4. Intimate Relationships Online (Gershon--neoliberalism)

Welcome to Section 4 of Introduction to Digital Anthropology. Your required reading this week is  Gershon, "Un-friend my Heart".

Recap & Overview

In Section 3, we considered the ideas of online self as Netizen and dividual. In Section 4, we analyze the online self as a neoliberal self. We are still interested in the topic of the self but now we also consider the self's relationships with other humans. Of course, we focus primarily on how these relationships shape and are shaped by the Internet. The structure is as follows:

1. Introduce the anthropological understanding of "neoliberalism". We do this to help students understand Gershon's article.
2. Move on to Kinship and Relationships. We contextualize Gershon's article as research in intimate and romantic relationships.

Neoliberalism: Anthropological concepts

Gershon uses the idea of "neoliberalism" to analyze the interviewee's relationship with Facebook. But what is "neoliberalism"? It seems to mean different things in different disciplines, so let's focus on anthropology. Even within anthropology, understandings of "neoliberalism" differ, perhaps because the basic terms are not agreed upon. Nevertheless, here is what I think are the fundamentals. I'll use an analogy of sports to explain:

Neoliberalism as economic policies

Neoliberals would argue for selling off government-run sports organizations like the Australian Institute of Sport. A better model is the US Olympic Committee which gets funding from charitable donations. Taxes are lowered and the organization runs more efficiently when it's sold off. Athletes should not be forced to join trade unions; this interferes with the free running of the market economy. So, unfettered capitalism, where private organizations and companies are unconstrained, produces the best results for the individual and the nation. This is why, according to the neoliberal approach, the US wins more gold medals! 

Neoliberalism as individual responsibility

Neoliberals would argue the best athlete is one who is able to make up her own mind how she wants to train and compete. She shouldn't necessarily be limited by laws and rules. If the government gets infolved and starts banning no-holds-barred cage fighting or makes drugs, it just makes things worse for everybody.  The banning doesn't work; the fighting and drugs to 'underground' where they are more dangerous. The individual athlete is best-placed to decide what's in her best interest. Let people work out what's best for them and keep the government out.

Neoliberalism as measurables

We can quantitatively measure how good the athlete is. There is no mysterious 'stuff'. We can put a number on all values and all aspects of her performance. All you need to know is the statistics about her performance. If she's a boxer, there are probably thousands of stats. We can start with reach, body fat, tricep strength etc. Then we can judge how well she anticipates jabs after taking a hook to the head. We can do that by making it into a statistic. We can calculate the force of each punch (left vs right: hook, jab, uppercut). Every other aspect of her performance can be broken down and judged by numbers. 

Neoliberalism as the predominance of Market rationality

Finally, her value as an athlete, person, boxer, or anything is realized by her market price. How much she can fetch for fighting a no-holds-barred cage fight is an accurate representation of her worth as a fighter. What she can command for talk show appearance represents her value as a celebrity etc..

Neoliberalism as a theory of Knowledge

Our female boxer is best informed about how to improve her performance by having a variety of ideas available. They could be from Russian sports scientists; Australian yogis, or whatever. Let her as an individual be the judge what knowledge is right for her.

Conclusion

These ideas are inter-related. In theory, taxes should be lowered, because sports training facilities are running more efficiently when private, and because individuals take more responsibility for their own lives instead of looking to the state for support. The individuals will become richer, less reliant on taxes and so on. This blog explains my understanding of the anthropological take on neoliberalism in more detail.

Kinship & Relationships

As mentioned, the focus in this section is how Digital Anthropology approaches intimate, family, work and other relationships. Relationships are a crucial area of study in Anthropology. They are usually covered in the sub-discipline of called kinship. Kinship is basically the study of what you might call family relationships, including marriage.

Digital Kinship & Digital Relationships

As Digital Anthropologists, we look at how the online world may re-configure and redefine our human relationships in the most intimate ways. So this section focuses on intimate relationships (or possibilities of intimate relationships) as they are managed. 

College students partying

Gershon: Summary

As mentioned, this week's main reading is Gershon, "Un-friend my Heart". Gershon argues that there is a paradox between the expectations of her research informants. These 72 American university students seek a stable monogamous relationship. These fail. They are undermined by the  'impossibility of true intimacy' they perceive in their online social networks, such as Facebook. The reason for this 'impossibility' is that being on Facebook makes them part of the 'cold market rationality of the US neoliberal ideal'. Here I have summarized Gershon.

More partying

 Gershon's interviewees worry when they saw photos of their boyfriend or girlfriend on Facebook with others. The interviewees reported being jealous and then using crafty and devious ways to find out what the boyfriend or girlfriend was up to. But the more they looked into it, the more they found tantalizing clues, so they looked into more clues.

Analysis of Gershon

Gershon's account of Facebook contrasts with Dalsgaard. Dalsgaard argues that we exhibit a dividual and individual self on Facebook. By contrast, Gershon argues that we exhibit a neoliberal self. Is one researcher right and the other wrong? Or can the two accounts be combined? For instance, it's possible that the individual self which Dalsgaard identifies is partly the neoliberal self, as described by Gershon. What do you think?

Further research: Neoliberalism, Wikipedia, & the Marketplace of Ideas

In 'Postface: Defining Neoliberalism', Mirowski (2009) applies the idea of neoliberalism not to Facebook but to Wikipedia. Mirowski argues that the Internet has been developed in line with the neoliberal doctrine of the marketplace of ideas. The neoliberal 'prophet', Hayek, argued that good knowledge accumulates through people sharing their ideas in a marketplace of ideas (not for example, by the output of a solitary genius working alone). Wikipedia should have demonstrated Hayek was correct. But instead, Wikipedia shows how Hayek was wrong. In practice, the marketplace fails. For instance, Wikipedia is hierarchical. Good articles decay. Wikipedia survives by plagiarising and appealing to populism. Contributors work for free. Moreover, they steal intellectual property from legitimate sources (like newspapers and encyclopedias) and undermine them. Neoliberalism masquerades as a popular knowledge over elite pretensions. This is what Mirowski argues at least. If you want to look more closely, I have also summarized Mirowski's article.

Further Research: Intimacy online

Another important issue that arises in Gershon's "Un-friend my Heart" relates to intimacy online. Interesting work has emerged in digital anthropologists studying 'dating apps'. One theme emerging in this work is how one can go online to find intimate relationships offline. For example, in "Social Media in Gay London: Tinder as an Alternative to Hook-Up Apps," Mackee argues that amongst London gay users Tinder is a place 'where nice guys go' in the hope of finding dates or a relationship. They curate a portrayal of their digital identity 'self' to present a considerably less sexualized persona. However, MacKee also found that in addition, his research participants also use other platforms in parallel to explore different subject positions and motivations beyond the 'Tinder nice guy' stereotype.

Earvin Cabalquinto, a digital scholar in Melbourne, is currently working on a research project on matchmaking websites and apps that he argues revolutionized how intimate interracial relationships are created, specifically between Philippine women and Anglo-Australian men. The beginnings of intimate relationships show the contradictions, negotiations, and awareness of the 'mail-order bride' stereotype of pre-online matchmaking.

Anthropologist Kathryn Robinson similarly has researched Philippine women and online matchmaking websites to understand the 'broader politics of gendered mobility, identity, and intimacy' in Philippine-Australian intercultural marriage. In contrast to Gershon, Robinson argues that the metaphor of the marketplace cannot explain the international relationships that develop on the Internet. Men from Western countries meet Filipina women on online marriage sites. We might expect the Filipina women to be commodities in this relationship. However, Kathy believes such a stereotype undermines the women's agency (ability to choose). This means that, if you meet your partner online (let's say they live in another country), then the neoliberal logic of the marketplace described by Gershon does not fully explain the process. The marketplace metaphor, Robinson argues, is too simplistic to understand these online relationships.

Further research: Neoliberalism 

For a more recent take on social media and neoliberalism, you can turn to Hawkins, T., 2019, ‘Facebook, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosing of Imagination’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 52 no. 1, pp. 137–152. This article is not written specifically from an anthropological perspective. You'll note some of the assumptions in the article.  For example, Hawkins treats the online world as somehow inauthentic. She also takes a moralistic, judgmental approach to social media. These perspectives are not typical of the anthropological approach as we have outlined it.

Further research: social media

You might also look at the Introduction of danah boyd, It's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. Aside from not using capital letters in her name, see how this author's approach differs from a standard anthropological perspective.

Further research: Gershon

You might also like to look at, Ilana Gershon, 2010, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies". Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2):389–405. Also, her book The Breakup 2.0 is a classic.

Next section 

Having considered, in this section how human relationships are framed through digital technologies, in Section 5 we will explore further the use of multiple platforms and the ability to have multiple identities and motivations. We call this "polymedia" and we will consider how polymedia mediate the kinds of intimate relationships we want to have both online and offline.