Table Of Contents
o daniel
daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic c
Miller
study with the residents of an english village, tracking I
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their use of the different social media platforms. Following
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his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter and instagram does little to explain M
what we post on social media. instead, the key to
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understanding how people in an english village use social
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media is to appreciate just how ‘english’ their usage has
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become. He introduces the ‘goldilocks strategy’: how a
socIal
villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of
interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too
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cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.
a MEdIa
He explores the consequences of social media for groups
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ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of
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a hospice, and he compares these connections to more n
traditional forms of association such as the church and the g
neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary l
I
s
clash between new social media that bridges the private
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and the public domains, and an english sensibility that is
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all about keeping these two domains separate. In an
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danIEl MIllEr is Professor of Anthropology at a
UCL and author/editor of 37 books including Tales g
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from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (ed. with H. EnglIsh
Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with d.
slater), Webcam (with J. sinanan), The Comfort of Things,
A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.
M VIllagE
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Cover design:
rawshock design
www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press £35.00
Social Media in an English Village
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Social Media in an
English Village
Or how to keep people at just the right distance
Daniel Miller
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First published in 2016 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press
Text © Daniel Miller, 2016
Images © Daniel Miller, 2016
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from The British Library.
This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial
Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license
allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and
non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated.
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0
ISBN: 978- 1- 910634- 42- 4 (Hbk.)
ISBN: 978- 1- 910634- 43- 1 (Pbk.)
ISBN: 978- 1- 910634- 44- 8 (PDF)
ISBN: 978- 1- 910634- 45- 5 (epub)
ISBN: 978- 1- 910634- 46- 2 (mobi)
DOI: 10.14324/ 111.9781910634431
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Introduction to the series Why We Post
This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to
specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England,
India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey – they will be published in 2016–17.
The series also includes a comparative book about all of our findings,
published to accompany this title, and a final book which contrasts the
visuals that people post on Facebook in this same English field site with
those on our Trinidadian field site.
When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about
social media around the world, all using the same chapter headings
(apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition.
However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much
hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing
the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were
on an entirely different topic.
This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies
of the internet and social media are based on research methods that
assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in
one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media
and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if
friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine
books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves
what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible.
Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or neg-
atively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evidence of
what social media has become in each place and the local consequences,
including local evaluations.
Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time
most of the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in
the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writ-
ing social science books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic
literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the
v
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same discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these litera-
tures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed
Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which
again is the primary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the
immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried
to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted
a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and
the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. If you prefer to
read above the line, each text offers a simple narrative about our find-
ings. If you want to read a more conventional academic book that relates
the material to its academic context, this can be done through engaging
with the endnotes.
We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read our com-
parative book – and perhaps some of the other monographs – in addition
to this one.
vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the anonymous informants for this study, especially
the patients at the hospice suffering from terminal illnesses who agreed
to give their very precious time to these discussions. I would especially
like to thank Ciara Green, my co- researcher on the entire village ethno-
graphic study: she participated, discussed and helped throughout, and
without her I could not have done this work. I am indebted to Kimberley
McLaughlin, who worked with me on all the interviews of hospice
patients, and to Dr Ros Taylor, the director of the hospice of St Francis. We
received a good deal of assistance from a number of teachers who helped
us establish our work in the four secondary schools. I am also grateful to
Amelia Hassoun and Sabrina Miller, who worked as interns at an early
stage in the project, and to Rickie Burman for all her help. I apologise that
I cannot name others who assisted in this work for reasons of anonymity.
I am also grateful to the two peer reviewers of the original manuscript
and their many helpful suggestions for improvements. Finally I am very
grateful for the excellent copy- editing by Catherine Bradley.
The volume forms one part of the Global Social Media Impact
Study (www.gsmis.org), dedicated to understanding the use and con-
sequences of new and social media. It consists of nine simultaneous
15- month ethnographies and is funded by the European Research
Council grant ERC- 2011- AdG- 295486 Socnet. We devised the project as
a team and discussed it continuously (incessantly) throughout. All the
chapters of all the books were commented upon extensively by the other
members of the team.
We obtained informed consent from all those who participated in
our interviews. We also went through a secondary process of informed
consent when we wished to use materials taken directly from people’s
own social media profiles, in instances where we had permission to fol-
low these directly. This was also true for people who agreed to take part
in the films we produced as part of our field work. These short films may
be found on the Why We Post website (www.ucl.ac.uk/ why- we- post), and
vii
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I would strongly urge anyone taking the time and trouble to read this
book also to view some of those films, especially if they have not them-
selves lived in England. It would not be hard in these days of ‘Google
Search’ for readers to identify places and sometimes people. However,
I would request that readers collaborate with me in trying to preserve
anonymity as far as possible – a precondition if we want to share and
understand people’s personal lives and thereby educate ourselves.
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Contents
List of figures x
1. Welcome to The Glades 1
2. The social media landscape 19
3. Crafting the look 45
4. Social media and social relationships 92
5. Making social media matter 122
6. The wider world 150
7. How English is social media? 180
Notes 193
References 201
Index 205
ix
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