Social media and the co-production of bodies online: Bergson, Serres and Facebook’s Timeline

Abstract

Social media's networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically-mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova, 2004) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson's non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing 'bodies online'; understood as expressions that blur the subject-object and representation-being dualisms. This paper explores how socially mediated bodies are disposed for action in ways that involve negotiating communication through the mediated noise (Serres) of social media, along with managing bodies that are faced with the spatialisation of time through new features such as Facebook Timeline.

Facebook use and negative body image among U.S. college women

“…Unrealistically thin images are prevalent in mass media, but may also exist on social media as users tend to select carefully the content they share (Goodings and Tucker 2014;McLaughlin and Vitak 2012;Siibak 2010). Some young men, for example, have tended to pose alone in their profile images to emphasize their looks and appear as willing romantic Facebook Use and Negative Body Image 4 objects (Siibak 2010).…”

“…Some young men, for example, have tended to pose alone in their profile images to emphasize their looks and appear as willing romantic Facebook Use and Negative Body Image 4 objects (Siibak 2010). College women have untagged photos on Facebook, which they see as unfitting to Western beauty ideologies (McLaughlin and Vitak 2012), while a female university student has described her conscious construction of an image on social media (Goodings and Tucker 2014).…”

Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress

“…To follow the earlier example, simply adding the members of a social group in Facebook (e.g. work colleagues) might not automatically lead to a sense of connection and could form a layer of parasitic noise that prevents us from seeing/hearing the true communication (Goodings and Tucker 2013). To briefly summarize at this stage, we argue that living with increased social media activity results in a greater proportion of everyday experience being organized and managed in concert with such technologies.…”

“…Social media are often reported to be "changing" the nature of our relationships and connections with others, and yet we know that it is not so much the technologies themselves that present novelty, but the configurations of body-technologies that emerge and unfold through activity that is as much sensory as it is cognitive and/or technological (Goodings and Tucker 2013). However, it has not though always been the "senses" that are considered the most viable concept through which to keep bodies in the picture.…”

On and Off the Stage at Atlanta Greek Picnic: Performances of Collective Black Middle-Class Identities and the Politics of Belonging

“…Social networking websites package their content in specific ways, impacting our connectivity with the site itself, our presentation of self, and how we connect with others (Goodings and Tucker 2013;Van Dijck 2012). During the festival in 2013 Instagram only allowed users to post photographs but shortly after it ended the platform was upgraded to include video.…”