3 The Dramaturgy of Social Media: Platform Ecology, Uneven Networks, and the Myth of the Self [chapter]

John D. Boy, Justus Uitermark
2022 Social Media and Social Order  
For good reason, critical observers of the contemporary digital media landscape have grown tired of Mark Zuckerberg's contention that there is something inherently good about "connection." Even when faced with overwhelming criticism, the Facebook founder and CEO has stuck to his claim, which seemingly counterbalances all evils the company might be accused of, that Facebook facilitates building "community." This is not surprising, since more connection means more users, means more revenue, means
more » ... more profit for the company and its shareholders. But if we take Zuckerberg at his word, he sees connection as valuable because it shores up social ties, which have been shown to be beneficial to individuals in many ways; from lowering blood pressure to making it easier to find a job. In other words, Facebook and other platforms like it simply add more of a good thing to people's lives. One reason this simple formula fails to convince is the growing recognition that social media are not simply added to what is already there: the institutions, interactions, and effects of everyday life. They have gradually come to permeate everyday life, and this interweaving has left the fabric itself changed. In other words, social media have become ecological (Postman, 1998) . For their part, sociologists have long asked whether online social ties develop at the expense of offline social ties. When it was found that this wasn't the case, they were reassured. Now we view the correlation between online and offline social ties somewhat differently. We no longer think of them as additive or interchangeable, but as mutually transformative. This changes the verdict. It means the difference they make is no longer linear. Instead, they effect a broad qualitative shift that isn't confined to any particular area but has reverberations throughout the social environment. This has consequences for how we study them. Although platforms have specific cultures, which is the stuff of media studies, there's also much to be said for understanding platforms as sites within a larger ecology. Hoping to develop an understanding of how such ecological processes "scale down" (Breiger, 2015) to the level of daily life, we turn to the stories of two informants we met in the course of our research whose social position as "very online" women means that the platform ecology is particularly relevant to how their daily lives unfold. Their experiences give us some points of reference to evaluate how well the tools of the sociology of everyday life, particularly dramaturgical analysis, are suited to our task. Dramaturgical concepts, which study the self in interaction, are pervasive in the extant literature on digital media. It almost seems like Erving Goffman, the founding figure of dramaturgical analysis, has experienced a rebirth as an analyst of online life. Even so, our assessment of the dramaturgical approach
doi:10.2478/9788366675612-004 fatcat:bp3thoxh5fdszlqzg5l5esi244