Tales from Facebook

Academics in many different fields (communication studies, psychology, business studies etc.) have written about the way Facebook is used in the Western world, but we should not forget that Facebook as a phenomenon has reached many corners of the world often considered as remote. This development has taken place in a span of just seven years, and it is thus timely that anthropologists have begun to devote their attention to how Facebook is used in the communities where they work. Daniel Miller’s Tales from Facebook leads by example in this regard. Tales from Facebook is an ethnographically rich book, and I cannot hope to touch upon all the issues that it raises and manages to discuss. It is divided into two parts. The first (and most lengthy) part is a series of ethnographic cases depicting how different people in Trinidad use Facebook in their own individual ways. Part II more explicitly refers to anthropological theory and tries to draw conclusions about Facebook on a general level although still based upon the cases presented in the first part. The book is well written in an easily accessible language, and while intended for a wider audience, it still manages, through the presentation of the ethnographic cases, to refer to key themes within anthropology (exchange, agency, performance, identity, sociality, morality, time/space etc.), and many Facebook practices are shown to be directly related to the cultural specificity of important offline phenomena in Trinidad (such as bacchanal). Through the discussion of the cases, Miller shows that while Facebook as a company may be pulling in certain directions in the attempt to define what Facebook should be, users also claim ownership of Facebook and have their own agendas that are more conservative than that of the company. Miller demonstrates that Facebook cannot be reduced to what anyone in particular tries to define it as. As ‘culture’ in the making, Facebook espouses many of the social concerns that dominate people’s offline lives. Miller thus convincingly argues that it is not what is new about Facebook which makes it interesting, but actually how Facebook allows people to ‘reconnect’ to offline concerns of maintaining social networks and a sense of community – something that is made harder in contemporary times often depicted as dominated by individualism, capitalism and neo-liberalism. What I find most interesting is Miller’s comparison of Facebook with kula through Nancy Munn’s work The Fame of Gawa, which leads him to conclude that Facebook (like kula) exemplifies what anthropologists mean by ‘culture’ in that it allows the expansion of people’s (social) worlds and ‘spacetime’. Miller has elaborated on this in the online forum Open Anthropology Cooperative (http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ forum/topics/online-seminar-112-novem ber), where ideas contained in Tales from Facebook are discussed further. Miller is humble in his attention and devotedness to ethnographic material and the concerns that individual people have for the (digital) world around them, and in his insistence that theoretical discussions must be grounded in these minutiae of individual Trinidadians’ lives. While sophisticated in its approach and in the way the book shows the complexities of Facebook usage, the popular style in which the book is written sometimes tends to convey a romantic atmos-