Friend me If you Facebook : Generation Y and Performative Surveillance E.J Westlake, TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 52, Number 4 (T 200) Winter 2008, pp. 21-40 (Article).
A lit review of an article examining performance and surveillance in action on Facebook, with a healthy dosage of pop-sociology thrown in. The upside is that it has lead to further articles that are quite useful.
Friend me If you Facebook : Generation Y and Performative Surveillance
E.J Westlake, TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 52, Number 4 (T 200) Winter 2008, pp. 21-40 (Article).
This articles starts from a very poor place by framing itself in the context of “generation y”. Generational theory is simply lazy. It takes sociological phenomena and shoehorns it into basic demographics then sews together by arbitrary lines drawn at dates that convenient times. Sure there are generational differences, but apparently Socrates once said “Children today are tyrants[…] they contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers”. Every generation has been puzzled by the actions and behaviours of the next and trying to explain it by simply stick a label on it and putting it down to demographics has absolutely zero academic merit. This approach misses the myriad of other factors, subtle, nuanced, and otherwise. It is, at best, pop-sociology that is thrown together in a flash-looking book and targeted at business owners and marketing or managerial people that promises to explain how to “get down with the kids”.
But that aside the article does raise some interests points about the performance of the self online and goes back to a stalwart of the sociology discipline Erving Goffman to argue it. In his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argues that people present an idealised version of themselves to others, rather than a “true” one. The continued presence of other “actors” and observers on the “stage” of life, seen or unseen, causes individuals to constantly tweak their behaviour and undertake “impression management”. Facebook it would appear fits quite nicely into this as the establishment of a profile, choosing your profile picture, filling out the fields pertaining to one’s interests and so on can be understood as preparing one’s self as an actor. The actions of the actor can be undertaken through interaction with the software: status updates, pokes, likes, groups, uploading pictures, and linking content all present to the “audience” (your facebook friends) the version of yourself that you might wish to present.
This performativity, Westlake argues, encourages a panoptical surveillance relationship, not only with bodies (she seems to have quite the fascination with the Government using Facebook to spy on users, but corporations, like Facebook itself for example, seem to me to be more of a consideration), but also with other users. Facebook is always ready to take down infringements of IP, and albeit somewhat less quickly, will take down posts or actions by users that are offensive or in some way against the Terms of Service. The primary software function that activates that panoptical power is the “Report abuse” button. The panoptical observations that users make of each other and that Facebook (either itself or acting as the proxy of another corporation) fit into Goffman’s thesis that people modify their performance to exemplify the values of society, after all, being observed is the crucial part to this idea. It follows then that Facebook becomes a place that allows (or pushes?) people to perform their roles and the social values attached to these roles online in much the same way that they would do in Meatbook(1). Facebook is another platform for developing normative behaviour rather than the apparent deviance of online communities pre-Facebook, and because of the way the software is built Facebook more neatly aligns itself and in fact poses as the real world more than any other website or internet phenomenon previously.
She justifies this claim by saying that the performative surveillance of one’s friends ensures that the social norms of Facebook are enforced. Which seems reasonable at first but when the author elaborates it comes a little undone:
It can be socially embarrassing to have a profile that announces “you only have 3 friends at Michigan” when being friended and having comments on your Wall are signs of the social acceptance of your performance. Too few friends signifies someone who has no social network outside of Facebook, someone who does not understand the purpose of Facebook, or someone who is generally not “with it.” Too many friends signifies someone who is desperate, the so-called “Facebook whore.”
To which there is no empirical evidence given. Sure, the panoptical gaze of the requirements of performativity is powerful, but I don’t think there’s justification for that kind of development and enforcement of some sort of etiquette of use. If you don’t use Facebook very often or don’t have many friends, rather than being judged by others you simply wouldn’t factor (as much) on their Facebook radar. I don’t think there’s much justification for her claims as to the kind of rules about changing one’s profile picture on some sort of routine. That’s not to say that it categorically cannot or does not happen, it’s just that the claim is unsubstantiated and draws away from her previous strong argument that Facebook poses as real life. That tendency is archetypal of the “old school” approach to examining digital media - finding and highlighting those “peculiar” social differences in cyberspace in comparison to meatspace and presenting it like it’s a fact discovered on some African safari. The role of social scientists who are interested in digital media now is not to point out the difference as if it they are the skull of prehistoric humans but to think about how the two spheres are rapidly converging.
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1 Cyberpunk introduced the term “meatspace” as an opposite to “cyberspace”, ie, where the “meat” of ourselves lives as separate to the self existing in an online sphere. I think Meatbook is a suitable portmanteau to represent the same concept while also recognising the primacy of Facebook…. And gosh, don’t I feel clever.
Nobody likes a bureaucrat
The hollowing of state-sector administration
It has been interesting to watch the actions and rhetoric of this Fifth National Government in the lead up to the final budget of its first term in power. In the wake of the Christchurch earthquake the spotlight has become far more focussed on the number of people employed by the state sector, particularly in the area deemed as the “back office”. In reality, this is a process that has been underway since the very earliest days of this government: many state sector organisations have been prohibited from hiring new administrative staff, and with budget increases that have either been zero or less than population growth and inflation the shedding of these jobs has been quite rapid — 2000 since the implementation of the cap. The Government has been quick to point out that these cuts have come with increases in “front line staff” - more police, teachers, nurses, and so on.
Despite some attention from the opposition and the unions, the Government has been getting away with these cuts, remembering of course that cuts were ruled out in favour of a ‘cap’ before the election. It has continued to poll relatively well with the most traction against it coming from environmental policies, employment relations policies, the cost of living, and ministerial scandals. Labour and the PSA have stuck with the message that there is no difference between back office and frontline cuts — cuts are cuts and more importantly, where are they going to cut next? It seems that it’s a hard sell, especially when the government can trot out the figures like “300 more police, about 1600 extra teachers, more than 500 more doctors and 1000 more nurses” and paint a picture of growth in the public sector. Despite the fact that redundancies in the “front line” have been occurring the whole time anyway. Some left-wing commentators and unions have noted that the effectiveness of the front line is entirely contingent on the abilities of the “back office” to provide them with the support they need. I find this to be a particularly compelling argument, although it does seem to be somewhat lost in the ether at the moment, because let’s face it, nobody likes a faceless bureaucrat.
All the while the Government is sticking to its guns: This is just necessary pragmatic and prudent management in a time of fiscal crisis, it’s nothing ideological and it’s nothing like the last time we were in power. It’s hard to argue with the last part. There have been no moves to restructure the public service to allow competition, choice, and voice to guide citizens to a brighter future through pure supply, demand, and deregulated capitalism (asset sales, schooling deregulation, large benefit cuts, large state sector organisation cuts, and other such hallmarks of the Fourth National Government).
What we have is something quite different. It appears to be happening almost in reverse.
Instead of blowing out the egg and selling the insides (and the shell if its viable) to anyone who’ll take it, this Government has taken an approach akin to a child eating a soft-boiled egg: Whack off the top, eat the white, and leave everything else sitting there. Bugger what’s spilling out and down the sides, the egg’s still there, isn’t it? But what does this mean and where is it going? We could well progress down the well-trodden 1990’s track once again, but right now I think a different kind of reform is slowly underway. A reform of the privatisation of administration.
Neoliberal doctrine stipulates that government should be divided between funder/policy maker and provider, that is, the government creates the administrative framework and sets the outcomes and then contracts the private sector to carry out the delivery, utilising the command and control mechanisms of measurable outputs and outcomes, contracts, and the courts. Third Way governments tend to preserve this structure, but instead of allowing private companies to compete against one another (and the state sometimes) to provide the best services, this is normally locked down into another state organisation. Private companies are utilised generally to provide fringe services, consultancy, and so on, but seldom direct service provision.
(A crude diagrammatic explanation, it’s not something that can be boiled down so neatly across a differing range of services and departments, but it illustrates the fundamental idea)
By cutting the administrative capabilities of the state sector the government is priming the sector for more private involvement at the policy and control level. Another hallmark of Neoliberalism is the crisis — utilise crises in the economy or society to push through reforms. Crises can range from the coups in Indonesia and many South American nations, to fiscal crises or managerial crises as we saw in the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand (for more read Naomi Klein and Bruce Jesson among many others). Stripping back the administrative infrastructure is sowing the seeds of a crisis of service delivery, exploiting the fact that without proper back office support, the front line will be undermined.
It seems clear to me that as the fiscal worries grow, so too will the appetite for increased savings in administration. At some point the government will announce that, as apart of its constant drive for prudent management of your tax dollars and citing (the prediction of) vastly reduced operational costs, the administration of various state services will be outsourced. If there is some form of failure or crisis in delivery, all the more reason because, as every good dogmatic Neoliberal knows, the efficiency of the private sector is no match for anything in the public sector (in short, nothing beats competition and the profit motive).
It’s clear because this is nothing new. In Britain a company called Capita has been moving into this area for several years. It already controls much of the administrative infrastructure of schools, IT support and call centre operations for government departments central and local, it administers criminal records, TV licensing, and the HR for the BBC. It has been doing very well for itself too: Capita posted a 10% increase in profits for 2010 and nearly the same for 2009 with only a slight loss at the beginning of the recession in 2008. In a recent article in The Economist entitled Austerity’s Winner, CEO Paul Pindar boasts, brimming with confidence, that Capita could bear the entire administrative workload of the Police with half the staff and provide hundreds of millions of pounds in savings by sucking up other areas of state administration.
This isn’t something that is particularly new here either. For a number of years now, companies such as Datacom have been creeping further and further into administration: vast amounts of the public service payroll is provided by them as well as much of the outsourcing of IT support. Just recently the company won a 5 year, $30 million contract for providing “IT production support, IT infrastructure management, and application development, maintenance, and support services” to Land Information New Zealand. The change has resulted in 44 people losing their jobs at LINZ with only 12 of them being hired by Datacom.
Throughout the state sector IT has been an area identified for savings. Health and State Services Minister Tony Ryall has already implemented the National Health Board, a body that centralises the provision of payroll, IT, procurement and logistic for all District Health Boards in New Zealand. While I can’t find anything specific, it has come at the cost of 500 jobs nationally and approximately $10 million dollars. The board has already begun outsourcing work to the private sector with a recent RFP worth $15 million tendered for the development of a “Health Identity Programme” which aims to “deliver a single integrated system that will lay the foundation for a secure and transferable electronic shared care record”. All very well and good, but after a little more digging it seems to be more about layering new systems across 21 still-disparate systems rather than unifying them all, but that’s for another post perhaps.
Another all-encompassing but alarmingly vague ICT reform is the development of a Government Infrastructure as a Service programme. ICT infrastructure will now be provided as an operational expenditure item only rather than a combination of operational and capital — the state sector will “rent” the capacity it needs from a central provider, thus more accurately determining the ICT infrastructural and administrative needs in the short term and bypassing the typical process of building and filling ICT infrastructural capacity. The Department of Internal Affairs has already tendered the RFP and the results will be back in a few months, however ComputerWorld reports that it will be a 30 year contract for and undisclosed sum for two private companies. The likely contenders are Telecom’s Gen-i and a raft of other wholly foreign companies such as IBM, Unisys, Telstra, HP, and Fujitsu.
The merit of these particular ideas laid out is not the point of this post. The point is that these moves are simply the first step on the path of the hollowing out of the top of the egg shell. In the Neoliberal era one of the responses to falling profits and stagnating economies has been to extract profit from ever-larger pieces of the state and public service — user pays, privatisation, State-Owned Enterprises and so on. Whereas in the 1990s we were shifting to a system of private provision of public services under this Government we seem to be heading towards the privatisation of the organisation, administration, and coordination of the state sector. Instead of the “consumer” being exposed to the rigours of supply and demand for the benefit of an ever-diminishing percentage of the population (shareholders) the electric shock therapy seems to be turning inwards toward the state sector in a far more direct fashion. Let’s be clear: This is still a Neoliberal attack on the public service, but its now being deployed in a new way.
It makes political sense. Given the amount of anti-privatisation sentiment that still exists in this country it is a smart move to bring the Neoliberal dogma in through the back door. What only increases concern is that this trajectory of rhetoric, policy, and ideology can very easily be directed into a path that takes us back to the 1990s high-Neoliberalism of unfettered markets and Richard Prebble’s wet dreams. Something I think we will begin to see more acutely if this Government is awarded a second term.
In the mean time we still have the 2011 “zero” budget to come and I predict that we will see a wholesale deepening of these measures which will certainly encourage the process to run a little quicker.
How to write a thesis.
