In The Diaspora
Terry Roopnaraine is a Guyanese social anthropologist with research interests in Amazonian ethnology. He currently works as an independent consultant in the social development and poverty alleviation sector
By Terry Roopnaraine
“…if networks had lengths, they would stop themselves” (Marilyn Strathern)
A few months ago, I caved in and joined Facebook. I had resisted this for a long time, smugly and stubbornly deleting many invitations from my inbox. I’m still ambivalent about the whole social network zeitgeist, and my use of the site is self-limited and self-censoring: I have posted a few photos, uploaded a link or two, and used it to get back in touch with friends from long ago and far away. But that is about the extent of my involvement. I don’t ‘update my status’ or share my thoughts. I don’t log in every day, and rarely comment on anything at all. I am disinclined by nature to live much in the public view; given the current debates about Facebook privacy settings and the harvesting of involuntarily shared information, I feel vindicated about this choice. But private vs. public life is not what I want to discuss in this column. My interest here is in the idea of networks and relationships.
Some numbers: at the time of writing, I have a modest 115 ‘friends’ on Facebook. Of these persons, I have actually met precisely 112 at one point in my life or another (I use ‘met’ broadly as some of these people I have not seen since I was a child). Two of them are people I have never met, but have corresponded with professionally, and just one is someone with whom I’ve had no contact at all.
Now, according to Facebook’s own statistics (we should perhaps reach for the salt shaker at this point), the average user has 130 friends. I have not calculated the average number of friends of my friends, but I did glance over the numbers: they range from a low of 20 to an amazing 2742. And before you jump to the conclusion that this extraordinarily connected person is a 16-year old techno-whizz from Silicon Valley, let me note that he is retired and lives in Paris.
What is a network? We have long spoken of networks of people or institutions; we have made network into a verb, albeit an ugly one. One way to define the concept is to think of a set of points or nodes (people or institutions) connected by ties (relationships). Here I am borrowing the terminology of Social Network Analysis, a field which, incredible as this may seem, pre-dates Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the like by a century or so. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has noted the ‘fractal logic’ of networks, to which we might also add a comment on their iterative nature: relationships begetting relationships.
One archetypal network would be that of the family: the kinship network. But if the nodes are people, what are the ties? Some represent affinal relationships—those which exist through marriage, while others represent consanguineal relationships—those which are characterised by ‘shared blood’: fraternal or filial. Our kinship networks are tightest within some culturally-defined central core, and weaken as we move outwards. What do I mean by ‘tighter’ or ‘weaker’? Simply that tighter relationships embody more requirements: enjoining feeding, nurturing, protecting and, between certain categories of people, sanctified sex and reproduction. Weaker ones imply less of an obligation to provide these things.
Kinship can seem difficult to grasp, but in reality it is simple: a set of basic principles and rules are engaged to varying degrees in different societies, and the cultural texture, or variation, arises from these specific gradations and permutations. To a greater or lesser degree, culture defines the shape and form of kinship relations, telling us (at least) how to behave towards a given person: it situates us. This is useful and it allows us to move through lives of great social complexity without lurching from one humiliating faux pas to another. In other words, these rules of behaviour help us keep our feet out of our mouths.
But if we now step beyond the traditional boundaries of the kin network, and think about social networks more generally, matters become much more complicated because of the slipperiness of concepts like ‘friend’. In the real and non-virtual world, I think we all have a reasonable notion of what constitutes friendship, though we should not forget that there are cultural variations here too.
But I am sure that we would also agree that there are gradations of friendship: as with the ‘family kinship’ discussed above, we have groups of close friends and groups of less-close friends, radiating outwards in concentric circles, each successive circle less enmeshed in the obligations of reciprocity and mutuality than the last. The problem here—which creates the slipperiness—is that ‘friend’ is just one word upon which we place excessive demands: it has to cover everybody from the very nearest to those hovering at the outer edges of our circles.
In the virtual world of Facebook-speak, ‘friend’ is even more fraught with ambiguity: it is a noun-verb cipher, covering everybody from family members to people whom we have never met at all but whom we have clicked (‘friended’) into our anointed circle.
To steal an overused term from the social theorist Benedict Anderson, Face-book is a universe of varyingly-overlapping, occasionally-concentric imagined communities: friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends (and so on ad infinitum), groups of classmates, groups of shared political activism, groups of shared cultural interest: the number of possibilities is literally limitless. One of these imagined communities is surely that of the diaspora: Facebook caters specifically for people on the move by providing, in the personal information section, options for both ‘Hometown’ and ‘Current City’.
It is a truism that new forms of technology are fundamentally changing the ways in which people in a diaspora communicate both with each other, and with the people who have through choice or necessity remained in their home countries. Facebook may be the crest of the current wave of possibilities, but it is by no means the first. I first began to get a sense of these possibilities in a Nicaraguan cyber café in 2002: as I checked my email, a dozen internet ‘telephone’ (VOIP) conversations were taking place at the workstations around me. Most of these conversations concerned remittances. This made me reflect on the changing nature not only of technology but of relationships: the ability to easily and cheaply call relatives in Los Angeles or Miami, this new access, must surely have placed greater demands on those living abroad and earning hard currency. In what ways might this change the nature of these relationships? This is the question I want to pose in the context of Facebook and social media in general.
How are the changes in the density, shape and extension of our social networks reflected in changes to the nature of our relationships to people, places, culture, politics and history? I find it hard to imagine that kinship relations, particularly in diasporic communities, will be unaffected by the new immediacies of social media. It is hard—and probably unnecessary—to speculate about whether this will be on the whole a good thing or not.
Some critics raise the issue of dehumanizing and digitizing our social relationships, erasing their colour and emotional content.
I think this is probably too sceptical a view, and that in fact a lot of relationships have been enabled and ‘activated’ in ways which would have been inconceivable before social media.
Given the relentlessly Futurist gaze of the social media phenomenon, one of the things which strikes me as most incongruous is the change in our relationship with the past, with our own histories. Let’s not forget that Facebook started out specifically as a tool for alumni to reconnect with their classmates, in other words, it explicitly encouraged users to delve into their pasts to re-establish contact with people with whom they might, in the absence of such a tool, never have had any post-graduation contact at all.
It has of course since opened its doors to the world beyond the academy, but the theme of ‘reconnection’ with old friends remains an important one: the technology of Future is used to re-animate and re-engage the Past; simultaneously, the idea of breathing new life into old friendships may have the effect of making new technologies more palatable to a wider range of people.
That social media were extensively used in the 2008 Obama campaign is old news. Closer to home, a few months ago, Sheila Holder flagged in this newspaper the growing importance of social media in Guyanese politics, specifically because these tools have the potential to engage the diaspora in current debates and even decision-making. The optimist in me wonders whether we might genuinely be witnessing the creation of an inclusive and participatory politics through the active construction of a more collective consciousness and an increasingly contingent, mutual present-ness in the lives of others.
The pessimist thinks that it will take a great deal more than denser connectedness to dismantle the entrenched power structures which produce and sustain inequality in the world and the home.
