable to this
perspective on Melanesian sociality. There is a recognized
tendency in the West today for the formation and represen
tation of a person's social identity to be based on exhib
iting who one is via material and immaterial consumption. This aspect of processes of social identity formation has
been discussed in anthropology at least since the 1980s
(e.g. Bourdieu 1984, Miller 1987, Friedman 1994). People adhere to specific social identities by sporting, for instance, a particular style or dress associated with specific forms of
'cultural capital', distinguishing one from others that one
does not want to be identified with or identifying one with those one wants to be included with. Social identity can
also be exhibited via taste in music, literature, choice of
transport and much else (cf. Bourdieu 1984).
Today this happens also on the internet, where on
Facebook and MySpace for instance, one can display one's choice of music, photos and videos of oneself, and
also one's social relations - a person can display his or her
'friends'. But social networking sites are more than just a
reproduction of the work of distinction that takes place in
real social life. They go further in that they are meant to
present people as being in the centre of the world. They allow people to display themselves not just as self-made
individual persons, but as dividuals. In one way, they give
everyone the chance to be individual in the sense of being
unique, because any person can be shown as being in the
centre of a social universe -
their own. No matter who you
are, your Facebook website has you as the one in focus.3
It is a matter of exhibiting one's perspective or point of
view on the social relations that one is made up of. That
people are made up of social relations may not be explic
itly conceptualized by Facebook users, who still regard themselves as individuals, but the websites in question
provide the applications and a medium for exchange of
perspectives that match dividual sociality. It offers -
per
haps even demands -
changes of perspective in the sense
that people must see their friends as centres of their own
universes, since their uniqueness is defined by the rela
tionships they embrace. The Facebook-person is presented
relationally, in that a profile without connections to friends
would make no sense since that is the whole point of the
social networking site. Furthermore, most interaction on
Facebook is built on and facilitated by small exchanges of information, challenges, photos etc. between friends.
Facebook persons are thus not presented as bounded indi
viduals, but rather as unbounded dividuals.
The Facebook person is a dividual that incorporates her/
his social relations to form the representation of her/his
identity. The concept of the dividual has been employed in discussions of sociality on the internet by Tom Boellstorff
(2008), who uses it to describe people's use of different
'avatars' displaying various sides of themselves in the vir
tual world Second Life. However, his use of the concept
is far from the Melanesian understanding that a person is
constituted relationally in exchange, which is what I find
to be the case on social networking sites and Facebook in
particular.
Structuring relationships It must be noted that there are a number differences
between the setups of specific sites. MySpace, for
instance, is to a wider extent a platform for individualistic
self-representation and self-promotion where people share
their own generated content, while the electronic applica tions on Facebook profiles encourage exchanges between
friends, which create the content (McClard and Anderson
2008). Similarly, there are differences in terms of whether
Requests
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Papua New Guinea gifts Refresh I Customize
Papua New Guinea gifts
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Wanna send something else? Make your own gift app in minutes!
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 6, DECEMBER 2008 9
1. For an overview, see
boyd and Ellison (2007). 2. Mark Mosko (n.d.)
has done much the same
by arguing that Christianity contains the recognition of dividuality in Western
persons. This implies that what I am describing in this article may not involve
any new forms of Western
personhood, if the Western individual already contains the potential for dividuality just as the Melanesian
person, according to Marilyn Strathern (1988), maybe individually conceived under
specific circumstances. It is the technology that engenders new perspectives on
dividuality and individuality. 3. The name 'MySpace'
says it all! The phenomenon is also attested to by Time
magazine's announcement that in 2006 its Person of the Year was 'you' on the
grounds of the increase in
user-generated content for the internet such as videos,
blogs and social networking profiles (Time magazine, 13 December 2006).
4. See www.alexa.com, which monitors the traffic on web pages.
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Fig. 5. Facebook's front page.
Wtkomc to Factbook! | Factbook
Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.
Sign Up It's free and anyone can join
w& ::%?.%:>*
the general public or only your 'friends' can see your pro
file, and how much of it. There are also both geographical and demographic differences in terms of which site people prefer and how they use it. The site Orkut, for instance, was virtually taken over by Brazilians employing it to
ends other than those intended by its creators (Nafus, de
Paula and Anderson 2007). Of the two best-known sites,
Facebook is generally more popular than MySpace in
Western Europe, while the latter is more widely used in
the US at the moment.4 However, the fundamental aspect of displaying who one is by displaying one's friends is common to all of the social networking sites (see boyd
2006). Taking my cue from the above observations on similari
ties between Melanesian sociality and the Facebook phe
nomenon, I argue that the internet has been shaped into
hierarchical forms by the way that people use it in prac tice. Others before me have shown that people's use of the
internet reproduces concerns and differences from 'real
life' (e.g. Miller and Slater 2000, Castells 2000), but some commentators still seem to be taken with the internet as a
new and fascinating technology, and refer to it as flat and
non-hierarchical without providing any qualitative or quan titative empirical evidence or social theoretical argument for this assertion (e.g. Urry 2005; see also Castells 2000).
Non-hierarchical to whom, one might ask? In theory the web may be so from the perspective of the omniscient
scientist, who knows that the internet is 'just' a very large number of computers that are connected to each other,
and that the internet drawn out on paper seems like a two
dimensional model of how people relate to each other and
follow links from one web page to another. The argument would seem to be that interaction can take place horizon
tally and directly between users, without having to pass via
'hubs' or 'nodes'. But most often it does pass through just such nodes, as communication travels through a medium
forming a network. Practical use of the internet entails sev
eral different kinds of ranking systems or hierarchies that
often match social differentiation outside the virtual world,
and much communication on the internet is not horizontal - in part because networks are not by default horizontal
or devoid of differential rank. This is to say not just that access to the internet reproduces already existing social
and economic polarization and stratification (cf. Castells
1998), but that much internet interaction involves several
more or less tacit forms of ranking - some hierarchical,
some not.
When MySpace added a 'Top 8' feature where one
could list one's eight best friends, it made offline hierar
chies overt in the online forum and created antagonisms between friends, who expected reciprocity in terms of
who was listed as the best friend of whom (boyd 2006).
Facebook has not added this feature, but the user can add
applications to his/her profile that rank and compare one
against one's friends. This could for example be ranking in terms of 'funniest friend', comparison in terms of
'which superhero are you?' or small competitions (such as quizzes about European flags, movies etc.). MySpace and Facebook are not the only examples of production of
rankings in internet forums, although they are probably the clearest.
The way that some websites function as centres and as
access points to others is also a way of constructing a form
of rank. There is much more traffic and many more hits on
these pages, whereas other pages that are less well-known
suffer anonymity in the periphery. Even search engines such as Google have been programmed to make ranked
lists of search results based on an evaluation of'relevance'
of information (see also Castells 2000). This relevance
may not always be relevance to the one doing the search,
but could be from the point of view of those whose desire to be found extends to paying to get listed at the top of the list of hits, or deliberately including a number of popular
words in titles or key text passages based on a speculation of what people 'google' most frequently.
With the array and multitude of websites available
today, survival is a matter of being found. Many websites
have a 'hit counter' that reveals how often they are vis
ited. Entities that desperately need and hence want to be
found may be private enterprises dependent on promoting themselves as brands. These also increasingly advertise
via social networking sites, where information is passed on via one's network of friends (see boyd 2006).
Virtual mobilization
Building on New Melanesian Ethnography as a model
to understand social networking sites, it is obvious that
networks are closely intertwined with the production of
hierarchy, which still seems to contradict some people's
perception (e.g. Urry 2005). With the advent of MySpace and Facebook, the possibility of a hierarchical relationship has been recreated for everyone with access to the internet,
where the person as the centre becomes the holistic entity
defining and encompassing his/her own sociality if not
'society' (see Strathern 1994). Networks consist of nodes,
and in the 'Facebook society', every person is a node. But
there are differences between nodes. Some are more cen
tral than others and function as the hub for many more
transactions. Some may only have ten 'connections' or
'friends', while others may have several hundreds - not
withstanding that there is qualitative difference between
relationships, that not all relationships are personal, that
many 'friends' are perhaps what we would normally call
acquaintances and so on.
Bertrand, Romain, Briquet, Jean-Louis and Pels, Peter
(eds) 2007. Cultures of voting. London: Hurst
&Co.
Boellstorff, Tom 2008.
Coming of age in Second
Life. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984. Distinction. London:
Routledge. boyd, danah 2006. Friends,
friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being on social
network sites. First
Monday [online], 11 (12). ? and Ellison, Nicole 2007.
Social network sites:
Definition, history and
scholarship. Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1): 210-230.
Castells, Manuel 1998. End
of millennium. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
? 2000. The information age: Economy, society and
culture, vol. I. The rise
of the network society. Oxford- Blackwell Publishers.
Friedman, Jonathan (ed.) 1994. Consumption and
identity. Newark: Harwood Academic.
10 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 6, DECEMBER 2008
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JBT.'hf??X?^
facebook Browne AfPages | Dfrectory
Barack Obama
2,968,284 supporters
Type: Politician r
?Mgg*T9cl*_Jgp_
! (3? Q ^ ? http://www.lMrKkotMfTM.com/indcx.php
OBAMA Ul 1)1 N
THANK YOU
ACTION PEOPLE
lima? y CHANGE
CAN HAPPEN
John McCain 619,116 supporters
Type: Politician
T?MMOaCA
Sarah Palin 445,017 supporters
Type: Politician
Students for Barack Obama 206,589 supporters
Type: Politician
OUR MOMENT IS Joe Biden 175,308 supporters
Type: Politician
^-"^ Hillary Clinton
?^?"?II!?T 166,809 supporters
H'^JlLl Type: Politician
Se?ttMe
Michelle Obama 162,623 supporters
Type: Politician
Fig. 6 (above). Politicians on Facebook rated in terms of number of supporters, in which the Obama-related websites
gained well over 3 million supporters.
Fig. 7 (light). The homepage of Barack Obama's www.
mybarackobama.com site as at 11 November 2008, following the Obama-Biden election victory. This effective networking
page offers every user their own customized view of the
presidential campaign depending on locality and personal interests. Designed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, it includes customized tools to help Obama mobilize social networks. The website claims to have attracted into the
campaign people from all 50 states, creating more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosting over 200,000 events, and
making millions of calls to neighbours encouraging support for Obama's presidential candidacy.
O OBAMABLOG
Moving Forward on My.BarackObama posted Sovember o~ 4:23:23 PM Over In? past 21 months, millions of Indrviduals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama The scale and size of this community and its
work is unprecedented. Individuals in all 50 states have created more than 35.000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200.000 events, and made millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign There can be no question thai these local, grassroots CONTINUE READING
Wisconsin Celebrates posted Soi ember o* 3:10:0- PM Supporters in Madison. Wisconsin celebrated Ihe victory on Tuesday night in the streets of downtown How did you celebrate''
CONTINUE READING
Scenes from Election Night postedSoiember 06 5:59:40 P.V What was your Election Night like?
CONTINUE READING
Barack Wins North Carolina posted Soi ernber 06 4:24:42 P.V The Associated Press reports that Barack Obama won North Carolina President-elect Obama won North Carolina on Thursday, a triumph that underscored his political strength as he turned nine states thai President Bush won in 2004 to Democratic blue The Associated Press declared Obama the winner after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots That survey found that there are not enough remaining CONTINUE READING
Front Pages, continued posted Soi ember 06 8:3~:2~ AM More of yesterday's front pages from around the country CONTINUE READING
One Day to Change the World
? MY BARACKOBAMACOM
ORGANIZE LOCALLY WITH OUR ONLINE TOOLS T.ilk to Voices-Join j I.?.iM.mup r.iul jii Fvi-ni rundr.iiM- Wog
LOGIN TO My BO
WELCOME HILLARY SUPPORTERS
O OBAMA STORE It OBAMA MOBILE
TEXT HOPt TO 6220?
O OBAMA EVERYWHERE
Facebook BleckPlanet
MySpece Falthbes?
YouTube Eons
Signs and Posters Pins and Buttons
For hundreds of more items, visit the Obama store VISIT THE STORE
Hats and Winter Caps
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 6, DECEMBER 2008 11
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Fig. 8. John McCain s
My Space page, 21 Oct. 2008, with a request to become his
friend. That it is not stated as a personal invitation to
become 'my friend'may bear witness to John McCain's own
feeling of estrangement from cyberspace.
}J Country First
J?i
i MySpace i Blog
as
View Friends
&-} Send ^*yy Message !
<?
Make a Comment i
OHIO EARLY VOTING BEGINS SEPT. ?0
Live Events with John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin
COUNTRY I i?RS
4 Super Tuesday'-these numbers had grown to 287,853 and
185,694 respectively, but Obama's site kept on growing
reaching 871,963 shortly after his election victory, with his Facebook profile nudging 3 million supporters, a record
for any politician on Facebook.
On Facebook, political mobilization has become so
popular that politicians as a category of people now have
specific kinds of profiles, where they have 'supporters' instead of 'friends'. Here it is not votes that strengthen the
politician, but relationships, and it is the revelation of their
quantity rather than their quality which counts. The politi cian in question stands as the central node in a network of
supporters with the aim of reaching further out along the
links provided by these supporters. Like the big man, the
politician on Facebook is also constituted relationally, in
that by gathering a large number of supporters s/he appears as a candidate with widespread public appeal
- an appear ance which is necessary in order to be taken seriously in
an electoral contest. 'Facebook size' is one way to demon
strate appeal, and it feeds into and becomes a competition
parallel to the voting. Perhaps it gives a good picture of the cultural or social aspect of voting.
Offline political support is based on exchange rela
tions to a larger extent than is often recognized in political
theory or sociological literature on elections (see Bertrand,
Briquet and Pels 2007). Interestingly, if this MySpace or Facebook 'model' was applied to an election in Papua
New Guinea, for some candidates there would be no sig nificant difference between a candidate's actual social
relations and the amount of votes s/he would get, and to a
large extent this is what elections are about in Papua New
Guinea, where 'big man-style' politics is a common phrase
(see e.g. Rynkiewich and Seib 2000). However, had MySpace or Facebook really been used,
there would be a difference even though political sup
porters are typically relations of the candidate. Political
support is not always something that can be given to a
candidate openly and freely, for fear of repercussions from
those candidates one chooses not to support -
especially if
one of them happens to win. A politician in power may not
be able to harm those who did not vote for him directly, but he is likely to provide access to the limited resources of the state to his supporters first and to everyone else second
- if at all. That is the positive aspect of the secret ballot
in Western-style democracies, although support for politi cians on social networking sites is as much a statement
to one's network of friends as it is to the politician. The
crucial thing to note, however, is the way that social net
working sites such as MySpace and Facebook have been
employed by politicians in Western countries to mobilize
political support, and that in the process they enable a
work of distinction and hierarchization.
There are many interesting areas that could be explored from here. I have focused in this article on the visible -
that which is exhibited and forms the obvious parts
of people's impression management in cyberspace (cf.
Goffman 1959). In Melanesian groups, it is also common
to have relationships that are not exhibited, but must be
kept away from the public. My guess is that all sociality is like that. Almost everyone, in the West too, has rela
tions they would rather keep quiet about. One could argue
that the choices people make in what they want to exhibit
on the internet would necessarily mirror the complexity of the social relations they are engaged in. One major task that remains is to uncover the ways in which social
networking sites provide different possibilities for both revelation and concealment of aspects of personhood and
social reality.
Goffman, Erving 1959. The
presentation of self in
everyday life. New York: Garden City.
Josephides, Lisette 1991.
Metaphors, metathemes, and the construction of
sociality: A critique of the New Melanesian
Ethnography. Man (n.s.) 26: 145-161.
McClard, Anne and Anderson, Ken 2008. Focus on
Facebook: Who are we
anyway? Anthropology News 49(3): 10-12.
Miller, Daniel 1987. Material culture and mass
consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
? and Slater, Don 2000. The internet: An ethnographic
approach. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Mosko, Mark 2007. Fashion as fetish: The agency of modern clothing and traditional body decoration
among North Mekeo of
Papua New Guinea. The
Contemporary Pacific 19(1): 39-83.
? n.d. 'Partible penitents: The dividual Christian
person and processes of religious conversion in Melanesia'. Paper
delivered for the Research Focus Area on Globalisation at the
Faculty of Humanities,
University of Aarhus, 20
September 2007.
Nafus, Dawn, de Paula,
Rogerio and Anderson, Ken 2007. If we are all
shouting, is there anyone left to listen? Abstract 2.0. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
Proceedings, 2007(1): 66-77.
Rynkiewich, Michael and
Seib, Roland (eds) 2000. Politics in Papua New Guinea: Continuities,
changes and challenges. Goroka: The Melanesian Institute.
Stirland, Sarah Lai 2008.
Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama wins
Presidency. Wired (blog. wired.com), 4 November,
Strathern, Marilyn 1988. The gender of the gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.
? 1994. Parts and wholes:
Refiguring relationships. In: Borofsky, R. (ed.)
Assessing cultural
anthropology, pp. 204-216. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Urry, John 2005.
Complexities of the global. Theory, Culture and
Society 22(5): 235-254.
This testifies to the different ways people make use of
MySpace of Facebook. Some only want to invite a close
group of real-life friends, while others want to collect and
encompass as many friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc.
as they can to appear popular (boyd 2006). Thus one hier
archical relationship can be based on one's 'popularity' as a form of comparative ranking. On one level, popu
larity on these sites subjects the perception of a relation
ship between part and whole to personal understanding; on another, it can be objectively determined based on
the quantity of one's relations (see Nafus, de Paula and
Anderson 2007). The latter definition emphasizes that the relations to 'friends' on MySpace or Facebook may just as
well be of a symbolic character rather than signifying an
important relationship built on long-term mutual exchange of greetings, gifts, favours, opinions and so on.
The creation of hierarchy or rank in the size and cen
trality of specific nodes in the network is again comparable to Melanesian groups shaped around so-called 'big men'
who dominate others via competitive exchanges of wealth.
To a big man, the number of relations is key to his status
and social significance. Drawing upon a large number
of people through gift exchange enables him to channel
large amounts of wealth through himself in ceremonial
exchanges. This allows him to sustain a large number of
relations over time, thus increasing the amount of wealth
he can attract for his next ceremony. The more relations
then, the bigger he is socially - as a person.
Something similar in appearance to this 'big man com
petition' is occurring in Western politics, when politicians use Facebook or MySpace profiles to mobilize support in
terms of both votes and funding, although here it happens on a much larger scale and with a much larger audience,
given the possibilities presented by new technologies of communication. During the Danish parliamentary election
campaign in 2007, the Danish prime minister bragged of more than 4000 Facebook friends. Other candidates for
the Danish parliament also employed Facebook to gather
support, mustering numbers in the thousands (Politiken,
17 November 2007). In comparison, according to his own
website Barack Obama had mustered 203,952 MySpace friends on 30 December 2007 (see www.barackobama.
com); Hillary Clinton had 152,647 according to hers
(www.hillaryclinton.com). By 20 February 2008 -
after
12 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 6, DECEMBER 2008
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