Mocarski, R. (2013). The discourse of the seemingly innocuous: Social media and willing surveillance. The Electronic Journal of Communication, 23 (3-4).

The Discourse of the Seemingly Innocuous: Social Media and Willing Surveillance

Abstract: Social networking is a new constant within the lives of almost all Americans, and most people around the world. The use of social networking sites provides many benefits to the users while also providing capital and data to social networking companies. However, the gains of the social networking companies are downplayed in the official rhetoric of the companies in an effort to create an apparently safe, utopian-seeming space for the users. Through a cultural, critical rhetorical analysis of the rhetoric of social networking companies, this paper demonstrates the ways in which materiality is being re-invented as social networking becomes not only a technological and cultural force in our society, but also an ordering metaphor of our lives. Furthermore, this paper complicates the operative logic of the virtual/reality binary promoted in this rhetoric, demonstrating the ways that this binary allows innocuous seeming rhetoric to mask the disciplinary, surveillance, and capitalistic forces of social networking.

Social networking has become a pervasive technology and means of communication in our society. The virtual worlds social networks create allow us to connect with other people throughout the world instantly, shrinking time and space, essentially eliminating physical boundaries. This paper explores the rhetoric of social networks and the ways in which materiality is being re-invented as social networking becomes not only a technological and cultural force in our society, but also an ordering metaphor of our lives. More specifically, this paper examines the operative logic of virtual/reality binary that allows innocuous seeming rhetoric to mask the disciplinary and surveillance forces of social networking. Through rhetorical analysis of social networks’ mission statements and other promotional materials, the seemingly innocuous rhetoric of these companies that purport to support diversity and inclusion are shown to foster homogeneity and willing submission to discourses of surveillance.

Literature Review

Operative Logics and Performativity

Operative logics function outside of critique because they can only be scrutinized on their own internal validity (Massumi, 2010). They generally function on falsely created binaries, where the opposites that construct these binaries work to define one another and exclude everything else. The operative logic at the center of social networking is that of the virtual/real binary (van Doorn, 2011). In other words, social networking is viewed and framed as virtual expressions and a virtual world, which creates a binary between the virtual and the real. This creates an unreality online that is purported to be free of consequences or real power (Freishtat & Sandlin, 2010). However, there are real consequences since the ways in which binaries and operative logics work to regulate bodies is through the materialization of discourse: “If the power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked with the question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 171).

Performativity, in this paradigm then, is the iteration and reiteration of the operative logics of discourses which bring these discourses into being, giving them power, and, in turn, material.

For social networks, their performative power is couched in their ability to create a world that is separate from the real. The very act of engaging with social media is willful submission to surveillance and discipline across multiple domains: surveillance from both the capitalist underpinnings of social networks and from the dominant discourses of society. In the paradigm of social networking “surveillance can be defined as the collection and usage of data on individuals or groups so that control and discipline of behaviour [sic] can be exercised” (Fuchs, 2010, p. 172). Disciplinary action comes via the fixed categories of self-disclosure on profile pages and the interactive element based on posting, responding, tagging, and so forth (Cover, 2012). Through these interactive elements of social media, dominant norms are stabilized. For example, transgressive posts can be brought into question by other users—disciplined—or if one wished to classify themselves outside of the gender binary they would not have this option in the profile function (Cover, 2012). In order for this willing submission to disciplinary discourses, the world of social networking must be presented and believed to be virtual.

These disciplinary functions act as solidifying forces, tools of other dominant discourses that extend their regulatory regime. Essentially, social networks, which have a physical body of the internet’s wires and hard-drives and servers and personal computers, act as an extending tool of discourse. Since social networks, or at least the output of these networks, is all discursive (words and images on a screen, and sound through speakers), then the reality created by these networks is necessarily discursive and can be dubbed virtual. This discursivity does not make social networks less real or less material. In fact it just orients them in the history of discourses:

If a performative provisionally succeeds, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because the action echoes prior action, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices (Butler, 1993, p. 172, emphasis in orginal).

The discourses enacted on social networks carry the weight and power of their history and therefore have inscribing power. The power of social networks to regulate bodies lies in the power of social networks to create and maintain the virtual/real binary in users’ minds while at the same time enforcing the governing rules (Foucault, 1972) of other dominant discourses through the aforementioned embedded disciplinary functions of the networks.

Materiality/Real

The questions of what is real and what is virtual are questions that assume there is a fixed world with big T truths. This worldview is predicated on antiquated notions of true objectivity and rationality. While discursive formations may not have matter in the same way that tables have matter, we still must navigate our world in response to these formations as we do with tables in our path. That being said, social networks do have matter that extends beyond the virtual. While the output of social networks is very much discursive, the hardware, wires, and devices used to access these networks are physical objects and the consequences of the use of these networks is inscribed on the bodies that use them (as well as other bodies). The production of these physical objects provides an example of how, even without discursivity, the

matter of the internet inscribes bodies. For example, Apple manufactures its iPhones in China. Their reason for doing this is quite obvious: profit. The eight hours of assembly each phone requires costs US$ 7.10 in China versus US$ 165.67 in the United States (Velshi, 2012). The logic of the decision is grounded in a capitalist discursive formation, where the more money you make on something the better. Apple workers in Chinese factories have their bodies shaped by the global capitalistic desires for products. This inscription is manifest in the restrained choices of materiality for the workers, as they are the abject. In order for the capitalistic drives of social networking to continue unabated, it is vital that the rouse of the virtual world that social networking operates in continues to be the logic of the users. In other words, it is imperative, in a capitalistic sense, for social networking sites to keep the fictive of the virtual world they operate within alive because if users step back and think about the production of the products they use to access social networks, or the disciplinary discourses they are subjected to on social networking sites, or the surveillance regimes they are subjected to as users, then they may cease being users (O'Brien & Torres, 2012).

Therefore, as posited above, the matter of social networks can be, and is, discursive—exceeding the physicality of wires. This discursivity inscribes bodies through performativity. The materiality of bodies does not rely solely on physical experience. Instead, materiality evokes the lived experiences of people where the body is constructed through the physical and the cultural. The cultural functions through language, emotion, affect, social norms, and all constructed systems of being.

Immaterial/Virtual

As discussed above, operative logics that rely on artificially constructed binaries gain their power through the exclusion of everything that does not fit one of the binary poles, with social networking using the virtual/reality binary as its foundation. The current constructions of virtual focus on digital and electronic worlds (van Doorn, 2011). In these constructions, virtual is interrelated to different forms of media and therefore becomes context specific. van Doorn (2011) traces the history of the concept of virtual, revealing that the concept, while not named until 1988, predates digital technology, describing worlds reflected in human memory, dreams, mirrors, paintings, photos, and film. In this construction, virtual culls the images of “disembodied minds” (van Doorn, 2011, p. 533), which journey unattached through abstract worlds of information and fantasy. When placed as the polar opposite of reality then, virtual is that which is not real. This binary makes the way we act on social networks safe from consequence because it is not real in this operative logic. This unreality could lead to freedom of expression because the actions on social networks are divorced from the actions in life, however, since this binary is a fictive, it does not work that way. Furthermore, since access to social networking is not limited to the disenfranchised, the surveillance of these groups remain, and their actions are therefore punishable (Cover, 2012).

By positioning virtual as fictive, then online selves and acts are at the same time discursive and material. Online we are able to extend ourselves through the collapse of physical boundaries. These online selves act as technologies of vision (Haraway, 1988). In Haraway’s study of the objectivity of science, she explores the way that technologies of vision restrict fluidity as they order the world in a specific way, not allowing for fractured or pluralistic subjectivities. This

folds into a view of the internet where each person is supposedly granted the power of new technologies of vision; this power, so we are told, gives us agency and therefore promotes fluidity. In other words, the technologies of social networks become extensions of ourselves. Since social networks, and the internet in general, are not individual things and there is not one way to interact with them, social networks conceptualized as an extension of the body highlight the co-mingling of technology and man with many iterations of this merger.

Our use of technology is therefore a blurring of the lines between man and machine. This blurring allows the extension of disciplinary and surveillance regimes of other dominant discourses. In other words, since technology allows the collapse of space and time through instant connection, dominant discourses have almost continuous access to people. This access allows the regulatory, governing rules of these discourses to be continually enforced and regulated. This type of hierarchical ordering of the world is convenient and clean, but it only tells half the story because the internet and social networks also allow spaces of invention. “Given the inextricable relations between humans and machines… it might be more useful to think in terms of ‘distributed agency’, which recognizes agency as a process that is allocated to human as well as non-human actors” (van Doorn, 2011, p. 536). Since that which we come into contact with online, we come into contact with within ourselves, the agency of the internet inscribes itself on us and we inscribe ourselves on it. Agency is not monolithic and viewing it as a process highlights this understanding, while also demonstrating that agency cannot be doled out like goods. In other words, the internet cannot act as a great equalizer which grants agency to all, because agency is performative and thereby situated in the history of discourses, wielding the power of these discourses to abject. Social networks, in this view of the internet, are then one of the tools that re-stabilize the governing rules from dominant discourses that early cyberfeminists thought might be escaped from on the internet—in a view that positioned the internet as a great utopia (Schulte, 2011). However, these hopes are not completely abandoned in this view, since agency is not positioned as a commodity, instead it is a process or a performative act. As a performative act, agency is obtainable to all, should the strategies of the dominant discourses be uncovered to illustrate the ways agency processes are being withheld. In the analysis below, the seemingly innocuous rhetoric used by social networks are deconstructed before moving to the discourses of surveillance that these strategies successfully hide, revealing the ways that this binary is created and solidified by social media purveyors.

Analysis

Creating the Binary

Social networks walk a narrow line when creating their image. They must project a weight or significance in order to gain value in the user’s mind, but, as argued above, they must remain grounded on the virtual. In this section, I analyze rhetoric that maintains this virtual grounding, before turning to innocuous seeming rhetoric that adds the weight needed to gain and keep users.

The virtual grounding is based in the common understanding of the function of technology, as explored above, and reified by the avatars we create on social networks and the games we play. First, avatars are the virtual images that represent the user online. For Facebook, Twitter, and

many other social networking sites, an avatar is simply a picture chosen by the user. This picture is static, in that it can only be changed manually, and comes to represent the user online. These avatars emphasize the virtual nature of social networks because they are constant, static, reminders of the sites’ own artificiality. Avatars in more game or virtual place centered social networks, such as Second Life, are more interactive and function as digital stand-ins, created and customized by the user.

Second Life, a virtual world with millions of users, “is a 3D world where everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you” (Second Life, 2013). Within the world, you can interact, as you would in person, and also play games, create worlds, do art, play music, have sex, and so forth. In order to join this network the user must create an avatar. This avatar is a choice of a generic 3D person or creature. Second life gives users the option of selecting from a dozen people, a dozen vampires (half of which are wolves), a dozen animals, a dozen robots, or a dozen vehicles. By keeping the avatars cartoonish creations, Second Life stabilizes the construction of its social network in the virtual. While the aforementioned description claims that Second Life is “real” through the “real” people on the network, the avatars belie this claim. Specifically, since the world is completely populated by 3D cartoons, many of which are non-human, the realness is overshadowed by the virtual interface, further solidifying the virtual/real binary. This is also solidified through the very name of the network: Second Life as the virtual world of the interface is positioned as less than or next to the real or first life. Furthermore, the secondary functions of Second Life—gaming—further reifies this construction as games are constructed as outside the real or as escapes from the real (Eisenbeiss, Blechschmidt, Backhaus, & Freund, 2012).

The introduction of games to social networks has exploded in the last few years, with Zynga leading the charge (Shin & Shin, 2011). Zynga is fully integrated with Facebook and is the producer of Facebook’s most popular games, including Farmville, Words with Friends, and Bubble Safari. Zynga claims 240 million active, unique, users a month. Full integration with Facebook allows Zynga free promotion of their games, as playing the games are narrowcasted via Facebook (and other social networking sites) to players’ social networks. The games that focus on simulated worlds, like Farmville, are 2D cartoon worlds in which users control cartoon avatars in order to complete goals and tasks. In Farmville, users can grow crops, raise animals, trade with other users, and socialize. Their exploits can be announced via Facebook and Twitter. These types of games solidify online space as virtual in that they present users as cartoon avatars participating in structured tasks. These tasks, while many times grounded in real world experiences such as farming, are outside of the real for the users. This virtual construction spills from the games themselves into players’ social network pages, as announcements of game achievements are both a reminder that there are games afoot on social networks and are also accompanied by cartoon logos of the games. Furthermore, Zynga’s own website perpetuates this cartoon world through visual rhetoric, as their About page features the employees of the company rendered as cartoons. Instead of pictures, each company member is a cartoon and has a biography that includes their favorite Zynga games.

In an interview with Om Malik at Gigaom, Zynga’s CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, explored his desires for the company’s future and also what the present and past of Zynga means and represents. His interview, unlike the innocuous rhetoric of the corporate website described

above, was candid about the commoditizing nature of the startup. This makes sense for a company, since profit is the overall objective. However, he took it one step further when talking about the future of his games:

Social gaming has to get to a level where Facebook has gotten to — you just cannot avoid it. It is a social norm for connections and we want to get there with games. That is what we are doing (with) Word for Friends, so we can get to bigger, broader market and get to more people (Pincus, 2012).

This quote illustrates how the goals of social gaming, at least at the corporate level, are for the playing of games to become natural and therefore pervasive. Pincus’s use of the phrase “social norm” is particularly telling, because social norms are those hegemonic forces that go unquestioned. If social gaming can become a norm, than the motives of the companies behind the games will be unquestioned because the companies become purveyors of necessities. The profit motive of Zynga and other social networks is what needs to be hidden by the public rhetoric of these companies, as the discourse of capitalism does not sit well with many people when it comes to social interactions—because monetizing these properties have shown to cause followers to sign-off (Huyse, 2011).

However, there are overt capitalistic undercurrents in the games of both Zynga and Second Life, as customization costs real money, as well as access to certain areas or experiences in these platforms. These types of experiences—free to join and play but not for everything—are termed freemium (Wasserman, 2011). This type of gaming erodes the rhetoric of the virtual, to an extent, as it links immediate effects (monetary) with what initially is divorced from reality, namely games. However, given the performative nature of discourses, this move can cloak itself in plain sight:

In virtual communities such as Second Life and social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook, self-organizing consumers are (re)producing consumer culture through individual and multi-level group interactions. In many instances, brands and other marketplace symbols can play important roles in developing and reinforcing individual consumer identities, and in providing substance for online consumer community formation (Darmody & Kedzior, 2009, p. 20).

Since the history of a performative adds weight to each iteration, the embedded nature of capitalism in western culture allows the real to infiltrate the virtual without the collapse of the binary. Therefore, the intonation of “brands and other marketplace symbols” within games actually can lend credibility to the games without disrupting the virtual experience. Furthermore, the capitalistic organization of the games can come to feel natural since it is a reflection of real society.

Games and avatars are strategies to perpetuate the virtual, common-sense, understandings of social networks. As games become more pervasive, varied, and complex, these strategies become less pure and therefore reveal the real side of the gaming industry, mainly its capitalistic undergirding. This is offset by both the weighting of the games in real life causes (such as Zynga’s promotion of their players’ charitable contributions) and the perpetuation of the cartoon worlds and avatars, as well as certain strategies of the innocuous that allow the

iteration of dominant discourses such as consumer culture to go unquestioned within the game. In the next section, innocuous seeming rhetoric that aims to further weight social networking, as well as ground social networking as a great diversifier, is explored.

The Trick of the Innocuous

Innocuous discourses work to restrict and bound bodies through their seemingly harmless operative logics. Sympathy (Butler, 1993), tolerance (Brown, 2006), empathy, happiness (Ahmed, 2004), and objectivity (Haraway, 1988) act as forces of abjection that seek to bound bodies in constricting, artificial discourses which solidify surfaces in an attempt to reify power. These seemingly innocuous mechanisms work to restrict fluidity through the elevation of the powerful by the definition (and in turn subjugation) of the negative. Bodies are bounded not by their physical borders, but instead through discourse bodies and the surfaces bodies come into contact with are defined and redefined constantly (Thrift, 2010). This fluidity of borders allows for a world where power is not stable and therefore hope is available. As stated above, to many, the internet is still seen as a force of resistance, a force of hope, a great democratizer and a place for utopian exploits (Hall, 2009). While this view has been complicated in more recent scholarship (Cover, 2012), the cultural understanding of the internet is still one of a positive force for equality, for the future, for democratization. Like other seemingly innocuous discourses, the internet also acts a solidifying force. Social networking is one arena online that acts as a hegemonic force, creating a restricting discourse on the internet that, in many ways, serves as the proxy or tool of the dominant discourses of society (such as gender)—hoarding the strategies of agency obtainment by willful submission to regulatory forces by users.

As with the seemingly innocuous discourses cited above, power is not granted easily and what seems to enable fluidity oftentimes stunts fluidity. In the case of social networks, the capitalistic underpinnings of its structure necessitate passive submission by users, where our very use of the sites grants permission to the powerful to track our movements (Sevignani, 2012). This surveillance acts as an avenue for those with power to shape our experiences online, restricting our fluidity by herding us toward destinations, which enables the extension of dominant discourse, and breeding self-surveillance (tailored advertisements (Fuchs, 2010), restrictions on posting content (Maranto & Barton, 2010), rebukes from other users (Cover, 2012), etc.). In other words, while much of the rhetoric of these sites focuses on the discourses of inclusion, diversity, and true social impact, the architecture of the sites breeds homogeneity and hegemony.

Tolerance. Wendy Brown’s (2006) examination of tolerance from a political/social/historical perspective illustrates how the seemingly innocuous is actually a force of the hegemonic order; a force that seeks to marginalize/abject others through the conflation of attributes and identity. Further, tolerance’s abjective function helps to reify a worldview of difference where difference is value-laden. Brown adds a layer to Foucault’s work on hegemonic discourses by tracing the ways one tool of power works. “Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist…. In this active management, tolerance does not offer resolution of transcendence, but only a strategy for coping” (Brown, 2006, p. 25). Tolerance as a coping strategy is tolerance as a reification of the marginal. The dominant norm uses tolerance to cope with the other and therefore reinforces the Other’s position as other. “Tolerance thus involves

two kinds of boundary drawing and a practice of licensing. Its invocation involves drawing special boundaries of dominion and relevance, as well as moral boundaries about what can and cannot be accommodated within this domain” (Brown, 2006, p. 29). Tolerance is an inscriber of relevance in that it marks certain bodies as Other through their need to be tolerated and hegemonic bodies as powerful and also compassionate through their ability to tolerate and wield the power of toleration. Aside from being an example of how the innocuous is an ordering form, tolerance is also intertwined with social network’s operative logic of inclusion.

The logic of inclusion is promoted by social networking’s most powerful brokers. Facebook’s mission statement focuses on this logic: “Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” (Facebook, 2012). The use of the phrase “make the world more open” is a way to say that Facebook wants the world to be tolerant, opening borders and connecting people across boundaries. Of course, this logic of openness functions much like tolerance. Facebook’s platform fosters closed borders through the way friending functions (Cover, 2012). In order to access someone else’s page, you must ask and gain permission. The openness is the ability to ask permission, but that openness can be stunted by others through refusal. The tolerance angle comes in because even if the borders are more open, and people “connect” with others they normally would not through Facebook, the connection does not eliminate differences. Furthermore, any connection across borders can be stifled through restricted or passive sharing, therefore the connection is a type of tolerance. Furthermore, this line of rhetoric grounds Facebook’s mission in the creation of a diverse world, one where sharing happens across borders. Given the way Facebook’s network functions, with the easiest and most pervasive way to friend someone is through actually knowing them in the flesh or knowing someone they know, this diversity is not actuality. Essentially, social networks are small, closed circuits. While they have the ability to make “the world more open and connected,” they normally keep the world homogeneous, with groups clustering around similar interests and localities.

Facebook’s mission also aims to give users “power” which is code for autonomous agency. As discussed above, if agency is viewed as a process than the commodification of agency is a fictive. For Facebook the “power” they give to users is the ability “to share and make the world more open and connected.” In this formation, power as agency is simply granted as a commodity in the form of sharing and social organization, or connectedness. This rhetoric occludes the power that Facebook enacts through tracking users and selling users’ information to advertisers. The power granted, is the power of communication and therefore not a commodity, but a skill that users already have. Therefore, this granting of power is rendered fictive. This rhetoric demonstrates the type of image necessary to keep the surveillance and disciplinary forces that social networks employ and facilitate hidden. By alluding to the importance of what Facebook does, Facebook elevates the use of its services and promotes a tolerant world. At the same time, this tolerant world, through Facebook’s architecture, is one where the tolerant do not have to have real interactions with the tolerated, and can even discipline these tolerated or deny them tolerance. This rhetoric of the tolerant is grounded as a humanitarian effort to make the world more open and therefore steps away from the virtual rhetoric analyzed above, weighting what social networking does or can do.

Sympathy. In another exploration of a seemingly innocuous discourse, Butler (1993) turns to sympathy. She illustrates how it acts as a colonizing force: “sympathy involves a substitution of oneself for another that may well be a colonization of the other’s position as one’s own” (p. 80). In Butler’s explanation of the difficulty of identity politics, where identities and identification require exclusion of other identities, sympathy acts as one such othering force. The powerful can masquerade as the marginal through sympathy, colonizing their position. This essentializes the marginal position, flattening it into a particular discourse embodied; while at the same time, elevating the sympathizer to the position of hegemonic power. Sympathy’s power lies in its ability to give an air of significance to the sympathizer’s actions. For social networks, the intonation of sympathy allows the networks to gain weight or relevance in the real world.

Social networks create this sympathy a number of ways, from individual users’ usage of the networks to promote charity and causes, to the companies’ own promotion of their charitable work (like those of Zynga highlighted above), to user memorials, and so forth. Facebook also creates a year in review page for users to browse that uses the rhetoric of sympathy as one of its primary devices. This page includes personalized tools where users can see a scrap book of sorts of their own year in review, as well as posting statistics, connection information, etc. Additionally, this page includes both a global year in review and Facebook Stories, which function via sympathy. Facebook Stories are six Facebook-selected stories that promote how Facebook changes the world. The mission statement for these stories is: “People using Facebook in extraordinary ways.” From the mission statement it is clear that Facebook uses these stories as a primary strategy to give weight and significance to their network and, in turn, users’ use of the network.

Each of these stories includes a fully produced, professional video that shows how Facebook facilitated a great, humanistic change in the world in the past year. Any of these six could be analyzed as rhetoric of sympathy, but for this analysis, I focus on one in particular for close analysis: “Perceptions: Beyond the Yellow Boat.” This “Story” is about Jay Jaboneta and his charity toward a small community in the Philippines that is part of Zamboanga City. Through Facebook Jaboneta raised enough money to buy a boat for the school children of this community. As the video explains and shows, these children, prior to the boat purchase, had to walk 2 kilometers in a river to make it to school. When Jaboneta heard about this, he was compelled to help.

The opening of the video features a dramatization of one of the children going to school. We see a little girl of around 7 years old putting her school uniform and shoes into a pink plastic bag. She loosely ties the bag and forces out all the air before tying it tight. We are then outside of her modest shed of a house, which sits on stilts in water. She climbs into the water, holding her school bag, which holds her plastic bag, above the water, which is thigh-high at this point. As the voiceover, narrated by Jaboneta himself, begins, a montage of shots shows the girl joined by her classmates as the water rises. One particularly endearing and powerful shot is of a smiling, toothless student who sinks into the water up to her chin and nose. She smiles as she pushes forward with her bag raised above her head, spitting water through her toothless grin. All the children then get out of the water and dress on the shore as Jaboneta says “where children were basically swimming when they were going to school.” These images are powerful

and implore the viewer to sympathize with the plight of these children. While the children are poor, they are framed as happy, clean, resourceful, and well-kept. The stark difference between the children themselves and their surroundings, rickety sheds and an industrial city, places the children into a safe and consumable light for the, likely, Western viewers who take in the video via Facebook. Further the narrative of liberalism—particularly the narrative of social mobility through education—that undergirds the need and want for safe transportation to school reinforces the safe space these children operate within.

Facebook implores the viewers to colonize these children’s position and in doing so, to understand what compelled Jaboneta to act. After the going-to-school scene ends, the movie shifts to a computer screen. Jaboneta says: “That story really touched me. So, I updated my Facebook status.” His status is seen typed on a computer screen: “wow…kids swim 2k to school!!!” His voice over continues, saying: “One of my friends challenged me.” His friend’s response is seen on the screen: “what are you going to do? ;)”, while his voiceover sets up the catalyst to his coming good deed: “It made me think. We should do something about it.” At this point, the viewer is supposed to understand and agree with Jaboneta’s sympathy. This agreement should stir positive emotions that then lend Facebook weight, as the video shows us that this real-world act of charity started with a status update—the mere typing of words on a computer screen.

This colonization masquerades as a completely beneficial act/position. While there are altruistic motives behind the boat drive, they are complicated by the binary set up via this sympathy. Essentially, Jaboneta can place himself in these children’s position symbolically, but he does not go to them. Instead, he uses a Western or capitalistic form of sympathy/action, that of a donation. Furthermore, this story’s tagline, “Finding his purpose with a status update,” sets up a hero narrative, where both the hero and those he saved are beneficiaries of the heroic action, mitigating the altruism of the act. This tagline also grounds the story in the world of Facebook by using the self-referent “status update” to describe the story.

While the action itself is not necessarily a negative, and in fact has positive outcomes, it is rife with the reification of power dynamics. This is most evident at the end of the video, which reveals that a secondary donation drive has begun, as the first one only solved half the problem. As the video continues it actually offers a counter-reading to the solely altruistic narrative. After a series of shots showing the kids riding the boat to school, laughing and jumping off the boat, and engaged in learning, we seeing them crawling through mud while Jaboneta says “But…Ah… one thing we didn’t realize was that in the afternoon when it’s low tide… A boat is kind of useless.” The altruism of the boat drive was rendered half useless, as the afternoon walk home, in the low-tide, was still an issue. Now, Jaboneta has moved to bigger problems in the community, according to him, by looking to fund college scholarships “to get (the community) out of poverty and improve the quality of life within the community.” This furthers the sympathy narrative and the narrative of liberalism that allows the children in the story to be consumable to Facebook users. Viewers are compelled to feel for these children, thereby placing the children into a Western paradigm. This sympathy reduces the children to pathos-inducing images, stripping them of agency (it is telling that none of the children speak in the video).

The final shot displays a picture of Jaboneta with the words “Jay Jaboneta: Finding his purpose with a status update.” His picture is connected to a dot that is connected to a web of sort. The shot zooms out to reveal that this is an extreme close-up of the map of the world. Each continent is created by millions of dots connected by lines. There are lines that cross the oceans too. Facebook has created these stories of triumph, which they claim to have been the catalyst to, as a way to weight Facebook. In other words, these positive pieces of propaganda, while innocuous seeming, hide the capitalistic, and therefore surveillance and disciplinary, function of Facebook. Facebook is framed as a world-wide network of altruism that inspires positive changes in the world while promoting diversity, while the sympathy they display is actually colonizing these subjects’ positions and forcing them into a Western paradigm, while using them for Western/capitalistic ends. However, one of Jaboneta’s final statements provides a glimpse into the negative aspects of these stories: “It’s really a learning process and it’s becoming sort of a relationship.” This is telling as it belies Facebook’s rhetoric of diversity and inclusion by underscoring the Western form of sympathy and inclusion, which is the donation. Before the failure of Jaboneta’s first idea, the real connections Facebook purports to encourage and facilitate were not actual connections. This is evident by the fact that Jaboneta, who has already had a successful campaign to buy a boat for these children, is just now thinking that his connection to these children is “becoming sort of a relationship.”

In sum, these stories afford Facebook a space to propagandize their rhetoric of sympathy, imploring viewers to sympathize with the subjects of the videos and therefore ignoring the shallow, or Western centered, connections and charity these videos actually demonstrate. This propaganda is effective and works to weight Facebook and therefore hide the technologies of discipline, surveillance, and homogeneity it actually supports.

Discourses of Surveillance

More than just seeming innocuous, the internet is generally, in its common-sense understanding, constructed as a positive force. As stated above, early cyberfeminists viewed the internet as a potential utopian discourse (Schulte, 2011; White, 2009), and the powerful companies of the internet continue cast themselves as links to this utopia. Like seemingly innocuous discourses, positive discourses conceal the restricting power of what they describe in an effort to keep power by willing voluntary participation.

McWhorter’s (1999) discussion of surveillance is a good exploration of how power is enforced through willing participation, as she demonstrates how institutions of power force control to be internal to the individual, thereby cloaking the discourse of power. This is done through the normalization and naturalization of these discourses. McWhorter (1999) captures the spirit of this type of action aptly: “docility is a major objective of most successful normalized disciplinary practices” (p. 180). In her description of soldier training, she shows how docility is programmed through the performative, iteration and reiteration of command acceptance and through a focus on a greater good. With a clear chain of command and a common goal, soldiers do not question what they do; instead their actions become embedded in who they are. Our use of the internet functions in the same way, as we willingly cede power for access. Using social networking sites means that we give these companies personal information to be sold, exposing ourselves and our bodies to capitalist discourse. This exposure is manifest through the

advertisements we see (Fuchs, 2010), the tailoring of our search results, and, in the most dystopic view of the world, to the government. These manifestations restrict fluidity because our behaviors along normative lines are rewarded with more normative discourses in searches and ads. While we have the ability to go anywhere online, if the tools we use foster homogeneity, than our destination cannot deviate from norms.

Grosz (1994) demonstrates how the senses build the organization of the body. In her analysis of how mental and physical injuries/disorders can cause phantom limbs, Grosz illustrates how inscription and, in turn, bodies are not predetermined. Our senses are how our bodies order themselves and also how our understandings of cultural expectation and body formations are understood. Therefore, we are produced through our senses and also regulate these productions through these same senses:

All of us, men as much as women, are caught up in modes of self-production and self-observation; these modes may entwine us in various networks of power, but never do they render us merely passive and compliant. They are constitutive of both bodies and subjects (Grosz, 1994, p. 144).

Despite this regulatory side we each have, Grosz posits that we are not passive. Passivity would mean that we do not have the means to resist culturally acceptable formation, but we do. As Grosz points out, there is no right formation and therefore, we have autonomy in the formation of our bodies. The virtual ordering of bodies, then, is no different from the real ordering of bodies. Discourses are enacted online and we follow scripts and re-inscribe these scripts on our bodies. As Cover (2012) demonstrates the ways we order our virtual selves on social media are severely limited by the architecture of the networks themselves. Specifically, the profile page functions as a marker of significance to bodily inscriptions. In other words, the categories privileged enough to be on the profile page are elevated and regulated by their placement (Cover, 2012). These categories include name, email, birthdate, gender, relationship status, religious views, political views, high school, college/university, employer, languages, and favorite quote. Not only do these abject categories/discourses that are not represented, they also abject those within categories that are not represented. For example, gender and sexuality only offer Male/Female and interested in Man/Women/Both. Transgender, asexual, third gender, and other subjectivities are rendered abject by their exclusion. This links back to surveillance in two primary ways: a) those who self-identify as other subjectivities are disciplined by their use of the social networks that exclude them from representation and b) these categories represent the discourse of capitalism, which buys this information in the form of advertising and therefore continues the perpetuation of normative narratives.

The omnipresence of dominant discourses, like capitalism, and their extension through social networking is articulated in the ways that surveillance has become a pleasurable act: “those who observe others take great pleasure in doing so, but even those who suffer observation find pleasure in being pursued” (McWhorter, 1999, pp. 177-178). Most, I would assume, have a negative reaction to the idea of surveillance, but the normalizing force of surveillance is invisible. As evident by the popularity of reality TV, people love watching, measuring up to others against the norms, and therefore power and control have become inscribed upon our pleasure. If we couple this observation with our current obsession with self-broadcast it sheds

new light on how deeply embedded surveillance has become in our culture. Not only are we under surveillance in public, now we freely give up the privacy of being alone through YouTube. Of course, maybe this self-broadcasting also acts as a stage of resistance, as we can use the broadcast to challenge normalization with the (assumed) safety of distance. “Instead of refusing normalization outright, we need to learn ways to use the power of its disciplines to propel us in new directions, which might (or might not) eventually establish something outside normalizing power networks” (McWhorter, 1999, p. 181). Does YouTube allow us safety in resistive acts? In acts of freedom? Or does the crowd-sourcing element (and the new Google ownership) take away this possibility? The discourse of YouTube is grounded in the seemingly passive nature of the site. The site is presented as a conduit for sharing: “YouTube’s mission is to provide fast and easy video access and the ability to share videos frequently” (Hamilton, 2011). YouTube is presented as a service or portal by which “sharing” is facilitated. Their tagline, “Broadcast Yourself,” speaks to the active nature of the user, again casting YouTube as passive. Of course, YouTube is in it for the profit and the surveillance it fosters is a product of its open network. Nevertheless, the passivity that YouTube presents in its mission statement is not real, as YouTube is active in taking down any content that threatens the capitalist mechanism (for example, videos that violate copyright). Furthermore, the comment system allows for taboo performances to be rebuked, thereby fostering an environment situated in the dominant discourses of culture. This double surveillance, from the company and the users, is willingly submitted to via the use of YouTube.

Breeding Homogeneity. As shown above, the available options on social profiles breeds a type of homogeneity that belies the claims from social networks that they foster diversity. Each social networking power broker, from Facebook to Second Life to YouTube, has an undercurrent in their rhetoric that promotes a diverse world. This is best illustrated via Twitter. Twitter’si current mission statement is: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them” (https://twitter.com/privacy). The way that the platform operates necessitates that which is “most important” is that which follows well tread discourses on Twitter. We follow those we know (friends and celebrities), those we have similar interest to, and trending topics that are elevated by sponsorship or popularity across the platform; therefore, we cannot escape the normative discourses of the real world. This entrapment is coded in Twitter’s mission statement because to get there “instantly” the connection must be easy, or readily available. In other words, Twitter’s mission is to connect us to like-minded people, ensuring we remain stagnant—even though the statement is meant to be positive, our destination based on this mission seems to be fixed in normatively. The rhetoric that promotes diversity is rendered fictive by the architecture of these networks. As demonstrated above, the rhetoric of social networking sites works to promote a positive image of these networks that is free of user consequences through virtuality, that is weighted in pro-social real world consequences through seemingly innocuous rhetoric, and that hides discourses of discipline and surveillance through profile categories and rhetoric of diversity and inclusion.

Implications

The body online becomes inanimate in its coding. In the new online spaces of social media, the body typically is represented by a webpage with writing and pictures and videos, but it is not

the body itself, instead it is an extension of the body. This extension can interact with others even when the physical body it is an extension of is not online. In other words, my profile page on Facebook does not go away when I log off (or even die); therefore, this extension of me can communicate with others while I am not logged on. This illustrates a true inscribing of bodies, as my friends can write on my extension/Facebook page. In one way, my page is the public persona I want to embody; my carefully crafted self that narrowcasts my chosen aesthetic. Nigel Thrift’s (2010) Understanding the Material Practice of Glamour shifts affective scholarship into a capitalist paradigm, where aesthetics have become a commodity which is informed and regulated by capitalistic machineries. He situates this study in the climate of the newly risen “public intimacy,” (p. 294) where new media facilities the blurring of public and private boundaries. In the world described by Thrift, every surface acts a space for affect because “every surface communicates” (p. 296). This necessarily animates the inanimate, as the inanimate is imbued with the history of past interactions. With the understanding that the discursive can inscribe and the inanimate can inscribe, this extension is real where those inscriptions on my extended, inanimate self are real. This understanding of the virtual makes it no different from the real. van Doorn (2011) describes the physical body in similar terms: “asserting that this body is itself a ‘living medium’; a productive site that mediates between the public and the private, the personal and the collective/cultural, and between the discursive and the material” (pp. 538-539). In this description the virtual body could be the focus, just as easily as the physical body, and that is the crux of my argument. The divisions that seem so natural of man/woman and virtual/real among others, these inculcated binaries, unnecessarily restrict bodies through their operative logics.

In reality, the internet and social networks, just like the body, are a surface of communication, where concealment is both possible and impossible depending on your subject position. The virtual/reality binary creates a distance between real actions and virtual actions (fake) and therefore embodiment of positions that fall outside normative binaries that take place on the internet are not viewed as real. This unreality makes transgression fleeting in some sense, diminishing the power of transgression on the internet. Of course, power is still there since everything is discursive, but the binary of real/virtual makes the internet feel fake to many, and therefore the power can be taken as fake. While examples of action derived from the internet are many (e.g. Arab Spring, 2012 (Chouliaraki & Blaagaard, 2013) and Kony, 2012 (Karlin & Matthew, 2012) ) many other movements fail to make changes off-line (countless petitions on change.org and the like). Furthermore, the pervasive nature of these binaries makes their enactment on the internet seem natural, therefore transgressions from the norms, even of man/woman in the virtual world, risk punishment.

While the internet has the ability to be a democratizing force that enables fluidity through the shrinking of time and space (in a globalization sense), it actually provides an arena to re-inscribe privilege, which is spearheaded through social networking. Privilege is re-inscribed even though the narrative surrounding social networking is one of open-access and diversity, because in reality, the internet is rife with gate-keepers. Furthermore, social networking promotes narrowcasting and self-selected homogenization, which means that even though there is diversity on the internet, these diverse bodies never have to come into contact with one another. This paper expands work on materiality and cyber-materiality to expose “how Internet

and new media practices constitute and regulate the body and embodiment” (White, 2009). This critique exposes a taken for granted (by many) logic that positions social networks as passive, positive forces; when in actuality they are extensions or tools of ordering discourses that restrict fluidity, solidify surfaces, and re-inscribe power and privilege, thereby stunting plurality of subjectivities.

Social networking has changed our lives; however, it has also kept many things the same. As much as it has become a metaphor for today, it also can be the wrecking ball of tomorrow. What I mean by this is that since the discursive formations of the world, such as time, space, friendship, and love, are understood differently now due to the pervasiveness of social networks, we have a chance to reorder all discourses. While feminist and other sects of the population have been reordering discourses for years, the majority of the population has not. However, with new world understandings via social networks and the internet, the rest of the population may be ready for these reorderings. Hopefully, this paper complicates the binary of virtual/reality and the seemingly innocuous nature of the internet for a step toward instability and reordering.

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i Until January of 2011, Twitter, the microblogging website that lets people communicate in 140 character bursts, had no mission statement. Although, that is not entirely true, the company listed its mission as “a work in progress” (Hamilton, 2011). This non-statement is as much of a statement as any other and captures the fluid nature of materiality on the internet. This non-statement offered hope, as it set no predetermined end point or goal, inviting instability and opening up the possibility of true transgression through Twitter.