Visualising Facebook

A Comparative Perspective

Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan

ISBN: 9781911307402

Publication: March 07, 2017

Series: Why We Post

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Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinidad. Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting.

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 39 books including How the World Changed Social Media, Social Media in an English Village, Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology, (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.

Jolynna Sinanan is Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne. From 2011-2014, she was Research Fellow in Anthropology at UCL. She is co-author How the World Changed Social Media (with eight others) and Webcam. Her areas of research are digital ethnography, new media, migration and gender in Trinidad, Australia, and Singapore.

1. Introduction

2. The English school pupil

3. Young people in Trinidad and their continuities

4. English adults

5. Trinidadian adults

6. The Englishness of posting

7. Trinidadian cosmology and values

8. Ten points of view

9. Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

References

Index