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Culture in mediated interaction: Political defriending on Facebook and the limits of networked individualism

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Abstract

During the 2014 Gaza war, Facebook became a central arena for moral/political boundary work for Israeli users, resulting in unusually high rates of politically motivated tie dissolution. Cultural criteria were thus applied to restructure and symbolically cleanse social networks. We analyze Facebook’s visibility-structures, interview data, and public posts to explore this phenomenon. Studying Facebook interaction reveals cultural mechanisms used offline to sustain heterogeneous social networks and facilitate interaction despite differences – group style differentiation between circles, differential self-presentation, and constructing imagined homogeneity – whose employment is impeded by Facebook’s material design. This case of materiality-informed value homophily introduces materiality to the sociological understanding of the interrelations between culture and network structure. Interviewees reported dissolving ties following their shock and surprise at the political views and sacrilegious expression styles of their Facebook friends. We demonstrate that their shock and surprise derived from Facebook’s design, which converges life-spheres and social circles and thwarts segregation of interactions, group styles, and information. Rather than disembedding individuals from groups within the ‘networked-individualism,’ it makes individuals accountable for their statements towards all their social circles. In dramatic times, this collapse of segregation between life-spheres, affiliation circles, and group styles conjures Durkheimian sociability and symbolic cleansing despite commitment to pluralism.

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Notes

  1. This subjective impression of our interviewees is supported by data from Vigo, a commercial company monitoring discourse in social media in Israel. In their sample, which consists mainly on Facebook posts, the absolute number of political discussions in July 2014 was approximately four times as high as in July 2015 (and more than eight times as high as in July 2013).

  2. Both procedures block future exposure to posts by the defriended party without informing her. However, there are some major differences: unfriending removes both parties from each other’s friends lists, while unfollowing merely prevents exposure asymmetrically (the unfollowed F-friend remains informed of the unfollowing party’s posts). While unfollowing can be easily undone, unfriending is irreversible (renewing the tie necessitates sending a new formal F-friendship request).

  3. Apparently people with strong political opinions are more likely to sort their social network for political homophily. PEW data show that in the US moderates have more heterogeneous F-friends networks: they are much less likely to agree with most of the posts they read (18 percent) than ardent liberals (52 percent) or conservatives (45 percent) (Rainie and Smith, 2012).

  4. While Culture has sundry conflicting definitions, most contemporary schools share an understanding of culture as non-universal shared patterns that are structured by knowledge (including both practical knowhow and mental representations). While we do not give up the analytical purchase of using culture to conceptualize individuals’ interactions with themselves, our discussion of culture is inspired by and indebted to Eliasoph and Lichterman’s (2003) treatment of culture as residing in intersubjective interactions that filter collective representations (rather than in internal values).

  5. On the politics of Edgerank see Bucher (2012).

  6. Users may change these default settings and share particular posts with particular segments of their F-friends, but they rarely do so, possibly because of the cumbersome interface that renders it rather difficult and time consuming. Users may also extend access to friends-of-friends or the whole public.

  7. A phrase borrowed from a Jewish prayer, originally referring to the sacredness of God.

  8. All interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.

  9. In this sense, the 'extreme' statements that users often encountered in Facebook during the war cannot be reduced to 'positions' at the level of individuals: they are produced by groups and their interaction styles.

  10. Similarly, Israeli liberal leftists often ritually talk about immigration plans to perform their identity as cosmopolitans whom nothing attach to Israel, without necessarily acting upon their statements.

  11. However, this does not render Americans immune to context collapse in political and other morally contested issues, as demonstrated by the public rage that hunting photos or private jokes published by American Facebook users occasionally evoke while reaching beyond their intended audience.

  12. While US political defrienders often defriended those who “posted too frequently about politics” (Rainie and Smith, 2012), this motivation accounted for a modest 13 percent of defriending cases in Israel during the war (John and Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015).

  13. Similarly, the objectification of social networks as F-friends-lists renders users accountable for their social ties in one social spheres to members of others: some users were defriended for failure to unfriend polluting F-friends.

  14. Merton, while coining the term “value homophily” in his seminal 1954 paper (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1954), already suggested that this pattern resulted from the gratification from initial encounters with similars and the ensuing incentive to maintain ties with them, thus anchoring homophilous sort in the surface of social interaction.

  15. This threat is especially relevant to Arab employees, but low-rank right-wing Jewish employees may also be affected – some have expressed fear of being labeled as “racist” (due to their expression style) and having their livelihood jeopardized. Some even defriended leftist F-friends and coworkers to avoid this type of scrutiny. Fear of persecution that may lead to defriending and self-censorship is thus closely linked to symbolic and institutional power inequalities.

  16. Since in our case the coercive power of society relies on non-humans, society is no longer a purely human thing as in most interpretations of Durkheim (although see Latour, 2005, pp. 37–8).

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Sagit Festman for research assistance; Nicholas A. John, Gadeer Nicola, and Kav LaOved–Worker’s Hotline for generously allowing us access to data; Lior Gelernter, Ido Yoav, and the AJCS anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts; and the interviewees for their helpful cooperation.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Ori Schwarz

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, 6997801, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Guy Shani

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Correspondence to Ori Schwarz.

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Schwarz, O., Shani, G. Culture in mediated interaction: Political defriending on Facebook and the limits of networked individualism. Am J Cult Sociol 4, 385–421 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0006-6

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