Lights, camera, SOCIAL ACTION!
Chetna Ojha
With 1.28 billion monthly
active users, Facebook is the most widely used social networking site across
the world. So much is its influence that in some parts of the world the term
‘Facebook’ has become synonymous with social networking. From being a noun, “I
have logged into Facebook”, the term has become a verb, “oh, I am Facebooking”.
This speaks volumes of the impact that the social media giant has had on its users
who are spread across the globe. There must be something that makes this social
space so popular and active. Why is it that people want to share their private
lives on an open forum? More interestingly, what is it, which is making them share
their likes, dislikes, locations and other personal things? What is guiding
this mass social action?
Clearly, this furore
about sharing everything on Facebook cannot be assumed to be random. This is
too simplistic an answer to a much complex issue which, on a deeper look,
reveals that what is happening on Facebook is an important sociological
phenomenon in its totality, what Max Weber has called ‘social action’. This action
is building and shaping relationships every minute in this rapidly changing
world.
This essay looks at
those relationships in one of the most popular social space, Facebook with
reference to Max Weber’s theory of Social Action.
Anybody, from the first
minute of logging into his/her Facebook account becomes a part of a carefully
laid-out process of interaction with his/her social surroundings. He/she is a
part of a complex web of people who, like him/her, are using the facility to
connect with others and in the process, all of them are fulfilling what Cohen
has noted as the three essential aspects of Weber’s approach to social action in
Chapter I of Economy and Society. These are subjective meaning, social
relationship and stable content. Every Facebook user is posting status updates,
photographs and educational background, not only to make his whereabouts known
to those who care, but also to gain attention and make his/her presence felt in
the social domain. What comes attached with this constant poking of catching
attention is an additional want of getting ‘likes’. The number of ‘likes’ on a
certain post has become an implicit indicator of its ‘cool-ness quotient’ or
beauty or sensibility, even when most people don’t put conscious efforts into
rationalizing before liking anything. Most of the time, when one posts
something, there’s an anxiety to keep checking the number of likes or comments.
The more of either or both, the better one feels, despite the fact that he/she knows
that most of the people who have liked or commented are only his/ her virtual
friends whom he/she might not communicate on a regular basis. Yet that
upward-moving ‘like’ counter makes everybody happy and to get that
satisfaction, people are ready to jazz everything up, and sometimes completely
change things from what they really are!
An example of this is,
people uploading edited images!
Reducing the blur,
red-eye, accentuating a particular colour, styling the picture with a sepia or
a black and white effect, you got to name it and everything’s available. The number
of image-editing tools is increasing manifold, each with a certain ‘new’
feature to make you or your photo more ‘rocking’ or ‘cool’. What this
implicitly means is to make it more socially acceptable and therefore,
likeable.
Of late, Facebook has also
become a popular forum for campaigning of all sorts - social and commercial.
The Arab spring is a blazing example of the impact of Facebook in the social
space. It was because of various social media, particularly
Twitter and Facebook that the protests in Tunisia captured the attention of the
masses across the globe and consequently sparked uprisings against
authoritarianism in other parts of the world. For example, nearly 9 out of 10 Egyptians
and Tunisians were using Facebook to organize protests or spread awareness
about them according to a survey done by The National (UAE). Recently, the India
Against Corruption movement, the Assembly elections and the Lok Sabha elections
in India saw a massive online participation of people. There were animated
discussions, status updates, photo shares, likes and event participation notifications
all around.
When people express
their opinion about any issue which concerns them and the society at large, it does
not happen in isolation. Their opinions are agreed with, disagreed with,
countered or shared. Social relationships build up and the action of an
individual takes into account the action of others as well. There’s not just
one lead actor, but the Facebook forum as a stage has multiple actors playing
their part in tandem with each other. Facebook is an active space for
commercial advertising as well, which is also the main source of its revenues. Every
advertiser is putting up its ad there with an intention of gaining recognition and
purchases. Therefore, Facebook is not restricted to personal
communications/sharing only. Financial motives are also a crucial part of the social
mingling happening on the website.
But Facebook is not
equally pleasing to everybody as it is to those who constantly keep updating their
profiles. A lot of people who deactivate their account do so because the
ironical monotony of skimming through 'new' posts bores them and forces them to
find a more productive substitute for the time that they spend on Facebook. A lot
of blogs and articles written by people who deactivated their account narrate
their stories of how their time has become more productive and their days more
relaxed after they deactivated/deleted their account. So despite Facebook being
the ‘in’ thing, some people choose to break up with it and this shows that
social action is not free of conflicts.
Weber doesn’t talk much
about conflicts while sharing his views on social actions unlike Marx, but the
deactivation of account is an example of conflict with the general trend of
social action of fellow users. Coming back to what Weber had to say about
social action, that as a sociologist, it is essential to understand the motivating
factors, see how people interpret a social relationship and attribute meaning
to a situation.
As mentioned before,
recognition is one of the motivating factors to be active on Facebook. Apart
from the regular features like profile picture, cover picture etc., adding a
life event like graduation, marriage, engagement, etc., are the ways of telling
everybody about the ups in one’s life and therefore gain recognition through likes
and congratulatory messages. In a way, this is encouraging, but in a lot of
other ways, it implicitly builds up pressure on a lot of people to look a
certain way, click pictures in certain poses which have become popular with
time. As Weber conveys, the interactions have certain patterns or regularities
associated with them and therefore meaningful action among different individuals
is associated with expected responses from others. These patterns are meaningful
actions of individuals, but they may ultimately solidify into customs, laws,
institutions, or structures.
This can be observed
through a small example on Facebook. There is an increasing want of social acceptability.
Certain ‘norms’ of how a profile picture should look and what’s the ‘right’
pose to be struck to attain that have been set and this is most profoundly
visible in the profiles of teenagers. The ‘pout’ pose is one example along with
shortened words and the strange manner of writing like - ‘I wil b der..w8 4
me’.
Not just this, people are
clicking pictures solely for the purpose of uploading them on Facebook and
because that is the purpose, the pictures must be either ‘beautiful’ or ‘cool’,
the parameters of both of which are very limiting. So, Facebook in this sense
is acting as a hindrance for many to express their individuality. The expected
response is that of liking a post which mentions something good and thus
maintains the stability of the social action as Cohen has observed as an aspect
of Weber's theory of social action.
To conclude, social action
according to Weber is a meaningful action carried by an individual in tandem
with other individuals and while doing so, he/she is not isolated from the
society. The society renders a broader meaning and impact to the action and
that makes the action of an individual social and results in building up of
relationships. There can be many examples of spaces where social actions can be
seen like family, friendship, etc. One such space is Facebook, which, in its
ten years of existence has shaped up a new paradigm to practice a certain set
of social actions, as mentioned above.
Chetna is a first year student of HRM & LR, in TISS Mumbai
