The grammar of social intercourse on the web

Facebook notification: Fred Bloggs likes your comment.

What does that mean exactly? It occurs to me that, whilst human societies have had countless centuries to develop and disseminate subtle modes of social interaction in the face-to-face world we are having to put together similar codes for interaction ludicrously quickly when it comes to the internet. Take the general area of the notification that starts this post- namely the expression of agreement and affirmation.

In the face-to-face world there exists a whole range of means, verbal and non-verbal, to let the other person know that you agree with them- that you are on their side. At a base level there are the simple nods and mumbled "yeah"s and "mhmm"s that really signify little more than "I am not actually asleep yet." Then there are the slightly more enthusiastic smiles or "Yeah, yeah"s and "quite"s or the never-completely-sincere-sounding "Ooh I know." For the young there are the the more emphatic "innit doe"s and "you know it"s or even "that's what I'm saying blud," accompanied perhaps by a high-five or other congratulatory physical contact. For the older participants there is a similar lexicon of supportive (though often essentially meaningless) comments, such as "absolutely," or "I couldn't agree more." In some communities even the middle-aged can accompany these with physical contact, usually centred around handshakes, though we repressed Britons usually have to make do with vigorous nodding and enthusiastic smiles.

If the social context is veering more towards intimacy than debate there is a similar range of supportive actions and comments, often so highly charged that a tentative touch of the hand across a table carries a wealth of meaning and potential. In these contexts in particular the signifiers are so subtly differentiated that they can become a minefield for the unwary or socially inept. So it is not just a question of whether one smiles at a particular point in the conversation, but what sort of smile that is. Get it right and the relationship can move forward incrementally; get it wrong and you risk looking insincere, pushy, creepy or downright manic (or is that just me?)

And on the internet what do we have? A "like" button, often illustrated with a thumbs-up icon.

The thumbs-up icon is actually interesting in itself. In face-to-face contexts the thumbs-up is very rarely used, and then in very specific circumstances. It implies an invocation to stick at it in the face of difficult challenges. It is the non-verbal equivalent of the French "bon courage." Think- when was the last time you gave anyone a thumbs-up in the context of an actual conversation? Because it is also typically a sign given at a distance, when someone is leaving for instance and the time for words is over.

The word "like" itself is pretty inoffensive and all-purpose, but the problem is that it has to carry such a vast range of meanings. To take a variant of the post above for instance: when a woman reads "Fred Bloggs likes your photo" there is an enormous amount of guesswork involved as to the implications of that statement. It could mean:

1. Fred appreciates the humour/beauty/photographic skill on display in the photo.
2. Fred has been reminded of your existence by the photo and wants to say hi.
3. Fred thinks you look very good in the photo, and wants to give you some supportive positive feedback.
4. Fred fancies you and is using an inoffensive "like" of your photo as a way in to deepening your relationship.
5. Fred is in fact a deeply creepy stalker who you would be well-advised to block from your facebook posts.

And how are you supposed to know which is which?

Or to take a similarly potentially awkward situation. Imagine the following: you have posted a sarcastically tongue-in-cheek comment about some issue which divides public opinion, in which you purport to put forward a point of view in order to satirise those who hold such views: "I really think the coalition government should be doing more to clamp down on the benefits that go to scroungers pretending to be disabled." Fred Bloggs (whom you barely know) 'likes' your post. Does this mean that he shares your political viewpoints and satirical humour, or that he is a closet Tory who thinks that he has found a political soulmate?

Mostly of course we have other clues as to what the 'like' means in any particular context, but we can never be completely sure. Did Fred click 'like' as a thoughtlessly automatic reaction whilst scrolling through hundreds of status updates, or is this a considered, thoughtful, even coded message of a deeper reaction to your post? Who knows?

The point is that I think we need somehow to develop a greater range of communication fillers and signifiers of social responses for use on the internet. Quite what I am not sure, and I think it would be hard to replicate the vast range of such signifiers we have in face-to-face contexts (particularly given the inherently multicultural nature of the internet), but we need something.

Click the button below to like this post if you agree.

Shame and poverty

I watched a depressing Panorama last night about the plight of Brent residents hit by the benefits cap, then read this morning this comment piece about the lovely Ian Duncan Smith's "reformed" replacement for the Disability Living Allowance. All of this is part of a pattern of course, and I have no intention of adding another pathetic complaint to the mountain that has built against the current government's benefit "reforms."

What I did want to pick up on is a strange but all-pervading reaction that I observed from most of those whose cases were followed in the Panorama programme. As they faced eviction and penury some were confrontational, some resigned, some vocal and truculent, others submissive. However most of all what they felt seemed to be shame. They were ashamed of being poor, ashamed of having to rely on the state, ashamed of the shitholes they lived in. Many of them were also as willing as the general population currently is to turn on and vilify "benefit claimants," as though that was not what they were. Many also seemed to have in their minds a definition of a "benefit claimant" who actually deserved to feel the shame they were themselves experiencing. One truculent man whose benefit was being cut trotted out the old myth about young single mothers having it easy; a young single mother, unsuccessful in her search for work to fit around her childcare responsibilities, blamed those without jobs.

Despite all being trapped in the steadily tightening web of the casually cruel benefits cap I would be very surprised if any of the subjects of this documentary would have voted for a political party whose policies included raising taxes and increasing benefits (should such a party even exist). We were reminded in various soundbites from leading politicians just how universal the political consensus is that benefits have to be cut.

So why is it that almost everyone in the UK (including the poor) believes that in times of austerity the amount of money going to the poor should be cut? How is it that we have developed to a point where poverty is of itself is deemed to be shameful? This used to be a country where "a working-class hero [was] something to be." No more, it seems.

Not so long ago it was the very rich who were typically portrayed as feckless, self-absorbed and decadent. Think of Bertie Wooster, or the Roman Emperors in the 70s productions of I Claudius or Caligula. At the same time there was a prevailing image of the fierce independence of the British working classes. Some of this was a legacy of the "spirit of the Blitz", when the poor of London's East End were portrayed as sticking two fingers up to Hitler's Luftwaffe. Some had an even longer germination, from the images of industrial workers powering the industrial revolution and the glories of the British Empire. The question of how closely these myths related to reality is neither here nor there: we had our archetypes of the miner, the shipworker or the railwayman, their faces blackened and their eyes steely with determination.

The 70s industrial troubles dented these images slightly, and began to introduce the conflicting trope of the "all out lads!" unionist warming his hands round a brazier. However the miners' strike, much as it might have divided Britain, had at its heart a powerful image of the indomitable poor fighting against the oppressive power of the state. From the Clash to Billy Elliot we were presented with images of the poor beaten down and dominated but retaining some dignity nonetheless.

However slowly our iconography has begun to change, and with it, apparently, our attitudes. Despite the prominence of made-to-measure figures of contempt from amongst the hyper-rich, like Fred (the Shred) Goodwin and Paul (meth and crack) Flowers we still seem to be moving towards a US-style veneration of the rich. Depending on our political affiliations (and level of personal wealth) we may feel anger towards them or envy, but we rarely seem to laugh at them any more. They may be figures of hatred, even of contempt, but rarely of fun. We seem to have accepted that, to get where they are, the hyper-rich may be grasping and of questionable morality but they must also be powerful, virile and brilliant. The fact that most of them are probably none of these things seems to have passed us by.

More sadly though, any last vestige of the concept of dignity in poverty seems to have disappeared. We have come to the point where poverty porn seems principally designed to generate not sympathy but contempt for the poor. The word "benefit," in itself an intrinsically positive word (from bene facere: to do good) now seems inextricably linked to the word "cheat."

Shame is a powerful force, but it really needs to find its appropriate target. It is the rich who should feel ashamed, every time they spend more on a meal out than the average family has to live on for a week. And we should feel ashamed at every story we hear of families evicted and the sick and disabled living in penury. The concept is bandied about a fair bit, but often directed by the current government at those in the public sector who, for all their failings are at least making some effort to address the needs of those less fortunate than themselves. Yes, mistakes by social workers, or poor hospital care by nurses are terrible things, but nowhere near as shameful as the simple fact that the 85 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion or that in Britain today families in poverty can be forced to move 100 miles with no redress because their benefits have been capped.

Portraiture and the #nomakeupselfie

I was alerted to the phenomenon of the no makeup selfie by my daughter, who has written an excellent blog post on the inappropriateness of aligning it with the fight against cancer. I have nothing to add to her post on that subject but wanted to look a little at the place of the phenomenon in the history of portraiture.

Disclaimer: I am emphatically not an art historian, so some of what follows may well be inaccurate. Ah well...

Although it seems a commonplace to state that portraiture has been around "since the dawn of time," or "for as long as people have made art," I am not entirely sure that that is the case in the sense that we understand portraiture today. Most of the Paleolithic art that we have today, if it depicts humans at all, depicts them in generic and non-individualised ways (like these), or records their presence rather than depicting their facial features (like the hand-prints for instance). There is a famous "portrait" in the grotto of Vilhonneur, thought to be 26,000 years old, but it seems to me at least questionable that this is a depiction of any real individual.

Ancient artists seem to me to have been more concerned with depicting archetypes and creating symbols than with recording the physical appearance of individuals. Perhaps art was for them too powerful a medium to direct it to depicting what some particular person looked like. It may also be that the power of art rendered portraiture problematic- that the act of capturing a likeness endangered the person whose likeness was captured. That would seem a plausible thought in a time when the spirit world, with which art was strongly associated, was always close at hand.

When portraiture first really boomed as an art form it was in forms with very different purposes to those we associate with it today. In ancient Egypt and elsewhere portraits started appearing in tombs. Whether or not these were painted or carved post-mortem it seems clear that the primary audience was not the living. These portraits seem almost an attempt to give the deceased an identity in the hereafter. It appears not to have been particularly important that the portrait resembled the sitter physically, since the name inscribed thereon would identify it. Instead the portrait depicted the person symbolically, sometimes with attributes of Gods or sacred animals. Art still seems to be seen as having a magical effect, though one that people now feel can be harnessed to their benefit.

The other forms of portrait in the ancient world have survived to this day, but we scarcely see them as portraits any more. These are depictions of rulers and other powerful people on coins and in public statuary. Here the magical power of art is clearly being used to enhance the temporal power of the sitters. Coins are immensely potent symbols of the power of an emperor or other ruler. The point about coinage is that it is the symbols impressed on the coins that in a sense invest them with monetary value, and it is perhaps unsurprising that rulers chose to associate that symbolic power with their own faces. However there is a clear coding of the use of portraiture on coins: always in profile, apparently decapitated and without any physical context. Realistic and individualised as many of them appear to be these portrayals are clearly different in intention to what we regard as portraits today.

Public statuary (and other public portraits) equally use the magic of art to enhance status and reputation. The focus seems much more on the sitter's role than on their character or personality, with fighting rulers portrayed on horseback, striking heroic poses. Roman statues of emperors, whilst apparently much more realistic than the Greek statues whose style they emulated, were manufactured with generic bodies and replaceable heads. This was handy in the case of a sudden overthrow of an emperor and replacement with another (no need to start a new statue, just chuck away the old head and make a new one) but also tells us something about the statues' purposes and how they were to be read: these were not an attempt to capture the unique character of a sitter at a particular moment in time but a public statement of their power. Such public portraiture is not as popular as it once was, being uncomfortably associated nowadays with repressive dictatorships, but the tradition has lived on in Hollywood posters.

Domestic portraiture in the sense that we would understand it does seem to have existed in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by some of the wonderful frescoes discovered in Pompeii. However what actually struck me when I visited there was how few there are. Many of the apparent portraits are actually depictions of gods or other mythological beings, and given the enormous profusion of art on every wall, ceiling and floor in the city there seem to be precious few straightforward portraits of the owners or their ancestors. Perhaps in a world where the Lares and Penates were physically present in every household it was seen as something like hubris to use the magic of art to associate one's own image with that of the heroes, gods and emperors.

However domestic portraiture survived, though for centuries being associated almost exclusively with the rich and powerful. And even domestic portraits seem often to have been concerned at least as much with a symbolic as a realistic portrayal of the sitter. Renaissance portraits for instance, whilst often beautiful and highly individualised are also frequently packed with symbolic images that lift the portrayal beyond a mere snapshot. Sitters are clearly aware of the power of having their portrait "taken" (the word is an interesting one) and this awareness survives into the beginning of the era of photography.

However the transformation of our concept of domestic portraiture began with the availability of cheap portable cameras. Suddenly portraiture not only became available to everyone but was stripped overnight of its intimidating power. We all took hundreds of pictures of each other, hardly regarding them as portraits, and kept them as mementos of holidays and weddings, early childhood and significant events. These portraits were domestic and personal in an entirely new way, not being intended for viewing beyond the immediate circle of close family (except perhaps in those ghastly slideshow evenings following foreign holidays).

So while public portraiture was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it had once been (outside countries such as Turkmenistan at least) domestic portraiture was booming. And domestic portraiture meant something much more private and informal than it had ever meant before. And so it seemed that the nature of portraiture itself had changed forever and perhaps the process of disassociating it from the  magical power of art was complete.

It was social media that began to change things round again, and to reinvest domestic portraiture with some of that magic and erode some of the distinctions between public and domestic portraiture. At first social media seemed to provide nothing more than an electronic version of those slideshow evenings. Facebook was just a way to share (endless) images of people in social situations of various sorts primarily with others who had been there at the time. However the selfie was an interesting development, and the #nomakeupselfie even more so.

Whilst "traditional" Facebook or Instagram uploads are all about images of the user in social contexts, selfies are the precise opposite. A true selfie (unlike the notorious one taken at Mandela's funeral) has only the sitter/photographer, often in a highly domestic setting, such as a bedroom. Its purpose, which has its logical extension in the no makeup selfie, seems to be to present to the world an image of one's essential individuality and uniqueness (which makes the whole notion of the #nomakeupselfie craze even more paradoxical). The only explanation I can find for people doing this goes back to the earliest days of portraiture: it is as if people are aware of the magical power that can be harnessed by creating an image of the human face. In taking and publishing a selfie they want to make a public record: this is me. I exist.

The no makeup selfie is the same but even more so, and seems to me even more an existential act, which again makes it even weirder that many seem to have been moved to create and publish one by an internet craze and the social pressure to conform. If that isn't mauvaise foi then I don't know what is...

Oddly, written analogues for self-portraiture seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Twitter, which for a time seemed doomed to be no more than an interminable sequence of self-indulgent verbal selfies ("Got up early today and brushed my teeth. May go out for a walk later.") has mutated into a medium for social debate and the sharing of memes of various degrees of sophistication and/or humour. No tweet now is complete without at least one hashtag, and these take the attention away from the individual essence of the tweeter in a way that is diagrammatically opposed to the impulse that creates the no makeup selfie. Although the concept of the self-portrait diary got a bit of a boost recently with the broadcasting of Tony Benn's diaries after his sad death that form of diary has begun to sound rather old-fashioned. In writing, it seems, we are to be defined by the size of our audience of followers, or by our humour and our skill and persistence in unearthing gems from the vastness of the internet.

So is the no makeup selfie just a temporary aberration- a craze that will soon die a death? Who knows. However I do suspect that its sudden ubiquitousness as a phenomenon has revealed a yearning to harness the magic power of portraiture that humans have been aware of for so long.