Social Media in an English Village

Why We Post

by Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.

He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.

This book is available as a free open access PDF from ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press. Print copies are also available.

Genres: Anthropology, Social Media

234 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2016

About the author

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 37 books including Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to summon a word that I rarely use in relation to social media scholarship: radical. This small book - one of a series of 11 local anthropological studies published into monographs - offers a radical reinterpretation of social media. Firstly, a fascinating word 'polymedia' is deployed and applied. Secondly though, Miller turns McLuhan on his head. While 'the medium is the message' was a cliched McLuhan flourish - so appropriate for the 1960s and 1970s - Miller decentres (and perhaps even denies the medium) to stress the content.

While I disagree with this approach - I do believe that each platform has limitations and capacities that shape and contour the ideologies and meanings of texts - there is great value in Miller's correction. He explores how a portfolio of media options are deployed. Of particular value is the analysis of Facebook and Instagram by young users in an 'English village,' but also how social media is deployed by patients in hospice care.

From this short book, many influential studies will emerge. I look forward to reading all 11 titles in this series.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, maybe I'm a bit of a geek, but I read a lot of study reports for grad school, and this is the best one I've read. It was well written, engaging, and very interesting.

It's actually part of a group of studies, and I would really like to read a couple of the others and the wrap up one.

[Katie Parnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spend a lot of time on social media. And I’ve read a lot of anthropology books. And a lot of ethnography. And this would be more aptly named ‘too many prepositional phrases used by anthropologists to generalize their opinions’. I can only pray that my professors don’t find my Goodreads account because they wrote this book and I’m going to see them tomorrow and every Monday for the next few months.

TLDR: there are a few anthropological conclusions that still stand, and some general cultural observations that I think hold water. But most of the ethnographic conclusions are just outdated at best and speculative at worst. Not bad as far as trying to do an ethnography on an extremely private population as an outsider goes, but could be better.

But anyway!!
This book was probably revolutionary in 2016 but in the last decade has since lost its novelty and its anthropological conclusions of ‘Englishness as expressed by and through various social media platforms can be concisely concluded into “the Goldilocks strategy” is the English People™️’s way of coping with people they don’t actually like invading their carefully constructed castles of confidence’, having been revealed by the ubiquity of social media, is are only pretty decent.

The main hurdle the researchers found was that, in an English fashion, people did not want them following them on social media ‘for research’ just as much as they did not want them in their homes. Which like, I can’t blame either side about that. The researchers, to their credit, did their best to supplement the gap in their ethnography with polls and interviews, but there were still significant gaps in the research in regards to schoolchildren’s usage (obviously an ethical immovable object) and young-ish men. A lot of the evidence provided concerned elderly people (evenly across gender lines), and mothers. Which, multiple times throughout the book, there were anecdotes only referring to women as ‘young mothers’ but men were never referred to as ‘fathers’ in regards to their social media usage, which if fathers didn’t have any mentions of their children on their social media, wouldn’t that be an interesting anthropological point? Call me nitpicky I just couldn’t get over this gender gap throughout the book.

They even admitted that the ‘Englishness’ of the villager’s social media usage was better illustrated by comparison to other place’s ethnographic evidence of social media usage!!! Which I think just says that this book could’ve been an email and I hope that the other books in this collection (which I’ve heard are very good) are a more concise and well-rounded ethnographic study.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is part of an series of books using ethnography to explore social media use and attitudes towards it in different communities around the world. It very interesting both for the descriptions of ethnographic practices and the specific results in each location. The results are different in each place.

This volume showed interesting examples of how different people and organisations in the community were using social media. One of the most interesting areas was the use by people with terminal illnesses as part of their experiences of dying.

This was a very interesting book to read.