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