Branded Social Networks

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Collective Identity on Branded Social Networks

While urban centers have traditionally operated as powerful sites of culture production from which media products are broadcast to other countries and inform global culture, branded social networks have taken a similarly influential but more active role in the digital imaginary as a site of collective identity production. Through activities like status message production, media product sharing (videos, audio, articles, etc), and commenting, branded social network members create a communal space online, albeit one constrained by the limits of BSNs. This chapter looks at how these meaning-making activities generate a shared identity organized through repertoires of social practice.

Every branded social network offers a unique composition of membership, visual identity, and repertoires of action that create a particular experience for their members. Text and image are the tools of branded social networks, both for the developers of the networks, but also for the members. As a result, members often “write back” to the networks, repurposing actions and tools to different ends that can in some cases subvert the intended use. This chapter uses a variety of mainstream and academic literature and case studies to refine the terminology used to describe these networks, and formulate a basic description of structures of meaning, and repertoires of action found on branded social networks. Several examples of how visuality and textuality have shaped meaning making activities on branded social networks are included as case studies.

Interrogating the Terminology

How to categorize and label these types of Internet-based social networks continues to be a point of contention. Wikipedia’s entry, for example, terms them social networking services (social network service 2010). According to Wikipedia’s editors, a social networking service “focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.” danah boyd and Nicole Ellison also interrogate the terminology in “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” arguing for a comprehensive definition and the name social network sites, as opposed to the more common social networking sites that continues to dominate the popular press today. boyd and Ellison write, “We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (2007).

As a basic definition of the main characteristics these networks share in common, boyd and Ellison provide an excellent starting point. And their attempt at refining the terminology makes a fine and necessary distinction between the nature and activities in these networks: “‘Networking’ emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers… What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks” (2007).

Nevertheless, I would argue that there are two omissions of key characteristics of these networks embedded in the terms social networking sites or social network sites, and one by social network services that could be rectified with yet another shift in terminology to branded social networks (BSNs). In 2009, it seems highly advisable to drop the word “site” as it limits access points to browser interfaces, while many networks are now regularly accessed through a variety of mobile device applications. In addition, many of these networks host events in the offline world as opposed to the online, and much of the activity that takes place on these networks can be described as coordination of “real world” or offline activities (Roberts and Foehr, 2008). Thus, the boundary between online and offline worlds is both permeable and fluid so no limitation is necessary.

Finally, in my view it makes sense to include the more commercially oriented vocabulary of branded because branding is the central organizing principle of these networks. Many members are proud to be affiliated with one network, and have actively rejected identification with another. This aspect of brand affiliation cannot be ignored in discussing how members engage with each other and with the networks themselves. In addition, the dominant networks that exist are for-profit companies, and their networks and members are big business. To ignore this element of networks like Facebook and MySpace, when it has shaped basic elements of the networks like the graphic user interface and functionalities, is to preclude a discussion of motives and catalysts for certain types of growth and use. Therefore, I employ the term branded social networks to refer to entities like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, and other media companies that host and foster digital communities.

Repertoires of Social Action

One of the main characteristics of branded social networks is that they define, shape, and limit member actions to specific repertoires. I’m borrowing this vocabulary from American sociologist Charles Tilly’s original idea of repertoire, which has proved a foundational concept in theoretical discussions of social movements, collective action and organizational form and tactics. Tilly defines repertoire as a “limited set of routines that are learned, shared and acted out through a relatively deliberate process of choice.” Tilly believes repertoires are “learned cultural creations” and that in regards to collective action, “the existing repertoire constrains collective action; far from the image we sometimes hold of mindless crowds, people tend to act within known limits, to innovate at the margins of existing forms, and to miss many opportunities available to them in principle” (quoted in
Chadwick 2007).

I was first introduced to Tilly’s ideas in Andrew Chadwick’s excellent paper, “Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity,” which applies Tilly’s theories to explain how the supple and responsive structures of digital participation were enabling organization to operate with a looser structure and move towards a hybrid mode where they could switch between classic repertoires of action as defined in the field of organizational theory (Chadwick 2007).

Tilly and Chadwick’s theories apply nicely to branded social networks in several ways. First, BSN design and interface constrains users to a set of simultaneously individual and collective actions that can be described as a limited set of routines or repertoire. These actions have had to be learned among users, and as BSNs evolve, users experiment and play with these actions, as Tilly describes, innovating at the margins of existing forms. On the other hand, the rise of a marketplace (although mostly available for free) of independent applications that add different types of functionality to Facebook and other BSNs suggests the kind of fluid and hybrid “switching” model Chadwick claims for digital organizations. Users can add or remove smaller repertoires as desired by adding or removing applications, and enterprising members who have the technical skills can create their own applications and share them, adding another level of innovation to the mix.

While many BSNs, especially the general ones, keep to a more or less similar format, repertoires of actions do still vary by network and emphasize different goals depending on the type of member the BSN is trying to attract. In fact, the content, vocabulary, and presentation of these repertoires of actions can have a measurable and vital impact on member perceptions of the brands of the BSNs, affecting expectations and affiliations over time. But for members, by forming the core of their interactions both with the network and with their contacts, these actions are more than simply tools to manage their online networks, they help define their offline relationships as well. Repertoires are absolutely essential to managing the health of a BSN, and making even small changes can lead to surprising repercussions, as I will describe later in this chapter.

Formalizing and Flattening Social Structures

The primary function of BSNs is to connect one member to another, and the tools of this are purely text- and image-based. This connection can have several different meanings, from reinscribing an existing friendship in the digital sphere to making a new connection with a person previously unknown in the offline world based on any number of reasons such as similar interest, occupation, or geographic location. On nearly all networks, contacts are designated as “friends” regardless of whether that is how the members would designate the relationship or not. Boss and employee, mother and daughter, former colleagues, all of these relationships become flattened to the vocabulary of friend.

On the other hand, non-general BSNs embed these connections with more formally and specifically articulated relationships. LinkedIn, for example, requires members to specify potential connections as colleagues, collaborators, classmates, or other professionally-defined relations before adding them to their networks. MySpace doesn’t formalize this relationship (everyone is still a friend), but the network really took off when it created band-specific pages. MySpace allows members to join as regular members (who are in the position of “fans”) or as an artist, either visual, music, or comedian. Other businesses have created pages too, such as restaurants, although there is no formal designation for them.

BSNs also take what have traditionally been ephemeral relationship signifiers like frequency of interactions and gestures of approval and formalizes them into text- and image-based semi-permanent, publicly disseminated performative structures. For example, water cooler discussion has moved onto BSNs through article/link/video sharing, which can then be commented upon by contacts and, on Facebook at least, “liked.” The visual signifier of a “thumbs up” is accompanied by text making it clear that a contact is approving the article or the introduction that accompanies it. This is then publicly viewable by other contacts, who may respond as well.

Certain aspects of this type of activity are open to interpretation and misinterpretation. Frequency of interactions may misrepresent relationships—for example, high frequency of interaction between two contacts may indicate to others that they are very close, while low frequency among others may suggest distance. Facebook certainly assumes this in their suggestions box; one Facebook user recounted that Facebook was regularly urging her to get back in touch with her father, who she sees offline at least weekly but rarely interacts with online.

Comparing General BSNs

One of the pitfalls of Facebook’s popularity is that many researchers have ignored examining other general branded social networks, particularly those operating in countries outside the US. There are few outside Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster that have had sustained attention from scholars or market researchers for in-depth analysis, and those studies will be incorporated in the case studies included in the next section. Here, I would like to continue with a look at how six of the major general social networks operating in multiple countries compare in terms of features, visual vocabulary, and user interface. The networks I have access to and will be comparing are Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, and Bebo.

While landing pages before logging in vary from network to network, the homepage members are directed to after login includes similar vocabulary and functionality across all networks. There is a main menu at the top with a number of tabs including Home, Profile, Friends, and Mail or Messages/Inbox (fig. 4.1/fig. 4.2). There are two to three additional tabs on several networks, with the most common one being Games, a feature several networks promote more heavily (fig. 4.3). Hi5 is the most overtly commercial network, with a main tab for Coins, a type of prepaid credit you can use to purchase new games (fig. 4.2).

Profile pages are generally customizable, but with plenty of content that is set. First, there are the text boxes which offer information about yourself to other members. The text boxes are generally formatted similarly on most networks with some basic details required on every network, such as name, profile picture, age (although this can be hidden), and location (fig. 4.3). There are also boxes displaying interests and taste in books, music and movies. The third and fourth elements most networks include are a streaming series of updates from your contacts, and a public discussion section called comments or Wall (4.5). These are then the basic graphic and textual elements that create a space for the ongoing performative self-identity that is the primary meaning-making activity on branded social networks.

The graphic elements, however, vary more drastically by network. All of the six networks with the exception of Facebook allow for fine control over the graphic layout and presentation of the profile page. Orkut, while it looks basic, offers third-party applications which will transform the fonts, colors, and other graphic elements of the profile. Bebo, Hi5, and MySpace, the more “youthful” networks, offer skins which overlay the informational boxes, changing the color scheme and adding prominent graphic elements as a greater degree of creative control over the look and feel of a member’s profile. Friendster offers some basic skinning, but generally less dramatic in effect than the other networks. Facebook is the only network which eschews member control of the graphic elements in favor of a standardized branding (the “boring” blue) on every profile. Facebook is also the only network which favors tabs on the profiles, privileging the current events and public discourse elements of the Wall over all else. Only Hi5 offers the option of a cartoon-like avatar to represent you (in addition to the profile picture), an element in keeping with the general emphasis on games and diversion on the network (fig. 4.4).

Overall, all of the networks have focused on increasing the “stickiness” of their sites by adding lifestream feeds which catalogue the adding of photo galleries, videos, and other “scrapbook” features (several networks have a specific section called scrapbook) that functions as a personal diary able to be shared with a whole network. The recent success of Tumblr deserves to be mentioned in this company, as a similar concept but without as much of a focus on personal details and much more emphasis on performative acts like adding links to articles, videos and pictures. Something of a hybrid between a blog and a lifestream from a social network, Tumblr blogs encourage sharing but minimize the writing production expected on a blog.

The significant repertoires of action on these networks are varied and difficult to catalogue in full, but I will highlight three core repertoires here. One of the main repertoires encourages performing an ongoing self-identity through documenting activities and visual appearance through photos, events, etc. But what started out as performing self-identity has taken on another meaning as both information-gathering that used to be done through mass media and a place for public discourse—the articles and news bytes posted to profiles have become a significant source of news for many members, particularly on Facebook, while the commenting and like feature have transformed the space below the postings into spaces for in-depth or superficial discourse and reaction. A third repertoire surrounds strengthening, performing and cataloguing relationships, both a member’s own relationships, but also how the member perceive other friends’ relationships.

With the advent of third-party applications and APIs that encourage use on other websites and mobile spaces, the repertoires of action have multiplied to infinity. It really is impossible to catalogue them all, but many of them focus on games and diversions, others focus on genealogy and nation-making, and still others on self-identity. The case studies below will delve into some examples of different repertoires and how members have interacted with them, either using them to a specific end, or subverting them to fulfill a different aim. Together, they represent some of the ways that individuals and groups have the potential to push repertoires of action in new and interesting directions in the future. We begin back in 2004, with the first mass-adopted BSN in the US, Friendster.

Friendster’s Fakesters

As boyd and Ellison describe, Friendster’s popularity arose from its emphasis on connecting members with new connections, presenting members with profiles of unknown members who shared contacts in common, but restricting users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away (boyd and Ellison 2007). This strategy successfully instigated the desired exponential growth, but unexpectedly led to mass fake profiles which became hubs of ironic popularity among members. For members, scouting and adding friends from among the fake profiles for characters like God or BART, the public transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area, became a way to expand their network’s reach as well as an entertaining pastime of performative self-identity. boyd argued in 2006 that for many members, the act of connecting to fake profiles and writing testimonials was “a singular acknowledgments of others’ existence” (boyd 2006). For the staff who designed and managed Friendster, the fake profiles were an unexpected headache, derailing (they assumed) their goal of competing in the online dating sphere. Friendster began aggressively deleting fake profiles in an attempt to restore the social order they envisioned for the site.

But in deleting the fake profiles, Friendster was actually creating disjunctive chasms in their network by deleting the major hubs that tied their network together. Every time Friendster deleted a profile with 800 to 1,000 friends, those 800 to 1,000 members were cut off from vast swathes of the network. From a technical viewpoint, Friendster was unceremoniously hacking their network apart. Additionally, boyd and Ellison write that the user actions that were favored at the time involved “massively collecting Friends, an activity that was implicitly encouraged through a ‘most popular’ feature,” as well as “surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional Fakesters (e.g., “Brown University”) to find people they knew” (boyd and Ellison 2006). By deleting the Fakesters, Friendster was limiting the repertoire of action that most members had become accustomed to using on a daily basis.

As boyd and Ellison point out, this technical rupturing caused users felt the company “did not share users’ interests,” although I would argue that many users had felt that way from the start, and that part of the appeal of initially joining had been to subvert the original aims of the network as a form of play. When Friendster began deleting profiles, it was a signal that it was time to move along to new pastures. In fact, as boyd and many others have noted, there was already a more socially in-tune network ready for new users to adopt in the form of MySpace, which had already built cachet allowing for “clusters” of friends to build, creating stronger attachments to using the site through its adoption by the LA music scene (boyd 2006).

Reinscribing Nationhood on Iwiw

The impact of BSNs on issues of nationhood and national identity has intrigued more than a few scholars, forming a discussion that is constantly shifting in focus as BSNs continue to evolve. Anikó Imre tackles how BSNs can reinscribe nationhood by writing about International Who is Who (Iwiw), the network that dominates Hungary. The Hungarian network, launched in 2002, had grown from 1.5 million registered users to a population of ten million in 2006. By 2008, Imre writes that the site had gained another four million members, and that while the site is available in 16 languages, nearly all communication is conducted in Hungarian (Imre 2009, 220).

Imre sees Iwiw as uniquely suited to the Eastern European market, one nation at a time. On the site, the nation is reaffirmed in two ways –graphically and performatively. The network displays a photo album organized hierarchically, representing the nation’s people in “a static pictorial fashion,” while member actions like engaging in the regionally organized discussion boards and adding connections and images act as a “continual repetitive process of work that it takes to construct [the nation] discursively” (222).

Imre sees the popularity of Iwiw as a specifically Eastern European and post-communist manifestation of what she calls “national intimacy” through the network’s structure and repertoire of activities (221). Imre argues that Iwiw’s repertoire of activities reinforce kinship and affiliation structures around this norm. According to Imre, “the site is an eerie manifestation of a public space that represents itself as a large national family” (229). The author contrasts the graphic interface and displays of MySpace and Iwiw to show how the networks differ in which relationships they display and emphasize. While MySpace relationship maps are “forged out of friendship,” Iwiw “arranges acquaintances around the selected individual” along familial lines in a massive genealogically-based sphere (225).

Imre suggests that while Iwiw’s structures reinforce the Hungarian national identity, it also opens up network affiliations to more easily span generations, and thus opens up lines of connection among more diverse age groups, unlike MySpace and Facebook. However, the author’s interpretation doesn’t take into account Facebook’s remarkable growth in 2009 among people aged 35-49 and older, which has gone a long way towards balancing out the network in terms of age as well as the strength of Facebook applications in building in structures of participation that appeal to some members and groups on the network versus others (Nielsen Online 2009).

There are now independently-created applications on Facebook that create similar maps along family lines. FamilyLink.com has a staggering 17,788,499 monthly active users, and Family Tree application is used by 6,348,881 monthly active users. As a rule, Facebook’s patterns of organization have retreated from reinforcing goegraphic or cultural spheres of influence or discourse, steadily removing the regional or school-related networks that used to define which users a member could view. Instead, Facebook has flattened profile designations to simply Facebook member, no longer Facebook member and member of New York network, leaving these sorts of additional meaningful connections in the purview of independent application producers.

Twitter Analytics: Subverting the API

Twitter offers a fascinating example of users subverting the network’s repertoire of action to social effect, causing its statistics to go awry on purpose. Plenty of services take information from Twitter profile pages and aggregate or analyze the text-based data to paint portraits of the network in real-time. But during the Iranian protests, while Twitter was being touted for its role in connecting protesters and mobilizing them to rally points, users found a salient reason to make the widely-accessible information inaccurate. A campaign inspired the global community to help as they could by hiding protesters in virtual plain sight: many Twitter users changed their location to Tehran to make it more difficult for Iranian government officials to track protesters. In fact, one reporter decried how this move would make gauging Twitter’s impact on the protests accurately a much more difficult task, perhaps not the noblest of sentiments but accurate nonetheless (Morozov 2009). This is an excellent example of how Twitter users repurposed an already available functionality to have a desired effect, but still hewing close to the meaning of the original action.

In another move that innovated on an existing feature and signaled a shift in meaning behind the use, many Twitter users as well as those using Facebook and other networks, overlaid their profile pictures with a green shade to indicate solidarity with and support for the protests in Iran, called the Green Revolution. Arik Fraimovich created the Twitter application, which builds on an existing function to add meaning to it, a performative act of adding political meaning to an image that is already endowed with one type of meaning, adding a dimension to self-identity. While difficult to track with analytic engines, the visual signifiers presented another subversion of use to mobilize the global community in support of a national movement, but in this case innovating at the edges of an already existing function.

Visual Performance as Social Change: The Iranian Revolution on BSNs[1]

Visual imagery has also become a particularly prominent source of meaning-making, as performative actions of self-identity become vehicles for social change on BSNs. In the summer of 2009, I wrote about how faces have emerged as a particularly important tool in tying together imagined communities, as created for and displayed on the digital terrain of BSNs. In looking at the symbols of the Iranian revolution that have consumed coverage of the ongoing protests, the face again crops up as a powerful frame for inspiring action when used as a metonymic device on BSNs.

In the early days of the protests, the focus was placed on the political challenger who lost the election amid questionable results, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Images of Mousavi were restyled into the format of Shepard Fairey’s famed Obama campaign poster, among other representations, and proudly displayed on BSN profiles as the main profile picture and used to rally and represent protest groups online (fig. 4.9). The move drew on the subject’s change agent status to proclaim affiliation and solidarity — despite the fact that Mousavi was historically hardly the reformer international supporters seemed to expect.

But then an unexpected event occurred, the flash dissemination of a cell phone video of a young woman’s death, Neda, Agha-Soltan. Images from the video, as well as the video itself, raced across the Internet through the channels opened by the digital protests engaged in by Iranians as part of the Green Revolution.

There are four images of Neda Agha-Soltan that recur again and again in digital spaces. Two are from the video, one as she stares up at the camera from the ground, only her face unblocked by people and seemingly unharmed, the second moments later with the same framing, but with her face covered in streams of blood. The two other images are of close-ups of Soltan, one with her head cocked to one side as she smiles widely at the camera, her head uncovered, the second a more formal portrait in which she stares at the camera with a serious expression, wearing a headscarf (fig. 4.7). These four images appear both in their untreated states as well as in restylings created by various, mostly anonymous, reproducers as profile pictures and cover images for protest and discussion groups across Facebook. In one “Obamafied” image, Soltan’s face is cropped to fill the frame, above the text “we will never forget.” The image acts as both a traditional memorialization of her as well as a more complex evocation of the ideoscapes of hope and change associated with Obama’s campaign and election (fig. 4.8).

The immediate result of the Soltan digital image event was that Mousavi was eclipsed as a visual focal point for Iranian protestors and international sympathizers. In addition, the media discourse about the revolution became distinctly less political and far more personal, as journalists, pundits, and bloggers debated the specifics of the event, analyzed the few brief frames of the video, and delved into Soltan’s background and motivations. In the Western media, the discourse retreated almost completely from the ruling leaders’ and Mousavi’s policies and focused squarely on personalizing the Iranians on the ground in the protests, given the initial entry point through Soltan’s face.

The Soltan image event is distinctly digital for several reasons. First, it is composed of both a video and a series of images disseminated initially and primarily online, with the video deemed too “graphic” for US television broadcast. Second, her reappropriation took place in the global digital sphere rather than any physical space, which would of necessity be national. The imagery associated with Soltan were found almost entirely online, with few printed posters to be seen in the offline world. Finally, image and text became one, as the declarative statement “My name is Neda” became a rallying cry of solidarity, aligning users with Soltan as both a dignified figure of resistance as well as a hapless victim of violence (fig. 4.9).

1 For an extended investigation of this final case study, please read “Imagining a New State: Image and Activism in Iran.”

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Collective Identity on Branded Social Networks