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E-book Visualising Facebook : A Comparative Perspective
This book has three main aims which are surprising only in terms of how little has been done previously to fulfil them. In 2011 Miller published a book called Tales From Facebook.1 As the title suggests, that book consisted mainly of stories about how people, as it happens people in Trinidad, used Facebook, and the consequences of Facebook for their lives.In retrospect there were (at least) two glaring omissions from that book. The first is that there was not one single visual image –Tales from Facebook contained relatively few examples of postings and these were all textual. Yet it was already evident that in places such as Trinidad the domi-nant form of posting on Facebook is actually visual. The book was not alone in this omission. There are several journals devoted to internet studies, and increasingly these are focused upon social media. Yet one can browse through a whole issue about new media and society or about computer-mediated communication and not find one single illustration of a visual posting. We know of no precedent that even looks like this book.The primary reason for this has been cost, with publishers either refusing to publish colour images or charging authors considerable amounts in order to do so. But today, as shown by this volume, this is no longer the case and it is important that academics seize this new oppor-tunity. It is surely ‘about time’ that a book is produced which is not only dedicated to the acknowledgement and discussion of such visuals, but also based on the reproduction of those same images that make up so much of what is posted online. Indeed one of the core arguments of our wider ‘Why We Post’ comparative project is that social media has trans-formed human communication precisely by making images as much a part of human communication as text or speech.2 The second omission was that while Tales From Facebook was written about Trinidad, it did not claim that Trinidad was in and of itself any more important or inter-esting than any other place. Trinidad was used merely to demonstrate through a case study that Facebook is culturally specific, and is always encountered with respect to some particular population. This was a deliberate provocation in the face of hundreds of journal articles whose premise seems to be that there is a single thing called Facebook, and that if one conducts an experiment on some aspect of how people post among, for example, American college students, an academic paper can then extrapolate from that to a thing called ‘Facebook’ in general. Many of these same journals use methods which aim to emulate the natural sciences in the way they generalise from a case study to the universal, which makes cultural diversity something of an inconvenience.
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