Thanks for the ad(d): neoliberalism’s compulsory friendship

The Federal Government’s current campaign to filter unseemly Internet content and “protect families online” typifies an established genre of media representation which dismisses social networking sites for their dangerous voyeuristic potential.

To the Government, and the parents of children to whom their messages are routinely directed, online sites like MySpace and Facebook seem to provide evidence that young people have been inadequately informed of the notion of privacy and the risks involved in sharing personal information. Coming alongside the mass appeal of weblogging, SMS, instant messaging and video sites like YouTube, such instances of online culture are regularly criticised for their lack of surveillance by parents who themselves confess bewilderment with the technologies.

Leaving this hypocrisy aside, what would it mean to understand these sites in a different way? To see the popularity of online friendships and communities as a positive shift, or at least a necessary recompense for a range of social and economic changes taking place in the move to an information economy. These include, for instance, the intrusion of work into home and leisure space, the widespread expectation of computer literacy among young people and the long hours culture of middle-class professionals.

The extent to which people choose to conduct significant parts of their personal lives online, from finding the next book they should read to finding a life partner, surely says something about the opportunities available for previous forms of social activity and perhaps their reliability in providing satisfying relationships.

Internet scholars have tended to concur that social networking sites are the domain of young people, encouraged by a soundbite hungry media cycle on the look-out for the latest trends, or institutional constraints leading academics to opportunistically consider their students as representative users. In each case, the relationship these websites have with work, labour and class have been downplayed, despite the fact that they have emerged from, and are largely accessed within, work or vocationally-oriented locations.

Aspiring musicians were the driving force behind the popularity of MySpace (the site’s key feature was to allow the free distribution of band demos) while in Facebook, college and post-tertiary job locations have been crucial to initial membership and subsequent exercises in crafting identity. Indeed, even if it were the case that only young people used these sites, we could argue that this is both sensible and valuable preparation for the labour conditions currently flourishing in the network society - and thus the economy to which educated, tech savvy, English-speaking college kids will contribute.

Available research on “precarious” labour conditions in the e-society shows that the job opportunities developing in this sector are highly competitive, very much premised on who you know as much as what you know, and that in spite of their glamorous image they demand a high degree of sacrificial (i.e. unpaid) labour. Social networking sites have grown in tandem with these conditions: are symptomatic of them as much as they perpetuate them. To regard social networking sites as simply a new form of schoolyard popularity contest fails to recognise this significant development.

The entrepreneurial dimension to friending practices on these sites is captured in the phrase “Thanks for the add”- the ritual acknowledgement shared among MySpace users when someone “adds” you to their list of friends. It’s part of the site’s appeal that even if users are often friends with their online buddies beforehand, on MySpace people that aren’t known personally in so-called real life can be accepted as a friend, whether in recognition of a good profile page, a shared interest, or simply in response to a “friend request”. In this sense, the site pivots on the invitation to display and market a coherent self that can be assessed and consumed by others.

This is the double meaning in my bracketed title: it is both an addition and an endorsement to be allowed to join someone’s group. Due to the taste logic of these sites, the benefit that is recognised here is that friendship allows your own profile to be circulated for free to a wider market of potential friends.

Writing “Thanks for the add” on the publicly visible comments section of a homepage is just one way that friendship is vigorously affirmed on social networking sites. Comment sections, wall space, status updates, inboxes, mobile paging and instant messaging are just some of the ways they incite convivial discourse, meanwhile add-on applications allow gestures and mementos to accrue over time, acting as tangible evidence of friends’ ongoing presence and potential for further “hook-ups” in future.

It is this potential, and the constant and reassuring promise of presence, that is MySpace’s permanent consolation. Social networking sites offer on one convenient page the life narrative as archive; the “full time intimate community” as security blanket.

While its users vary greatly in their level of seriousness and resolve, sites like MySpace foster a new form of literacy among users - what I call a broadcast impulse - which encourages them to articulate and communicate a particular “type”. This is also how online cultures can connect beyond the local location: shared reference points can garner recognition within a familiar set of expectations, activities and aspirations. The broadcast capacity means young people can ensure the image they project is a favourable one, while also allowing them to become skilled in networking to create an archive of “contacts” for the future.

It is therefore important to track the popularity of these sites in tandem with the growth of more work-specific, professional sites such as LinkedIn.com and those (like Doostang.com or Zubka.com) that combine the two functions of friendship, cash payment and job opportunity. Not only do you invite friends to join these sites, they have the capacity to mine the address books in email programs on your computer so that any contact made over time can be notified of your profile. Here the cloudy distinction between “contact” and “friend” perpetuated by office software packages can be seen to play out in an unfolding set of encounters. In online communities, any and all relationships become part of the CV for which you are judged, and the testimonials of “contacts” are central to maintaining status.

In this way, what is most notable is the extent to which these sites reproduce offline culture rather than threaten or oppose it. Yet the precociousness they encourage from users - the self-reflexivity required to broadcast oneself and the literacy of being able to distinguish “friends” who share similar characteristics - indicates the new environment young people are facing. For what is perhaps most disturbing about social networking sites is the way they allow “friendship” to become synonymous with labour: both involve constant attention and cultivation, the future rewards of which include improved standing and greater opportunity. The amount of effort and time required to perform and display oneself, the various genres of managing presence, from Facebook’s status updates to Twitter’s "what are you doing?" seals the mutually constitutive bond of connectedness and desirability.

In this situation, our efforts to protect young people online are surely misplaced unless we develop more sophisticated ways of preparing them for the emerging employment context of the networked society.

The amount of time currently being spent chatting and reciprocating presence online might be better spent reflecting on the shared fate of knowledge work, which is increasingly defined by the hollowing out of hierarchies in white collar jobs, and hence the end of the kind of occupational security that middle-class college graduates might once have trained for.

On a local level, this is the growing phenomenon of “management empathy”, where everyone at every level of the workplace now experiences the same budgetary pressure from faceless suits. On a global level, the hollowing out of hierarchy comes in the practice of skills and knowledge transfer across countries according to the needs of global business, when those with jobs in the West end up training others who will be hired by the same firm at a cheaper rate to replace them. In these circumstances, making friends, like with like, in cultural and regional vacuums actually seems the worst kind of preparation for building the alliances necessary to combat this wider structural trend.

Capitalism may have finally managed to produce an atomised workforce that has no aspirations for living wage claims because overwork has been normalised and an all-seeing screen binds together our public and private identities. It is this reality that young people are preparing for as they learn to “broadcast themselves” online. But those of us concerned about their future must help them realise that while the friendships they treasure on social networking sites may be premised on a form of loyalty, the workings of capital and labour hire under neoliberalism most definitely are not.