Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in
a Neoliberal Age
Ilana Gershon
Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 84, Number 4, Fall 2011, pp. 865-894
(Article)
Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
DOI: 10.1353/anq.2011.0048
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by University Of Oklahoma at 07/12/12 10:50PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anq/summary/v084/84.4.gershon.html
865
SPECIAL COLLECTION:
THE ETHICS OF DISCONNECTION IN A NEOLIBERAL AGE
Un-Friend My Heart:
Facebook, Promiscuity,
and Heartbreak in a
Neoliberal Age
Ilana Gershon
Indiana University
Abstract
In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates
insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships.
Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve
their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This
article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that Facebook encourages
(but does not require) users to introduce a neoliberal logic to all
their intimate relationships, which these particular users believe turns them
into selves they do not want to be. [Keywords: Neoliberalism, new media,
disconnection, Facebook, deactivation, romance, US college students]
In 2007 and 2008, I interviewed 72 people, mostly college students at
my home institution, about how they use new media when they are
breaking up. For my second interview, Rose,1 one of my former students,
brought a list of rules and suggestions for other people about how to
manage their relationships. She was always a very well-prepared student
and I suspect might have been under the impression that I was
writing a self-help book. Her rules helped her to structure the interview;
she would read out a rule and then explain her reasoning. Rule number
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 4, p. 865–894, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2011 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
866
four was that the couple should not be on Facebook. Rose was clear: if
people want to maintain a romantic relationship, both members of the
couple should get off of Facebook.
Why Facebook? Rose and I weren’t discussing Facebook exclusively:
we talked about text message fights, about expressing misery through
away messages on instant messaging, and similar matters. Yet Facebook
was the new media that Rose considered singularly destructive of relationships.
For her, it seemed perfectly reasonable that one could threaten
a relationship by communicating through a particular medium, and
save the relationship by rejecting that medium. As Rose told me this, I
wondered if she and others I interviewed would be equally likely to say:
“quit using a cell phone if you want to preserve your relationship” or “quit
emailing.” I didn’t think so. Rose did not suggest Facebook was hazardous
simply because it was new—she used other new media that she
could have singled out but did not.
In offering her rules, Rose was introducing a theme that would emerge
time and time again as I spoke to other students who also told me that
using Facebook could lead to a break-up.2 Several students said that
they had deactivated their Facebook accounts either to preserve their
romantic relationships or to make future relationships possible. I want
to be clear here about where the hazard lies for those I interviewed, especially
because my interviewees were so clear about this themselves:
they believed that Facebook transformed them into anxious, jealous, and
monitoring selves that they did not want to be.3 After disconnecting from
Facebook, they felt they shed these unwanted selves.4 Facebook was
constantly providing information about their identity and others’ identity
that they believed should be a basis for relationships, and yet was too
vague to determine the actions which should accompany this information.
This speaks to an underlying assumption about how knowledge and
relationships are intertwined in the United States. Strathern argues that
“in Euro-American thinking, knowledge creates relationships: the relationships
come into being when the knowledge does” (1999:78). Yet my
interviewees felt that the knowledge was too incomplete to allow them
to evaluate the relationships created, and hence too incomplete to indicate
what action was necessary. These students were experimenting
with monogamy, and thus they were focused on how the incompleteness
of information might signal risks to their romantic relationships, but also
might not. No other media they discussed seemed to have this ability
Ilana Gershon
867
to transform selves or threaten romantic relationships.5 Why, then, did
students single out Facebook as a destructive medium for romantic relationships?
In this article, I discuss how students believed that Facebook
transformed them into selves that they did not like being—suspicious and
jealous selves based on neoliberal principles. If a US neoliberal perspective
demands selves that consciously bring a market rationality to their
relations, Facebook is a medium that urges, but does not determine, the
creation and display of these sorts of selves.
While my interviewees insisted that Facebook turned them into jealous
selves, I argue that the problem was in fact that Facebook encouraged
them to be US neoliberal selves—selves that were not conducive for the
romantic connections they had or wanted to have. Facebook asks its users
to manage themselves as flexible collections of skills, usable traits,
and tastes that need to be constantly maintained and enhanced. As Emily
Martin points out, this is a quintessential element of the neoliberal self, that
people are “a collection of assets that must be continually invested in, nurtured,
managed, and developed” (Martin 2000:582, see also Urciuoli 2008).
Facebook’s interface, more than the other media these students use, is
structured to encourage a neoliberal engagement with others because it
allows people to present themselves as a compilation of both consumer
tastes (preferred movies, books, music) and unweighted alliances (shown
through the number of one’s Facebook friends, wallpostings, and one’s
posted photos). The Facebook profile also presented people with a profile
“self” that could be managed through a reflexive distance similar to what
a US neoliberal perspective encourages in self-management and business
management (see Gershon 2011, Rose 1990, Thrift 1998). Through
Facebook, people can practice US neoliberal techniques for valuing, enhancing,
and managing their alliances.6
In addition, Facebook, just like the market (see Knorr-Certina and
Bruegger 2000), provides the conditions for presenting tantalizing, incomplete
information. As users and former users of Facebook mentioned to
me, they often find it difficult to interpret information on Facebook: they
feel the site provides both too much information and incomplete data.
They describe this combination of excess and incompleteness as flaws inherent
to Facebook, with users trying to interpret the alliances performed
on their lover’s Facebook profiles.7 Incomplete information on its own can
be frustrating, yet by itself was not so anxiety-provoking to convince these
college students to quit Facebook. They quit as a result of the combination
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
868
of incomplete information along with a socially constructed sense of obligation
to perform being a neoliberal self (a compilation of represented assets
and skills that constantly required attention and enhancement). The
neoliberal performances of self that Facebook fosters, but does not force,
are public performances of unweighted alliances expressed through the
circulation of incomplete information, presenting a contextless promiscuity
that some undergraduates fear should be read literally.
The Unbearable “Newness” of New Media
New media are often accompanied by anxieties about how a new technology
will affect intimate connections of all types through the ways that it
structures communication. John Durham Peters (1999) argues that in the
West, people have historically feared new media because every new medium
alters an earlier balance precariously established between dialogue
and dissemination. Communicative technologies have been valued for
how they allow for conversational turn-taking or for broadcasting knowledge.
Dialogue and dissemination are seen as existing in an unsteady
equilibrium. Each new technology can seem to change how dialogue or
dissemination will occur, introducing new possibilities and new risks to
communication. Peters suggests that one of the earliest reflections on the
interplay between dialogue and dissemination, Plato’s Phaedrus, is dominated
by Socrates’ concern that writing, as a new technology, threatens
intimacy in the ways it alters relationships and how knowledge circulates:
“Writing parodies live presence; it is inhuman, lacks interiority, destroys authentic
dialogue, is impersonal, and cannot acknowledge the individuality
of its interlocutors; and it is promiscuous in distribution…Communication
must be soul-to-soul, among embodied live people, in an intimate interaction
that is uniquely fit for each participant” (Peters 1999:47). Peters
argues that for Socrates, disembodied dissemination undermines the care
and attentiveness to personal perspectives with which ideas should be
transmitted. Writing lacks an attentiveness to one’s audience that in-person
communication encourages, and as such can be distributed willy-nilly
without being anchored to a particular time and place. As Peters points
out, Socrates’ concerns about the havoc writing will wreak on intimacy
resonates with the anxieties about intimacy that often seem to travel
alongside the introduction of new communicative technologies (see also
Marvin 1988, Gitelman 2006, Sconce 2000, Umble 1996).
Ilana Gershon
869
While the spread of new media is often accompanied by anxieties
about how intimate connections might change, the content of the anxieties
changes significantly depending on the historical and cultural context.
Those I interviewed were not concerned, as Socrates was, with the
ways new media might destroy true dialogue or overlook the interpretative
uniqueness of each recipient of a message. Instead, they were concerned
with the multiplicity of alliances portrayed through Facebook, and their
inability to evaluate the nature of other alliances. It was a discomfort with
what I argue here is a neoliberal enthusiasm for ever-expanding alliances
and acontextual communication that was at the core of my interviewees’
misgivings about Facebook. They quit Facebook because of the particular
way in which it allowed them to extend an unwelcome neoliberal logic to
their romantic relationships, relationships which they felt could not withstand
its unsettling consequences.8
Because Facebook is a medium, it isn’t inherently neoliberal, liberal
capitalist, or socialist. While its interface can seem to reflect the neoliberal
milieu of its designers, as I will discuss, its interface does not define in
advance how people will use Facebook. As scholars of circulating technologies
have shown (see Akrich 1992, Mol and de Laet 2000, Spitulnik
2002), social narratives do not determine the uses of these technologies
even though these narratives are imbedded in their design. The focus of
these studies has been to show how, as technologies travel further and
further from the cultural contexts the designers presupposed, the implicit
assumptions built into the objects become more visible and more
troublesome to the actual users. For example, Akrich (1992) describes
how French designers fashioned a photo-electric generator that did not
take into account the needs of its intended African users. The designers
created short, nonstandard connections that would easily fit a Parisian
kitchen. In doing so, they were not thinking about the architectural spaces
which might house the generator kits in Côte d’Ivoire or the resources
that the users might have available. The differences between the imagined
contexts and the actual contexts were great enough that the photo-electric
generator kits quickly fell out of use (and simultaneously thwarted a
nation-making project, since the Côte d’Ivoire state hoped to enroll villagers
as citizens by supplying electricity). As technologies circulate, inbuilt
assumptions about implied users can become obstacles that the actual
users must imaginatively get around in order to use the objects in ways
appropriate to the extant contexts.9
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
870
In my interviews, I came across tensions between the implied user and
actual user which were not caused by cultural or spatial differences. I was
interviewing college students from Indiana University who were using a
social networking site first designed by students at Harvard University.
Facebook was not traveling beyond the cultural contexts of its designers.
Both designers and users shared similar understandings about how
Facebook as a medium could channel social interactions, understandings
shaped by their own neoliberal milieu. Just as the photo-electric generator
was not inherently French, Facebook is not inherently neoliberal as a
medium. Yet its designers created an interface that could readily be experienced
as a technology that introduced a neoliberal logic when users
with certain media ideologies were evaluating information and relationships
through this medium. This was no accident. The designers began
with a self-conscious metaphor of the market to compare and interweave
Facebook profiles.10 As the college students who had trouble with
Facebook found out, US neoliberal principles become difficult to live with
when used to sustain intimate relationships. Despite a widespread neoliberal
faith in the United States that neoliberal logics should expand into
all walks of life (see Cruikshank 1999; Rose 1990, 1996) my interviewees’
ambivalent experiences with Facebook reveal some of the problems in
living a more fully neoliberal life.
The students whose interviews inspired this article were all experimenting
with monogamy. They were between the ages of 18 and 22, and they
were actively trying to understand what it practically means to be in a
monogamous relationship, and how to choose a loyal person to whom
they wanted to be faithful. I interviewed other college students, both men
and women, who saw monogamy as a widespread ideal that they did not
have to practice (yet). Those who didn’t want monogamy did not describe
these particular difficulties with Facebook. Interestingly, there is a gender
divide in my interviews. While both genders monitored other’s Facebook
profiles, women tended to describe monitoring the public portrayal of a
relationship on Facebook whereas men tended to monitor their lovers by
sharing or guessing passwords.11 This article is also about what it means
to be a college student attending a large state university12 in the Midwest,
uncertain about who they are and who they want romantically, soon to be
entering a job market structured along US neoliberal capitalist principles,
and anxious about Facebook.
Ilana Gershon
871
A Brief History of Facebook
Facebook was launched in February 2004 by Harvard undergraduate
Mark Zuckerberg. Originally called thefacebook.com, the site was based
loosely on a hard copy photo album of all incoming freshman, the original
facebook, which every Harvard freshman received. When Zuckerberg was
a sophomore, different residential houses had their own online versions
including photographs of all the residents in that house. Until Zuckerberg,
no one had created a Harvard-wide online version. When he initially designed
Facebook, it was available to anyone with a Harvard e-mail address.
Soon afterwards, access to the social networking site spread to
Columbia, Stanford, and other universities. In its first incarnation, a profile
“consisted of a photograph and some personal information, such as the
user’s major; club memberships; taste in films, books, and music; and
favorite quotes. There was a search box to help users call up other profiles,
and a ‘poking’ button, which they could use to let other people know
that their profile had been viewed. Users could also link to their friend’s
profiles—a feature popularized by [rival site] Friendster” (Cassidy 2006).
Facebook shared many features with other social networking sites. What
made it distinctive at first was that it was restricted to universities. Its initial
popularity was greatly aided by the fact that only college students could
use it, and that the students were participating in campus-specific networks.
In 2005, Facebook opened its networks to high school students,
and in 2006, it became available to anyone with an email account.
From the beginning, changes in Facebook design have been considered
controversial by users whenever the changes affected how information
circulated on the network. Allowing high school students to join was
complicated enough, but when everyone (including parents and other
authority figures) could join Facebook, college users felt that Facebook
was changing for the worse. In September 2006, when Facebook introduced
the newsfeed, which provides constant updates to everyone in
one’s network about how a profile has changed, this too created an uproar
among users. Since its inception, Facebook has constantly been faced
with users’ ambivalence about ownership and circulation of information.
Facebook designers are quite aware that issues of public and private information
are at the heart of these controversies. In John Cassidy’s (2006)
New Yorker article on Facebook, Zuckerberg is quoted as saying: “The
problem Facebook is solving is this one paradox…People want access
to all the information around them, but they also want complete control
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
872
over their own information. Those two things are at odds with each other.
Technologically, we could put all the information out there for everyone,
but people wouldn’t want that because they want to control their information.”
Zuckerberg is describing the basic dilemma as one of access—who
has access to information and who controls this access.
There are two problems with Zuckerberg’s account, however. First,
Facebook does not solve the paradox of control and free circulation, but
rather intensifies it. Second, in my interviewees’ narratives of why they deactivated
their Facebook accounts, the issue of access only played a minor
role in shaping how knowledge circulation came to feel hazardous. A
far bigger issue, according to my respondents, was that they did not know
how to act on the information they viewed and yet the diffuse plethora of
information seemed to require action. This drove them to seek out more
and more information as clarification. The problem for these students was
the paradoxical gap between too much and too little information presented
by the site’s interface.
Facebook remains a collection of profiles, with the common assumption
that each profile indexes a single person, with chosen events in their
life recorded on their profile through photos or text—not all of which will
be posted by the person who manages that particular profile. Others in
the person’s network can add to the profile’s public representation of
a person as an individual by sending Facebook gifts, writing publicly
available text on a person’s wall, or adding photographs with the person
tagged (that is, marking the photo with the person’s name so it can be
found quickly). A person with the profile’s password can refuse to include
a self-description, untagging13 photos and deleting wallposts or gifts.
Each Facebook profile is a collection of information about a person
compiled by a Facebook network, but selected by the profile’s passwordholder(s).
These profiles are understood by the people I interviewed to
be intrinsically linked to one’s offline life. While there may be profiles
that have no obvious living offline anchor—“Oedipa Maas” and “Franz
Boas” have their own Facebook profiles—students understand them to
be exceptions and “fake profiles.” A Facebook profile is understood as
a reflexively managed representation of an embodied self.14 There is the
ever-present possibility of playing with this generally shared expectation
of locatable embodiment. After one creates a profile, one can then
choose to friend15 other people, allowing these Facebook friends access
to the profile. The person controlling the profile chooses their level
Ilana Gershon
873
of privacy, thus deciding who else is allowed to view the profile. Some
people allow anyone to view their profile, many allow only Facebook
friends, and a few restrict specific profile sections from their younger
siblings and other inappropriate viewers.
Neoliberal Premises and Facebook Selves
The US neoliberal self is one that uses market rationality to manage its
self as though the self was a business that attempts to balance risks and
responsibility appropriately in its alliances with other selves/businesses16
(see Cruikshank 1999; Maurer 1999; O’Malley 1996; Rankin 2001; Rose
1990, 1996). There is a reflexive distance inherent in this form of self, one
takes oneself as something that requires care, attention, and management.
Not only the self requires management, alliances require management
as well to ensure that the balance of risk and responsibility is properly
regulated between participants. I want to point out that my argument
is that the US neoliberal self is a conglomeration of these attributes, all
of which must be present for this neoliberal logic to take hold effectively.
Simply taking oneself as a project to be enhanced is not sufficient. Being
anxious about one’s lovers’ unweighted and ever multiplying alliances is
not enough in itself to warrant being labeled a neoliberal anxiety. The US
version of neoliberalism requires that people should be selves that reflexively
understand themselves to be metaphorically structured like an idealized
US business. This entails being a self that is flexible and following
market logic; in short, a self comprised of an array of assets and skills that
enters into alliances and competions with other selves who are also structured
like idealized US businesses. These alliances and competitions are
both necessary and hazardous, and the hazards lie in the ways risk and
responsibility are allocated in these relationships. As a result, much of the
negotiation in neoliberal relationships lies in figuring out how to distribute
(and then re-distribute) risks and responsibilities.
When the self metaphorically becomes a business, it is a compilation
of measurable skills and assets that enters into relationships with other
selves that may have different arrays of skills. From a US neoliberal perspective,
the more skills one has, the better. So too with alliances, the
more alliances one has, the better. This is a view that Facebook seems to
adopt as well, its interface is constantly suggesting that people add more
and more alliances to their profile. Facebook users are visibly nodes in a
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
874
network, in which the number of alliances they have can, depending on
their social circles, give them a certain symbolic capital. The Facebook
interface encourages people to see their alliances in terms of quantity,
and people can easily evaluate their and others’ profiles in terms of how
many friends they have. On every Facebook profile, on the left side, there
is a box that announces how many Facebook friends you have. This is
information that is visible to anyone who is your Facebook friend, and,
depending on your privacy settings, can be visible to all other users. The
number rises as more and more people ask or agree to be your Facebook
friends, and falls as they defriend17 you or deactivate their account.
The quantity of Facebook friends is more obvious and discernible than
the quality of the Facebook friendship. Facebook profiles do not easily
reveal the type of alliance they encode, only that the alliance exists.
Distinguishing one alliance from another on Facebook requires effort. While
it is relatively easy to demarcate one alliance as “The Lover” by linking profiles
through Facebook’s relationship status category18 and one’s profile
photo, it is far more difficult to express the strength of other alliances. This
incomplete information becomes treacherous for people who are attempting
to balance risk and commitment in their romantic relationships, and
in particular, for people who are dissecting Facebook profiles to evaluate
the potential risks for infidelity embedded in the alliances. Jodi Dean sees
this as a token of a larger problem of the internet, that the internet as a
whole encourages information to circulate in a way conducive to neoliberal
capitalism (and in her argument, ineffective political communication)
as “the number of friends one has on Facebook or MySpace, the number
of page-hits one gets on one’s blog, and the number of videos featured on
one’s YouTube channel are the key markers of success, and details such
as duration, depth of commitment…become the boring preoccupations
of baby-boomers stuck in the past” (Dean 2009:17). For Dean, accumulation
and circulation become symptomatic of internet communication, with
disregard to the context and labor that underlies creating that context, and
thus undercutting the potential for effective action19 (2009:26).
Indeed, contextually rich interactions can often be disconnected from
Facebook friendship. People can collect Facebook friends solely to increase
their number of Facebook friends. Many people are friends on
Facebook who have only met once or who have never met but have friends
in common. Sometimes to be a Facebook friend is a virtually meaningless
relationship. To say “oh, she is just a Facebook friend” is to indicate that
Ilana Gershon
875
there are no obligations to each other in either direction, although there is
staged information flowing between the two profiles.20 People interact with
each other on Facebook when they don’t necessarily interact with each
other offline—you can have 150 messages wishing you a happy birthday
from your Facebook friends. One interviewee, who wanted the pseudonym
Gunslinger, explained that his Facebook profile no longer contains information
about his birthday. “I took the birthday thing off first because I found
it utterly ridiculous that 90 people, 85 of which I never talk to, wished me
a happy birthday like they give a damn. And the only reason they knew is
because Facebook reminded them.” As Gunslinger points out, Facebook
alliances can seem more plentiful and more superficial. One can have many
more connections to other people on Facebook than one does in co-present
interactions—these are, in this sense, promiscuous alliances. If one
is looking at a Facebook profile, it is often difficult to know how the person
behind the profile feels about any of these alliances—are they actual
friends, merely Facebook friends, and/or objects of desire?
Students can try to collect as many friends as possible, becoming
“friends collectors,” which is a slightly pejorative term for people a bit
too interested in the sheer quantity of their Facebook friends. Even people
who are not friends collectors might watch the Facebook record of
how many friends they have when the number approaches a particular
level. As one student, Frank, explained: “Right now I am at 399, and it
sticks out. So if it dropped down to 393 in five days, I would wonder ‘who
the hell?’” In waiting to reach 400, Frank was forced to pay attention to
the fact that people can defriend him and he will never be notified by
Facebook. Indeed, the first indication on Facebook that someone has
defriended you is that your Facebook friends’ number decreases. While
Frank was focused only on breaking the decimally significant 400 mark,
others can feel competitive about the number of Facebook friends that
people in their Facebook network have. In the following, Gunslinger discusses
his ambivalently competitive feelings towards a friend of his with
many more Facebook wallposts than he has.
Gunslinger: One of my friends, he has close to 2000 wallposts. And
he is a year younger than me. And I have like 600, which doesn’t
bug me.21
Ilana: But you notice.
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
876
Gunslinger: But I notice—yeah, yeah. Oh, he has a lot of friends and
he is very very social. And I am very outgoing, but not very social. I
like my private time. So it is one of those things that you notice.
Both Frank and Gunslinger are paying attention to the quantity of their
Facebook friends and their traces because Facebook’s interface so readily
and visibly offers this information. Every time one examines the profiles
of one’s Facebook friends, the Facebook interface announces the number
of friends one has. With this constant measure, Facebook encourages a
focus on the quantity of one’s network alliances which can inspire people
such as Frank and Gunslinger to compete, however ambivalently, with
others over the number of Facebook friends.
The quantity of one’s Facebook friends might be seen as an asset on
the job market. College students would tell me that potential employers
checked how many Facebook friends a job applicant had (among other
things), taking this to be a measure of how effective a networker one
was. In general, the college students I interviewed and taught were uncomfortable
about job interviewers’ growing tendency to request to become
their Facebook friends after an interview. Their Facebook profiles
were composed with their friends and fellow students as the intended
audience. When potential employers wanted to examine their Facebook
profiles, the students were concerned that this was an attempt to see if
they were irresponsible and too social. Some students did however feel
that it was a fair request, since it would reveal how thoughtful people
could be about managing their Facebook pages (presumably thoughtful
in anticipating a range of audiences, some more professional than others).
Students also felt that Facebook profiles could be good indications
of how socially adept one was, a skill that certain employers might find
valuable. Laura talked about her experiences trying to find a job: “For
some people I interviewed with, I have gotten emails saying ‘we want
to check out your network and see if you are good at communicating
with people and how many friends you have.’ Like that is one of the
questions that I got asked. I clearly was not ready for them to see my
Facebook profile, so I ended up ignoring that opportunity.” Here, Laura
is describing the sheer quantity of one’s Facebook friends as an indication
of one’s skills at networking, a skill that this potential employer
viewed as an asset.
Ilana Gershon
877
The job interviewers’ requests accord with Bonnie Urciuoli’s (2008) argument
that there has been a century-long move to transform communication
into a marketable asset. Urciuoli argues:
…the denotational norms for all skills, including soft skills, include
quantification: Skills are assumed to be segmentable, testable, and
rankable. Listening and presenting are as assessable as speaking
French or running Photoshop, however disparate they all might otherwise
seem. The interrelatedness of skills, worker-selves, and labor
arrangements goes back at least as far as the emergence of scientific
management during the late 19th-century expansion of U.S. corporations…As
aspects of worker performance, skills have become
conceptualized as “things” that can be acquired and measured and
that possess an inherent capacity to bring about desired outcomes,
outcomes that can be measured in dollars. (2008:212)
Facebook contributes to the history of quantifying communication skills
that Urciuoli describes. By quantifying one’s Facebook friends, Facebook
provides a mechanism for employers to treat communication as a measurable
skill, regardless of what interactions the quantity of one’s Facebook
friends in fact measures.
When employers examine how many Facebook friends a job seeker
has, they are paying attention to how the person reflexively manages their
profile so that they appear well-connected. This reflexive management of
one’s profile is central both to people’s understanding and interactions
with their Facebook profiles, and to a neoliberal conception of the self.
As I mentioned earlier, the neoliberal self is a bundle of traits and alliances
which must be consciously managed and enhanced. The neoliberal
self is a work in progress that requires constant care and effort. For the
Facebook users I interviewed, this is made concrete through the need to
add friends, to change their profile pictures constantly, or regularly formulate
witty statements for their status updates.22 As Audrey explained:
“You have to have the perfect profile picture that you update at least once
in a couple of months. If you don’t, you are a loser.” Facebook’s design
does not itself create any urgent reason to change a profile picture, for
Audrey this was entirely social pressure. By contrast, status updates disappear
from one’s profile after a week. This disappearance is one of many
ways in which the structure of the Facebook design encourages people to
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
878
regularly change their profile. This is an interface that encourages regular
and conscious work enhancing one’s Facebook self.
My interviewees were explicit about the ways in which their Facebook
profiles gave them an arena in which to perform a self that was referentially
tied to who they understood themselves to be but was not an exact match.
This difference between their real life selves and their Facebook selves offers
them a reflexive distance between who they are “truly” and who they
are as a compilation of skills and alliances. Karen explained this while talking
about how she felt competitive with someone she suspected was flirting
with her boyfriend: “I have more friends than she does on Facebook.
And I have more friends actively writing on my wall than she does, and
more pictures than she does. So I am a more popular cyber-persona, even
though I am really a hermit. I live alone, I have a dog. I don’t really hang
out with those people. But it looks like I do. Once again, my cyber-life is
so much more interesting than what is really going on.” Karen and other
students talk easily about how there is a distance between themselves
and the person they claim to be on Facebook. In doing so, they are pointing
to a reflexive distance in their performance of self that is also central
to how the neoliberal self is simultaneously manager and managed. The
neoliberal self is one in which the reflexive distance lies in the ways one
should take oneself to be a project or business to be carefully controlled
or enhanced. Facebook’s interface offers a medium that allows the enactment
of this reflexive engagement with one’s self—a self that manages
(i.e., the one who logs on and changes the profile) and the representation
of the self, the Facebook profile, which acts within Facebook networks.
Control, Cancellation, and Promiscuity
While one manages one’s Facebook profile, one does not have complete
control over what appears on one’s profile. Other Facebook users can
write on one’s wall, can send virtual gifts, and can post photos with other
people “tagged” in the photos. One can always delete wallposts or detag
oneself from the photos (although only the one who posted the photos
can remove them entirely from Facebook). And yet even detagging can
leave its traces, people can find the photos that have been detagged with
enough imagination and persistence. In our interview, Rose offered an
example of imaginative Facebook searching along with her assumptions
about how Facebook practices are gendered. “Women are much better
Ilana Gershon
879
Facebook stalkers than men. Men don’t think ‘so Rose was with Megan
last night, and Megan hangs out with Joseph, so I should check Joseph’s
pictures to see if they were hanging out.’” As Rose points out, uncovering
a photograph that has been detagged requires persistence and creativity.
People will search for a photo that has been detagged because they see
this as a revelation of the detagger’s intentions. Detagging allows others
to know that someone has seen a photo of themselves, and the person
decided that he or she did not want other people to look at this photo
when examining his or her profile. It is an attempt to reassert control over
one’s profile. This effort at control is visible to anyone who comes across
the detagged photo and realizes that detagging has taken place. Similarly,
people can tell when their wallposts have been deleted, or their gifts removed
from another person’s profile, creating potential social dilemmas.
Alan explained to me how a friend’s Facebook gift to him ended up sparking
a fight with his girlfriend, Rachel.
Alan: You can give like a gift, you can use gifts of random things. I
guess I was given a gift by a girl I used to be really close friends with
freshman year. I really haven’t talked to her much for awhile. She
gave me a gift and I never knew it. There was this gift that was just
on my profile that I never knew. She wrote me this past summer and
she said, “you know, I can’t wait for next year’s school. We should
watch Lost together, hang out” all this stuff. And I never knew it was
there at all. Thanksgiving time, I am getting ready to go over to my
aunt’s house, and Rachel IMs me [his girlfriend writes him by instant
message] and says: “I was about to send you a gift and I saw that
you also got one.” So I scrolled down to what I thought was my gift
section, but there are two gift areas. So the gift I saw was one that
me and her sent to each other last Valentine’s Day. I opened it up,
and I was like: “what is she talking about? This is her gift.” I wrote
her back: “no, no, no, it is from you. I am looking at it right now. It
is the box of chocolate hearts from Valentines’ Day.” She goes: “So
who sent the other one?” So I scroll down further and I see it. And I
don’t know why I did this. I still to this day don’t know why I did this.
Instead of looking at who it was from or anything, I deleted it.
[Ilana sighs deeply.]
Alan: Trust me, it was one of those mistakes, even if I thought I
could get away with it, I still wouldn’t have done it this way. I made a
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
880
mistake and I deleted it. Because I didn’t think she saw who it was
from. She saw who it was from and asked me: “well, who is it from?”
And now it was deleted, so I said my friend who she knows from
home, Jen. [Alan is lying, the gift is in fact from April. He continues
below by repeating his conversation with Rachel, and thus Rachel’s
words below]
Rachel: “Really? What did Jen have to say?”
Alan: “She gave me this gift, it was a graded piece of paper with an
F on it. She was upset with me that we didn’t hang out a lot together
over break, so she gave that to me.
Rachel: “Oh, so it wasn’t April saying that you should hang out? So
why did you delete it?
Alan: And it actually led to a huge fight. I didn’t even know it was
there for months. I once again tried to beat Facebook, and tried to
delete it…I don’t know if I can really blame Facebook for that. I was
more confused about Facebook, because there were two areas for
gifts to appear.
Faced with the problems that others’ Facebook activity caused, Alan
ended up attributing a significant amount of agency to Facebook itself.
It didn’t help that he was often uncertain about what the Facebook interface
allowed other viewers to know and what only he could know about
items on his profile. Alan explained: “I always try to avert a big mess, and
it ends up being a bigger mess by trying to go around the first mess…It
is better off just dealing with the Facebook demon.” At other moments in
the interview, Alan talked about a variety of ways in which he had challenged
Facebook, and Facebook won. While Alan was clearer than many
others I interviewed in stating that Facebook was influential and agentive
in his romantic relationship, others attributed varying degrees of agency
to Facebook. People often described Facebook as a website that acts
upon how people communicate or circulate knowledge, sometimes as
consciously designed, and sometimes simply as an agent in its own right
acting upon the world.
Facebook is not only easily turned into a neoliberal interface through
the reflexive view of agency it allows, it also encourages people to assess
others’ profiles and create alliances based on neoliberal assumptions
that link the self to consumer taste. When I asked people what they
noticed about other people’s Facebook profiles, they described noticing
Ilana Gershon
881
their favorite movies, books, music—in short, the markers of how they
were engaging with their class position (Bourdieu 1987). People would
describe deciding that someone did not have potential as a romantic partner
based on how they represented their interests on Facebook. While
people found these class-based indications to be a reason not to pursue
further interactions, some people also sought out connections based on
how people presented their habitus on Facebook. Frank explained how
noticing someone’s musical tastes on their profile led to a friendship. “I
saw a guy who was in a film class with me last fall. On his profile, he had a
quote from Ray Davies from the Kinks…So I messaged him about it, and I
said, ‘hey, I got to see Ray Davies. I am a huge fan.’ So we started talking
after class, joined a band together, broke off from the band and formed
our own band. It was good, and now we are like best friends.” As Frank’s
example shows, Facebook profiles encourage people to see taste as a
basis for a connection.
People also expanded their Facebook networks by friending the friends
of their Facebook friends, and in particular, friending their lover’s friends.
Audrey: If you are dating someone, your friends have to become
their friends on Facebook. Because everyone wants more friends.
The more friends you have, the more popular you look. So everyone
gets more and more friends.
Ilana: So once you start dating someone, your networks merge?
Audrey: Oh yes! And actually I do better. I end up better friends with
their friends after we stop talking [that is, after the relationship ends].
As Audrey’s example demonstrates, alliances spawn other alliances on
Facebook, which Facebook encourages by suggesting possible Facebook
friends when one logs on. One of the tacit assumptions in neoliberal contexts
is that expanding the number of one’s alliances is an unquestioned
good. Facebook allows for this possibility, constantly recommending
people one could add to his/her networks and creating emailed software
requests to introduce new people to the site. Increasing each individual’s
network is beneficial to Facebook as a social networking site as a whole
because Facebook measures its own success in terms of the number of
users. Facebook’s own literature from August 2009, recorded that there
were more than 250 million Facebook users (and that each user had on
average 120 friends) (Facebook 2009).
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
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Despite Facebook’s (and neoliberals’) general tendency to encourage
as many alliances as possible, alliances are not an uncontroversial or innocent
good. At the heart of every alliance is a combination of risk and
responsibility that, from a neoliberal perspective, will ideally be equitably
shared.23 Increasing alliances means increasing contact with potentially
risky people—in this case, people who might say or do inappropriate
things on Facebook. There are many ways to behave badly on Facebook,
but those I interviewed tended to focus on two. First, people were concerned
about fake or inappropriate people having access to one’s profile.
Just as official discourses encourage them to do, they worried that authority
figures might gain access to people’s profiles, putting the profile’s
animator(s) at risk of punishment. College students worried about the gaze
of parents, friends’ parents, employers, police, or university officials. Cole,
for example, was on a sports team, and left Facebook because he didn’t
want potential employers to see his profile, but more importantly, he did
not want coaches or university police to see his profile. He risked losing a
scholarship if he got caught for the minor infractions that always seemed
to get posted on Facebook in photographs. Cole said:
That’s another reason I got off Facebook. There is so much drama.
It’s adding another stress, I already have enough stress in my life…
It’s a big deal when people on the team are drinking and its on
Facebook. Because last year we got four guys kicked off the team
for getting drunk and doing a little vandalization. And we got three
girls kicked off the team for being drunk and being a minor under
the influence of alcohol. So they got two tickets, and there are
three, four, five girls kicked off. So we had eight people kicked off
the team last year. So it is a big deal that the freshmen are out drinking,
being stupid and putting pictures on Facebook, or putting stuff
on Facebook. So by getting off Facebook, I just eliminated the possibility
of doing something stupid and putting it up on Facebook,
or writing on someone’s wall, making it available to people that it
should not be available to.
Cole was responding in part to one of the official discourses surrounding
Facebook. The year before I began doing this research, the university
administration plastered posters all over the university stating: “I
Facebooked You [and so did your chemistry professor and so did your
Ilana Gershon
883
mother and so did…].” The campaign was to caution undergraduates to
be careful about what they posted on Facebook. There are also frequent
media stories warning that students regularly put up incriminating evidence
on Facebook that the police or university officials will find. These
stories present the threat as partially based on Facebook users’ ignorance
and that users are simply unaware that Facebook is a public forum
filled with unanticipated audience members.
Second, students were also concerned that people with whom they
had fallen out—former friends or lovers, or even ex-lovers’ new romantic
partners—might have access to their profiles. While they did not think
that Facebook friends were actual friends, they were certainly concerned
that their Facebook friends should not harbor ill feelings towards them.
They did not necessarily want the information on their Facebook profile to
become the topic of other people’s hostile conversations or ruminations.
My interviewees were also just as concerned that their interest in their
former friends or lovers’ profiles would be discovered. While they wanted
to look at an ex-lover’s profile, they would be mortified if their ex-lover
knew. People would go to great lengths to conceal their curiosity; including
creating fake profiles so that they could become Facebook friends with
someone without revealing that they wanted to look at that person’s profile.
They were concerned that they might reveal emotional entanglements
or inappropriate competitiveness. Alliances were risky on Facebook not
only because of what profiles revealed, but also because of what wanting
information might reveal. Finally, the alliances on Facebook were also
risky for the college students I interviewed because they saw their lovers
as constantly encountering other possible objects of desire. They were
constantly seeing traces of their lover’s social life yet did not always know
how to evaluate this information.
Facebook creates these risks, allowing possibilities for people to seek
out information or to display alliances, yet according to all the literature
that the Facebook employees produce, people, not Facebook, are responsible
for these risks. As Katherine Rankin (2001:29) points out, this is
a relatively typical ploy in neoliberal contexts, revising who is responsible
for what to protect the larger corporations’ interests as much as possible.
In the August 2009 version of Facebook user’s rights and responsibilities,
the Facebook corporation attempts to allocate as much responsibility
as possible to the individual user, asserting that users are responsible
not to provide false personal information, not to share passwords, not to
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
884
use Facebook if they are a convicted sex offender, and so on (Facebook
2009). According to this document, each person is responsible for safeguarding
their own profile, and responsible for any risk that they encounter.
The risks are not supposed to be due to the ways in which Facebook
structures its interfaces. When the people I interviewed attributed agency
to Facebook, it was clear that they did not agree. In attributing a form of
agency to Facebook, people are suggesting that the interface plays a
large role in why they feel that they become different selves on it.
To deactivate a Facebook account was to reject a particular type of circular
reasoning, one that in the United States is commonly associated with
communication in general. Peters (1999) suggests that a commonly held
belief about communication is that only better techniques of communication
can solve the problems that communication generates. More communication
is the solution when communication breaks down. The students
I interviewed described a medium-specific variation of this logical loop.
They felt that the risks Facebook suggested could only be resolved by
using Facebook more and more. Faced with incomplete information on
Facebook, their response often was to search through more Facebook
photos and more Facebook profiles. They would find creative ways on
Facebook to search and continue searching, often using other people’s
profiles or creating fake profiles. Gwen described how she was caught,
even after she deactivated her Facebook account, by the logic that only
more searching on Facebook could answer the questions raised by the
tantalizing and incomplete information on Facebook. She had broken up
with a boyfriend when she began to respond badly to what she saw on his
Facebook profile. She then deactivated her account in the hopes that she
would never again be that obsessively jealous in a relationship. While she
no longer thought they could be together (even after she deactivated her
account), she still had feelings for him months later.
One time, I do have one friend who is now in Germany so she can’t
help me anymore, who was friends with him on Facebook. And one
day, we just looked him up. We were in class, she had her laptop,
and we weren’t listening. And she said, “let’s look him up really fast.”
Some girl had written in Italian on his wall. And I went crazy. I was like
“what am I going to do? He is dating someone else. He is obviously
attracted to her. He is writing on her wall. It’s in Italian.” So we had to
go to a translating site to figure out what it actually said. Yes, this was
Ilana Gershon
885
such a task. And then we tried to look her up, but she had blocked
her profile. So after class, we spent, I am not even exaggerating,
maybe two hours Facebook stalking to figure out who her friends
were, what exactly she looks like, if she did hang out with any other
guys. And through all of this, we found out that she had a boyfriend
and we got to his profile…Why did I spend two hours through someone
else’s profile to find out if this girl had a boyfriend so that my guy
isn’t dating someone else? That is exactly why I deleted Facebook.
Gwen and others found that the information they got on Facebook, unsatisfying
as it was, kept them on Facebook, searching for more. It was only
the deactivation of Facebook accounts that led them not to want to know
in the first place, and thus, in the second place, not to use Facebook to
know. Avoiding Facebook entirely became the only way out of this circular
experience for them.
Those I interviewed saw Facebook as responsible for this circular experience
because it managed to offer simultaneously too much and too
little information. They interpreted Facebook profiles as reliable indications
of people’s friendships and flirtations, and took others’ profiles to
be a collection of traces of people’s daily social interactions which my
interviewees sometimes saw as consciously collected (and sometimes
not). This information often charted too much of another person’s life and
yet showed too little of the larger contexts. Facebook, my interviewees
insisted, encouraged them to care about things that they understood intellectually
were inconsequential. Gwen explained to me that she would
never have been so anxious about her boyfriend’s behavior while she was
away on vacation if Facebook hadn’t existed.
I feel like I couldn’t decide whether it was the fact that I checked
Facebook that triggered my not trusting him, or I already didn’t trust
him, and Facebook just perpetuated it. We really didn’t have issues
until I started seeing things on Facebook, like photos. And then I
started thinking “oh, I had better ask him about this.” And then anytime
something new was put up, it just got worse and worse. And
most of my arguments with him about something that he did, I would
not have even known about had I not been on Facebook. I would
have been completely oblivious and it wasn’t things that I should
know. It just didn’t matter.
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
886
Others also found troubling the ways in which Facebook allowed too many
incomplete glimpses into their lovers’ daily lives. One woman explained
to me that if she hadn’t constantly seen the photos of her boyfriend with
other women at parties, she wouldn’t have cared. She knew that there
were other women at parties. The problem was the photographs, was being
able to see her boyfriend with other women but not being able to know
what exactly was going on. She talked about how she had taken to asking
prying questions by text messages (never by phone—she explained
that texting would not carry uncontrollably anxious intonation. She also
thought text messages were a more informal medium). These were questions
she thought might seem innocent—oh, who are you partying with?
And then she would check his answers with the traces on Facebook the
next day. Once she quit using Facebook, she stopped asking these questions
and worrying about her boyfriend and his alliances.
The incomplete yet copious traces are weighed differently by
Facebook stalkers, depending on that person’s particular understanding
of how a medium affects a message. I often asked people whether they
thought photographs or wallposts were more useful indicators of people’s
social interactions beyond Facebook. More often, people turned
to photographs, describing those posted as reliable portraits of others’
social interactions. Photographs are taken at social gatherings—cell
phone cameras now ensure that someone is photographing at almost
any party or social moment. Yet these photographs are seen as accidental,
they are seen as trustworthy glimpses into people’s social circles
in part because anyone present can take a photograph and post it on
Facebook.24 People value the evidence photographs provide in part because
they see photographs as minimally staged glimpses of others’ alliances,
visible evidence of who a person is socially. They are fragments
of events that need to be pieced together to create a visual narrative of
what occurred. Yet as pointed out by Alan, a boyfriend a bit beleaguered
by his girlfriend’s careful examination of his Facebook photographs, the
photographs serve as visual evidence of social encounters where only
presence is accounted for.
What I don’t like about a picture is that it is physically shot, and you
see what you see. But you don’t know any of the background of
what was going on at the time. You only see whatever you see in the
picture. So you don’t see if maybe this person didn’t want to be in
Ilana Gershon
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the picture, but they were forced to. You don’t know if this person
was maybe just walking by and someone said “hey, come get in this
picture.” All you see is that they were in the picture.
What is left out is the type of social interaction, the kinds of conversations
people had at the party, the amount of time people spoke with each
other. What is visible is that these particular people were in the same
space at the same time long enough to be photographed. Photographs
only offer incomplete information, leaving certain questions unanswered
about the context of the photograph but revealing possible alliances. 	
Wallposts also reveal the traces of alliances only as incomplete information.
These are messages that people write on each other’s walls, short
texts that are understood to be accessible to anyone who has access to
that Facebook profile (whereas private messages can be sent as Facebook
messages). These are the traces of public conversations, recording sentiments
that Facebook stalkers frequently take to be assertions of connections
that they then follow as detectives, checking the Facebook profiles
of people who post on a particular person’s wall. This can turn into an
almost infinite regression of checking people’s profiles and walls.
Part of what people find so compelling and troubling about the information
on Facebook is an ambiguity about whether a profile is intended
to be a dyadic exchange or widely disseminated. As Peters (1999) suggests,
Facebook reconfigures how dialogue and dissemination intersect
and mutually constitute each other. Facebook profiles can be designed
with multiple publics in mind, but also can be geared towards communicating
with only one person. My interviewees would interpret a Facebook
profile as addressing one particular person or an entire Facebook network
in different situations, and this multiplicity of address often troubled
them. Sometimes the profile seemed designed solely to communicate
with them; at other times, images and messages were posted that clearly
did not seem to anticipate a lover’s perusal. Traces of contact with people
their lover might desire on their lover’s profile clearly bothered the people
I interviewed. These traces often remained, as their lovers chose to anticipate
a broader public, their Facebook network, rather than only creating
a lover-safe Facebook profile. Olivia’s ex-boyfriend, Brian, was very sociable,
and always had traces of how friendly and likeable he was on his
Facebook profile. He was anticipating his friends’ gaze, but never seemed
to take into account that Olivia was part of his Facebook audience.
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
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That was one of the things I always told him “you know, Brian, it says
here ‘in a relationship with Olivia.’ Yet someone sees that and goes
to look at your pictures, and they are probably thinking, ‘well, is Olivia
some kind of idiot?’ because her boyfriend looks like some crazy
insane guy with 8,000 girlfriends.” I almost found it insulting, and I
felt that it was degrading to me almost that he had these pictures.
And it wasn’t like these were naked pictures, but it was girls and girls
and girls. And really not any pictures with me, I didn’t use my digital
camera. In our relationship, we never went “out-out” together all that
much. We weren’t in situations where you really take pictures, because
generally you do that at the bars.
For Olivia, part of the problem was that Brian wasn’t de-tagging photos
or deleting flirty wallposts. He wasn’t adding the material himself to his
Facebook profile, but he also wasn’t removing the ambiguous and troubling
traces either. According to Olivia, he could have compensated for
this by also clearly demarcating that she was his one love. He was willing
to have their relationship openly marked through the Facebook relationship
status (they were “Facebook official”), although that also changed
over the course of their relationship; however, he wasn’t willing to do anything
else to his profile to show others how important she was to him. He
seemed to utilize his Facebook profile’s ability only to disseminate information,
ignoring how it might also contribute to a one-to-one dialogue.
Monitoring one’s own Facebook profile and anticipating a lover’s gaze
wasn’t all that reassuring for my informants either, though. When these
messages and images were deleted (and revealed somehow to be deleted),
people would tell me that this sparked their suspicion, rather than
assuaging them that their lover managed their profile with them in mind.
They found the deletion itself ambiguous: was this a gesture of care or a
gesture of concealment? They invariably read deletions of others’ words
as dialogic gestures, done only with them in mind.25
My interviewees insisted that Facebook gave them enough information
to be curious, and keep searching, but not enough information to be
satisfied, and never enough insight to know another’s exact intentions or
desires. Facebook allows you to know that there may be risk in your relationships,
but the people I interviewed felt that Facebook does not give
them enough information to evaluate it. In the following passage, Olivia
explained that she began to monitor her very friendly boyfriend’s profile
Ilana Gershon
889
because of her inability to assess the alliances portrayed on his Facebook
profile. Brian was a little older than she was, and so able to go to bars with
a valid ID. She did not want to risk using a fake driver’s license, so she
stayed home and texted him.
[About his Facebook profile] And every other picture was his face
mashed up against another girl’s face. And they are hugging him,
and these girls, you know you can write your caption, and every girl
writes “oh, I love Brian so much, isn’t Brian so cute, isn’t he awesome?
You’re my lover Brian!” And remember, for a long time, I was
like, well you know, I have flirted with guys in this way and meant
nothing by it. It is possible to have girl friends, and not to have infidelity
involved. Eventually my good friends were saying, “hey, have
you looked at Brian’s Facebook lately.” My friend wasn’t trying to
start anything, it was just as a concerned friend. How do you look at
these things and be normal with that. And when it got so bad that my
friends were trying to tell me—are you sure he is an okay guy? I started
to really wonder. That’s how it begins. At first it just became this
obsession with checking his Facebook, and wondering, ‘who did
you go out with?’ And that’s how these text message fights begin. I
am at home in my apartment alone, and I ask him who he is with, and
he says a girl’s name. I find her on Facebook, and oh look, a string
of pictures with her. And then you start looking at these girls—is she
skinnier than me? Is she prettier than me?…I would ask him what did
you do this weekend? And I can go on his Facebook and I can see
what his weekend looked like.
Facebook allowed Olivia to compare her boyfriend’s answers with the
“evidence” on Facebook. She was also very aware that he did not have
his own cellphone camera. Because the pictures of him were pictures that
other people put up of him, these photos served as more accidental (and
thus, for her, more reliable) evidence of what he was doing. It seemed that
he wasn’t managing his Facebook profile, that his Facebook profile was
being created for him by the traces of how friendly he was at parties. So
Olivia asked and checked, and asked and checked. She describes how
she found herself becoming paranoid, discovering a side of herself that
she did not want to have. Finally, Olivia got so disgusted with the cycle
she found herself in that she quit Facebook. After she quit Facebook,
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
890
she stopped this monitoring behavior entirely. Olivia and others often felt
trapped into constantly monitoring their lovers. Readers may suspect that
those I interviewed are probably jealous and anxious undergraduates in
general, and that they would monitor their lovers anyway, even if they
didn’t have this technology. The people I interviewed clearly wrestled with
this concern, and often, although not always, discovered that by quitting
Facebook it was not just them. It was, as they put it, who they were when
they used Facebook.
Conclusion
The more college students I interviewed, the more people I met who
were convinced that Facebook was hazardous for romantic relationships.
I have argued that singling out Facebook as a hazardous medium
when one is an undergraduate is no accident. Facebook allows
techniques for managing a neoliberal self to migrate into intimate relationships.
In the process, people experience these US neoliberal techniques
as difficult to live with. People begin to see unwelcome risk in
the pressure to accumulate more and more unweighted alliances. They
find the way Facebook allows information to circulate to be tantalizing
and incomplete, leading to more and more compulsive and unsatisfying
Facebook use. They found themselves surrounded by incompletely
known relations that seemed risky and to potentially require action. Yet
action would only clearly be warranted by more information, information
they sought through a medium that never quite seemed to provide it.26
When people’s Facebook practices depended upon these and other US
neoliberal techniques for managing selves and relationships, they began
to feel that who they were on Facebook was changing in untenable and
often destructive ways.
Not everyone I interviewed experienced being on Facebook in this way.
Many more people were self-professed Facebook addicts than anxious
or heartbroken former Facebook users. The trouble with Facebook that
I have been describing is a recursive one, emerging from the interplay
between what people understand Facebook does, how the site actually
functions and how others in their social networks use it. Facebook offers
new quandaries for its users to navigate, in part because it is a new
medium without widely recognized etiquette. But Facebook also offers
these quandaries because it provides insufficient information for people
Ilana Gershon
891
to live comfortably and ethically only with the knowledge that Facebook
circulates, and yet encourages people to stay within Facebook, as Lev
Manovich (2002) argues such media tend to do in general. Not every user
of Facebook experiences it as a neoliberal site, but those that do can learn
that neoliberal techniques do not drift comfortably and without social cost
into intimate walks of life. n
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
I want to thank Allison Alexy, Stuart Burrows, Amy Cohen, Melissa Demian, Susan Lepselter, Teri Silvio,
and Matt Tomlinson for their careful and helpful suggestions. I also benefited greatly from the challenging
questions in the anthropology seminars at St. Andrews, University College London and University of Kent.
E N D N O T E S
1All names are pseudonyms chosen by those I interviewed.
2There is currently a popular Youtube video “Don’t Let Facebook Mess Up Your Relationship, It’s Just a
Website” (accessed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O67BwJ2hTQs on Aug 23, 2009).
3Muise, Christofides, and Desmarais (2009) have analyzed the links between Facebook and jealousy
among college students from psychology’s disciplinary vantage point. They ask whether the increased
exposure to information on Facebook increases students’ jealousy, with the not so surprising answer that
it does.
4Journalists and bloggers call the act of deactivating Facebook accounts “Facebook suicide,” but none
of the people I interviewed had heard the term.
5Students would tell me that a rival site Myspace’s “top ten friends” application had an equally destructive
effect in high school, in this case on friendships. In this application, one lists one’s top friends in order, the
ranking and one’s presence on the list can become the source of conflict among high school students.
See boyd 2006 for a more detailed account of the effects of the top eight list on people’s circle of friends.
6For an analysis of how Wikipedia is structured along neoliberal assumptions of knowledge circulation,
see Philip Mirowki’s afterword in The Road to Mont Pelerin (2009:418-428).
7See Dean 2009 for a similar critique of how information on the Internet circulates for circulation’s sake
without context, contributing to neoliberal hopes that communication can be political acts without effects.
8Other scholars have found that refusing to use communicative technologies is implicated with people’s
uneasy relationships to dominant forms of capitalism. For further discussion of non-users’ resistance
to corporations and capitalism, see Krcmar 2009, Kline 2005, Nye 1990, Umble 1996, and Wyatt 2005.
9Mol and De Laet (2000) wrote about how easily the Zimbabwe water pump travels, by contrast to many
other development project technologies. Their giddy delight with the pump centers around the fact that its
designed boundaries are fluid enough not to present such obstacles as it travels from location to location.
10Mark Zuckerberg was initially hired to create a college-based dating site. See Heino, Ellison, and Gibbs
(2010) for how a market metaphor affects online dating practices.
11For a more detailed discussion of sharing passwords and other changing conceptions of public and
intimate relationships, see Gershon (2010).
12In 2007-2008, Indiana University Bloomington had 30,394 undergraduates and 57 percent were in-state
(IU Facebook 2008).
13When I wrote this article, students at Indiana University had not yet determined which variant to use,
and will debate whether it is “detag” or “untag.” Not even the fact that the Facebook interface labels the
process “untag” convinces “detag” advocates.
Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age
892
14In Facebook’s own Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, fake personas are discouraged (Facebook
2009).
15”Friend” has become a verb.
16This is in contrast to the liberal self, in which C. B Macpherson argues, the self is owned as though it
was landed property (Macpherson 1962). I am providing a brief summary of a longer discussion of the
neoliberal self found in my article “Neoliberal Agency” (Gershon 2011). This article also contains a more
extensive engagement with the considerable literature on neoliberal subjectivities.
17People at Indiana University did not agree whether the appropriate term for removing a Facebook friend
from one’s profile was “defriend” or “unfriend.”
18On Facebook, people can choose to declare their relationship status through a menu-driven option.
One can choose from among six options: single, in a relationship, its complicated, in an open relationship,
engaged, or married. When one declares one is in a form of a relationship, one can also select the name of
someone on Facebook—you can be “in an open relationship with Frodo Baggins.” Frodo Baggins has to
agree for his name to appear, otherwise the relationship status will read “in an open relationship” without
a link to another Facebook profile.
19Dean, however, is not concerned with the actions that form relationships, but rather the actions that form
an effective democracy.
20On the other hand, to say “we are friends, but we are not Facebook friends” also indicates that this is
not a good friend.
21In 2007-2008, Facebook had a wallpost count. This is not a feature of the current Facebook.
22My interviewees and I do not share this media ideology. I feel no pressure to change my Facebook profile
picture and don’t update my status often. I have only one friend who suggests that I update my status
more frequently.
23For more on a neoliberal perspective on risk, see Gershon 2011, Maurer 1999, and O’Malley 1996.
24As Van Dijck points out, there is an irony in seeing these digital photos as reliable traces of who lovers
are in other social contexts: “The digital collections on our desktops are brimming over with constant reminders
of our former selves, but by the same means they provide the tools to help us shape our idealized
image – a projection of who we want to be and how we want to be remembered…Memory has become an
interesting amalgamation of preservation and creation” (Van Dijck 2007:173).
25There are several other ways in which people interpreted their lovers’ Facebook profiles as a mixture of
dialogue and dissemination. When their lovers deleted public messages that they had left on the lover’s
profile, they either suspected infidelity or that their lover was anxious about their friends’ condemnation.
When people argued, they might use their Facebook profile to send messages to their lovers, depending
on Facebook as public address to underscore the seriousness of their message. Faced with acknowledging
a break-up on Facebook, some people deactivated their accounts to avoid making such a public
announcement. After a break-up, women who remained on Facebook would often change their profiles
to perform joy in a newly found freedom. They would ask their male Facebook friends to write flirtatious
public comments on their Facebook profiles, messages whose primary intended audience was their
ex-boyfriend.
26Hayek 1988 argues that the market also circulates knowledge in tantalizing incomplete ways, that individuals
can never fully grasp all the information they require to make fully informed decisions in the
marketplace.
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