This bit stolen from my digital ethnography side-project on the Facebook group
There are just some things that guys should do for girls. Period. This is just a summary of some of my fieldnotes, I know it may feel a little bit like you've been dropped into it.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2213453770Digital community.It’s a bit of a perplexing phrase when you think about it. Most of the time when people define the term community they think of persons (or even animals) living in a particular local area, having some sort of culture or religious characteristics in common, and likely possessing some kind of shared ownership and joint objectives. And yet this phrase doesn’t seem to apply in quite the same way to global Facebook groups. Even asking simple questions, like who is part of the community (and, taking it a step further to include nonhuman agency, what is part of the community) and where it is located bring forth complications. Many of the people in the Facebook group engaged in this study probably live very differently from one another. They hail from all kinds of ages (based on my statistics), religions (based on discussion topic headers), and geographical regions (based on stats, again). In sheer numbers, they’re astounding—200,000 unique members, most of which whom are female. None of them individually owns the others or the digital space in which they inhabit—and if ownership is denoted by control then not even Facebook has complete domination (nor do they want to!) of the group webpage. But in spite of all of this, I would argue that among them there is a sense of community. Perhaps it is stronger for some than others, and for many it may even just be an almost minor expression of social identity group membership, but there does seem to be a shared culture.
Consider the consistencies and trends I’ve noticed thus far in the 39 so-called suggestions listed on the site. Most of them seem as if they’re built upon assumptions of a few kinds. I’m not sure how many they are in number or specifically what all of them are, but so far I’ve noticed that most of the statements assume a heterosexual relationship, and are of a romantic character. They are also all directed one way, requiring or suggesting that men do something, but not that women do that something. They’re presented in an almost sermonic manner; decrees from a perspective on-high that leave little room to budge. The system architecture, in this instance, is only one-way, as users cannot reply to statements directly, but instead in the discussion group and on the wall below. The context of the terms assumes an ignorant (even immoral?) audience in need of hearing the good news, truths held self-evident irrelevant of the situational complications at hand. Participants are to listen and obey and perform their gender as men in doing “just some things” that they “should do” for girls. Consider the following quote:
4. Play one of the songs that would make any woman weep like the little girl she once was (but in a good way). A brief list includes, but certainly isn't limited, to:
"You & Me" by Lifehouse
Anything by Frank Sinatra
Any rendition of "Everything I Do, I Do it for You"
"Collide" by Howie Day
"Out Of My League" by Steven Speaks
And MOST IMPORTANTLY "Question" by the Old 97's (if you propose to a girl with this song, she is putty in your hands).It’s not ‘you could play’ or ‘you might play’ but a definitive command to play songs that make women weep and become little girls again. This raises all manner of questions. Why in the group title are ‘guys’ and ‘girls’ used instead of women, like it is here? We can say with some certainty (though I haven’t the sources to cite for it on hand) that the guy/girl duality is a youthful term, and probably a majority (white, northern, middle-class) culture one at that. What’s more – suddenly age and maturity enter into the question – a woman is reduced to putty, weakness incarnate, by a man. She is stripped of all of her own agency and becomes comparable to a moldable form. Remember those countless instances in pop culture (and worse in past paradigms of academe) of
women brushed off as irrational beings driven and masterminded by their period? If I played one of these songs to a woman in rural Russia, do you think she’d falter in any way? Moreover, many members of the group are from India – are these songs as meaningful there as they are here? Would a person who identifies as Native America or African American just melt away? A woman of lesbian sexuality? Or a person who’s deaf?
Obviously I could keep going but the point is that the rules are given in a particular manner. They’re tagged as suggestions and yet this contradicts their lexical characteristics as they all take the form of inflexible commands. Even tonal semantics are present in the emphasis of all-caps. The all seem to assume a given audience and yet seldom account holistically for the situational factors of a given context. This indicates something of a shared knowledge—the essence of a common culture—that bounds forth from the theories of hermeneutics and the like. I argue here, that this virtual community is knit together in this way, despite its rather distanced composition.
Ulterior functions of the mandates are another question entirely. I’d suspect on some level the author probably wishes to affirm his views and values by creating a group and seeing the support for it grow. And on another level he likely poses the rules in such a way so that people engage with them and debate how they should be interpreted. The lack of explanation on each post makes them inflexible, but yet functions to provide the use an opportunity to fabricate their own interpretation. They’re also practical in that they’re short enough to be easily read.
Observations of the description of the group are just the skeleton of the experience. The real interest lies in the meat between the bones—the wall and discussion posts. Though I haven’t had the time to really dig deeply into the discourse the clues are all there. Post titles sprout up relating to an assumed Christian God and advice for all kinds of hopeless male romantics. Women perform submissive or particular gender roles through their expressions in posts. One male dared to defy the list item by item. Half of the responses to his approach were rational and argument-based… and the other half just (assumed and) made fun of him because he couldn’t possibly have a girl friend. Defiance of the so-called suggestions leads to failure in the romantic universe. The place serves as a public forum of sorts, with popular topics that might be considered disconnected, like rating other people in the group based on attractiveness or abortion, and other topics perhaps more apparently relevant, like homosexuality as a lifestyle and desired features in a potential mate.
So who is it, then, that partakes in this discourse? Hard to say at this point, looking at 34,000 some posts is beyond human capabilities for a single half-semester. The group on the whole is very young, dominated by high schoolers, women (2 to 1 man), and contains a hefty helping of people from outside of the US. But after starting my own discussion forum topic on politics and watching the response I’m tempted to say that not only is only a minority of the group doing most of the posting, but that many of the active ones are more educated and college-age.
My role in the environment has been mixed. Mostly I’ve been just observing, taking down numbers, catching quotes, wondering about people’s perspectives. I think, in retrospect, it was a poor choice of groups to analyze. Its active and virulent nature not withstanding I found myself getting upset all too often. Though it may be impossible to conduct unbias research I still think I came into this one with an agenda, whether I knew it or not. After even just a few discussion topic posts I found myself defending statements and arguing others—through just asking questions many people began to assume what my perspectives were and I couldn’t just sit back and let them tell me who I was. The outcome was a bit more uplifting as amongst all of the sexist horror I somehow uprooted a few individuals who I wouldn’t expect to be caught dead in a group with such prescriptive gender roles. One such fellow even stated his outright disagreement:
I don't claim that "there are some things guys should always do for girls". There are some things which, in the proper context, are very nice to do for girls. There are some things which are very nice to do for guys. I don't see how those are black and white. What one girl would like me to do for her isn't necessarily going to be what another girl would like me to do for her.While another female explicated:
Gender roles in the 'traditional' sense are out dated and counterproductive to the societal social norms of our modern world…For some people traditional or quasi-traditional roles work, for others- not so much. In either case, the act of showing respect, attention, affection, whatever you want to call it- is a necessary part of making any relationship work...regardless of the gender/sexual orientation of the persons involved in the relationship.Somehow these individuals could exist in a group like this without a sociological consciousness of the sexist norms it perpetuates with its contextual framing (as discussed earlier). I don’t know if they lurked just to pick fights with people or if the group was the site of their developing perspective, they just thoroughly surprised me. Their resistance led me to reconsider some of my own presumptions (members’ perceptions of gay marriage as it relates to gender roles). Out of it all I mostly feel like I ought not dabble in an environment so upsetting that moral judgments might not only mediate scientific ones, but determine them.
So I’ve already said enough. I’ve found this group to be a site for the performance of identity and social control, the assertion of shared knowledge/culture and group membership, a grounds for both critical and passing whimsical discourse, and even an environment that can forge discursive practices amongst its own members. Suffice to say, stating that all this surprised, intrigued, and disturbed me is, in short, an understatement.
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