The Translucence of Twitter (original) (raw)
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Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary sociology. Our paper makes a contribution to the sociological theorization of social media. It suggests that the dominant framing of social media in terms derived from communications scholarship, particularly the concept of the public sphere, proves unhelpful when trying to make sense of what people overwhelmingly use social media for in their everyday lives. The networked public sphere prism suggests that unbridled opinion exchange and political debate are what characterize social media and thus define our age. This has been part of the utopian investment in networked forms of communications, and has proven an important aspect in the context of recent protest mobilizations and movements for accountability in which social media played a highly publicized role. However, outside of such normative ideals and exceptional contexts , social media are rarely vehicles for opinion exchange or disruptive movements. Rather, from the perspective of everyday life, social media are more often aligned with order than with disruption, and with the display of status rather than reasoned debate. We propose drawing on the work of Norbert Elias to develop an alternate theorization of social media. Elias' early work on the court society, his analysis of the civilizing process, as well as the larger "figurational" approach to the study of human society he founded, are helpful not just in making sense of the status-seeking behavior of social media users, but also the new needs, desires, sensibilities and practices that emerge at the interface of social media and the spaces of everyday life. From Elias' work, we derive structural pressures as well as new sensibilities that emerge in social spaces ordered by an overarching system of rank. While the court-like sociality of social media tends to reinforce rather than challenge social order, this does not rule out that social media can become aligned with movements for social change. In these cases, however, activists have to actively work against pressures toward conformity, so their successes should be seen as exceptions, not as paradigmatic.