Institut des sciences de la communication du CNRS

Presentation

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Friends Reunited, Viadeo... No less than two thirds of internet users today are thought to have been drawn into the « social media » galaxy. The interactive Web, which encompasses very different systems and uses, has captivated decision-makers and commentators alike.

In devoting this issue to the most recent among these systems, which we know as “socio-digital networks”, Hermès continues and deepens the critique of the digital world it has been pursuing with the CNRS Institute of Communication Sciences (ISCC).

Researchers from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds concerned with the Internet have contributed their analyses of the new phenomenon, covering different facets from its various and often misleading appellations to the place of these sites in the history of communication networks. Some articles highlight the way social activities are reproduced and the rapid emergence of new forms of relationships, others focus on the skills required and the risks that arise from the large-scale development of socio-digital networks.

The distinctive features of these networks - different forms of social ties and communication, daily lives visible to all, boundaries blurred between public and private spheres – are brought into perspective. An international panel of contributors brings greater insight into the sheer variety of ways in which private individuals and businesses “do things” with these digital platforms, to help readers appraise the many different goals and complex strategies used on these sites and which make them friends one day, false friends the next.

Contents

Thomas Stenger and Alexandre Coutant
Introduction

I. SOCIAL NETWORKS, OR SOCIO-DIGITAL NETWORKS?

Nicole Ellison
Social networks, digital networks and social capital (interview)

Franck Rebillard
From Web 2.0 to Web2: changes in the ideological views surrounding social networking sites

Pierre-Jean Benghozi
The digital economy and the content industry: a new paradigm for social networks

Alain Degenne
A return to social network analyses (interview)

Emmanuel Lazega and Élise Penalva Icher
Social networks and cooperation between competitors

II. THE VISIBILITY OF DAILY LIFE

Alexandre Coutant
Ambivalent self-realisation techniques

Dieudonné Tchuente, Nadine Baptiste-Jessel and Marie-Francoise Canut
Data accessibility on social networking sites

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay
Broadcasting rights and the reappropriation of data (box)

Olivier Le Deuff
Education and the social networks: a world that needs to be trained for

Geneviève Jacquinot-Delaunay
“You don’t start life as an internet user, you end up as one …” (box)

Olivier Rampnoux and Valérie-Inés de La Ville
Facebook: What are you playing at?

Yves Gingras
Freedom on socio-digital networks, but constraints for researchers (box)

III. THE QUEST FOR SOCIAL TIES

Sonia Livingstone, Giovanna Mascheroni and Maria Francesca Murru
Social networking among European children: New findings on privacy, identity and connection

Fabien Granjon
Friendship 2.0. Social ties on social networking sites

Serge Proulx et Mary Jane Kwok Choon
Social networking sites uses as a gradual and painless internalisation of social control

Brigitte Munier
From Kula to Facebook: the power of prestige

Alain Kiyindou
Social networking sites and solidarity

ISCC Working Group on Augmented Human
Networked man, augmented man (box)

IV. L’INSTRUMENTALISATION DES RÉSEAUX SOCIONUMÉRIQUES

Thomas Stenger
Everyday prescriptions on social networking sites: the dual strategy of exploitation and participation
François Heinderyckx
Obama 2008: the influence of the digital world (box)

Marc Bassoni et Félix Weygand
Social networking sites and the economic challenge of geolocation

Olivier Fécherolle
Viadeo: social networks and networking (interview)

Olivier Desbiey
Technology watch and social media: Twitter as a case in point (box)

Éric Sautedé
Social networking sites in China: a constellation of small worlds

Mokhtar Ben Henda
The Internet in Tunisia’s revolution (box)

Myriam Raymond
Chabab el Facebook : the Face of Egypt ! (box)

Jacques Perriault
Knowledge engineering and the knowledge industry (box)

VARIA

Nicolas Oliveri
Internet addiction: an object for the information and communication sciences

Marc Parmentier
Web dating and moral philosophy

Juremir Machado da Silva
Television and Internet in the 2010 brazilian presidential election’s

TRIBUTE

Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010)
(by Mohamed Nachi)

Claude Lefort (1924-2010)
(by Anne-Marie Laulan)

RECOMMENDED READING

Alain AMBROSI (dir.), Sciences & Démocratie, Caen, C&F Éditions, 2010
(by Valérie Schafer)

Dominique CARDON et Fabien GRANJON, Médiactivistes, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, coll. « Contester », 2010
(by Aurélie Aubert)

Jamil DAKHLIA, Mythologie de la peopolisation, Paris, Le Cavalier bleu, 2010
(by Brigitte Munier)

The Social Network de David FINCHER, 2010
(by Pascal Dayez-Burgeon)

Franck FROMMER, La Pensée Powerpoint. Enquête sur ce logiciel qui rend stupide, Paris, La Découverte, 2010
(by Benjamin Thierry)

Edgar MORIN, La Voie. Pour l’avenir de l’humanité, Paris, Fayard, coll. « Essais », 2011
(by Jacques Perriault)

Thierry PAQUOT, L’Espace public, Paris, La Découverte, coll. « Repères », 2009
(by Éric Dacheux)

Benoît PEETERS, Derrida, Paris, Flammarion, 2010
(by Thierry Paquot)

ABSTRACTS

AUTHORS

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Abstracts

Franck REBILLARD
From Web 2.0 to Web2: changes in the ideological views surrounding social networking sites

Launched within just a few years of each other, Web 2.0 and Web2 have met with very different responses. Surfing on a wave of enthusiasm for user participation, Web 2.0 could not have been more favourably received. But Web2, banking on people making the most of user participation, especially through social networking, never caught on. This paper analyses these contrasting fortunes through two examples of promotional literature for Web 2.0 and Web2, both written or co-written by an influential author (Tim O’Reilly). We then compare these with the discourse of the leading international player in social networking (Facebook), giving particular attention to the argument that users get a better service in return for contributing their own information. We conclude that the ideology of sharing user input has been reformulated into a more pragmatic and partial view of the opportunities opened up by interconnected information.

Keywords: Internet, social networking sites, Web 2.0, Web2, discourse, Facebook.

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Pierre-Jean BENGHOZI
The digital economy and the content industry: a new paradigm for social networks

Because of its sheer diversity and thanks to the Internet, the content industry has been pressing digital communities and social networking sites into the service of new economic paradigms. This crucial development is operating on several different registers at once. It is changing the way goods and services are designed and developed, transforming user roles and practices and redefining business models, forms of marketing and the underlying organisations and markets. The culture industry seems to have become a laboratory for experimenting with new organisational, work and market patterns.

Keywords: creative industry, cultural industry, business models, digital economy.

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Emmanuel LAZEGA et Élise PENALVA ICHER
Social networks and cooperation between competitors

This article brings a sociological perspective to bear on the increasing use of social networking sites and offers a neo-structural approach to analyses of user profiles. It lays particular emphasis on social comparison and the “status game” as one of the dimensions of contemporary rationalisation in the management of interdependencies in social networking sites. This rationalisation is added to increasing labour market flexibility and weakening universalist solidarity. Sociological analysis of these networks brings out the relational and symbolic work accomplished by those involved, as they seek to manage their relational capital. The social rationality that guides them enables them to cross-coordinate and the relational workings of a complex social discipline, which they see as legitimate and is also a component of the collective social capital. We suggest, finally, that advances in research on social and organisational networks could help to identify forms of social discipline that are emerging from the new practice of constructing on-line presence.

Keywords: Social network analysis, social circles, status competition, relational profile, relational structure.

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Alexandre COUTANT
Ambivalent self-realisation techniques

For Internet users, the way social networking sites are supporting identity-building may be seen as ambivalent. In many respects, they tend to suggest a similarity with the self-realisation techniques that have developed in western societies since antiquity, a similarity that clearly accounts for the enthusiasm with which social networking sites have been adopted. However, the networking platforms have a number of characteristics that distance them from the usual aims of self-realisation techniques, which are designed to develop self-reflection and self-care. They are tools for self-expression rather than techniques for self-realisation, and to understand them, we need to step outside the egocentric view to engage with the essentially co-constructed dimension of our identity.

Keywords: social networking sites, digital identity, self-realisation techniques, self-expression, visibility, self-invention.

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Dieudonné TCHUENTE, Nadine BAPTISTE-JESSEL et Marie-Françoise CANUT
Data accessibility on social networking sites

Social networks have been an object of analysis by the social sciences since the 1930s. The first challenge in performing these analyses is to gather information on the structure of these networks and on their activities. With the advent of Web 2.0 and semantic Web technologies, several different mechanisms can be used for this. However, few users are aware of how easy it is to access and manipulate the traces left by their activities and, especially on the social networks, by their personal data, which is becoming increasingly public. In this article, we look into the different ways of accessing data on the social networks, and – on Facebook in particular – into the quality and quantity of the information available and therefore the potential risks of users finding that third parties are accessing and manipulating their personal information. An experiment conducted via API Facebook (7 081 user profiles) shows that a great deal of information is accessible that can be used to automatically reconstruct a user’s actual network from their profile.

Keywords: social networking sites, data accessibility, API Facebook, privacy, Web 2.0.

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Olivier LE DEUFF
Education and the social networks: a world that needs to be trained for

This article discusses the different issues raised by social networking sites in the field of education. We try to show how their use in educational systems could be reconsidered, in particular to highlight both their potential and their dangers. We also show the potential contributions of other types of networks, such as social bookmarking sites and online thematic networks, on creative leisure activities for example, to ideas for new educational methods.

Keywords: social networking sites, thematic social networks, training, education for online social networking, creative leisure networks, social bookmarking.

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Olivier RAMPNOUX et Valérie-Inés DE LA VILLE
Facebook: What are you playing at?

This article looks into the distinctively “playful” nature of the socio-technical system that social networking sites construct around user profiles in order to organize different online activities. Although games some of the most popular activities among network members, to which they devote a considerable amount of time, there have been few analyses to date of game-playing on social networking sites. A number of proven conceptual frameworks can be used to analyze online games and game-playing and to examine the particular patterns found on the social networking sites. Based on an analysis of Facebook features, we offer an in-depth discussion of the nature of the game-playing that takes place in the particular context of social networking sites.

Keywords: game-playing, experiential marketing, digital game-playing, fun, social networking sites.

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Sonia LIVINGSTONE, Giovanna MASCHERONI et Maria Francesca MURRU
Social networking among European children: New findings on privacy, identity and connection

Social networking is arguably the fastest growing online activity among youth people. This article presents new pan-European findings from the EU Kids Online project on how children and young people navigate the peer-to-peer networking possibilities afforded by social networking sites, based on a survey of around 25,000 children (1000 children in each of 25 countries). In all, 59 % of European 9-16 year olds who use the internet have their own social networking profile. Despite popular anxieties of lives lived indiscriminately in public, half have fewer than fifty contacts, most contacts are people already known to the child in person, and over two thirds have their profiles either private or partially private. The focus of the analysis, then, is to understand when and why some children seek wider circles of online contacts, and why some favour self-disclosure rather than privacy. Demographic differences among children, cultural factors across countries, and the specific affordances of social networking sites are all shown to make a difference in shaping the particularities of children’s online practices of privacy, identity and connection.

Keywords: social networking sites, children and youth, privacy, identity, risk, connection.

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Fabien GRANJON
Friendship 2.0. Social ties on social networking sites

From the very first studies on social uses of computer communication systems, researchers were already analysing the new kinds of social ties that were emerging. Today, the success of social networking sites has brought renewed interest in this topic. Possibilities for creating wide-ranging relational networks whose members may move in circles that are very far removed from ordinary social life have given rise in particular to studies on how these networks of “ friends” come into being, on their social morphology, their topographical structure and, more rarely, on the motivations and social significance of online engagement, which goes hand in hand with other people’s motivations. Looking into the role of online communication in the creation of social ties, research in the UK and USA has focused in particular on approaches based on theories of social capital. This article describes the main results of these studies and shows some of their limitations. We also consider several avenues for further research, from a more critical perspective, on the question of social ties on social networking sites.

Keywords: Friendship, social capital, social tie, recognition, social networking sites, Web 2.0.

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Serge PROULX et Mary Jane KWOK CHOON
Social networking sites uses as a gradual and painless internalisation of social control

The hypothesis we put forward and illustrate in this article is that social networking sites have become a mechanism which is emblematic of the “society of control” prophesied by Gilles Deleuze. At its hub are two conflicting movements: one is a capitalistic process of capturing information posted by contributing users, which might be seen as a tendency towards institutional surveillance through centralised data control. The other is the somewhat surprising consent of many users – and even their active desire – for public disclosure of information and images on their private lives, despite the ethical and professional risks attached to these practices of self-disclosure. This second movement seems to be a central mechanism that governs a process of painless internalisation of social control by users, as they consent to a kind of voluntary enslavement to the needs of information capitalism, in other words to a system where the production of economic value is based on aggregating, or “crowdsourcing”, often minuscule items of information (at the individual level) into gigantic databases capable of generating money.

Keywords: social networking sites, social control, capitalist capture, institutional surveillance, data, internalised control, resistance, digital traces.

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Brigitte MUNIER
From Kula to Facebook: the power of prestige

Our comparison between Facebook and Melanesia’s Kula, an archaic system of inter-tribal exchanges described by Marcel Mauss, has highlighted the ability of the flagship Web 2.0 platform to respond to anthropologically verified socio-cultural needs. Both systems obey an implicit demand for reciprocity, which, over and above the actual content of exchanges, has a symbolic function: the interactions at play and the search for partners reflect a quest for prestige, or mana as it is famously known in Chinook. Kula and Facebook’s walls are a gigantic shop window where anyone can show off their mana and look at other people’s, while also seeking out other partners. The use of the Kula as described by Simmel
– as a model of intelligibility – suggests the ancient roots of these cultural traits: the combination of material and symbolic dimensions in exchanges between peers and, if there is no regulating authority, the risk that this inevitably competitive process may run out of control.

Keywords: Facebook, Kula, pattern, mana, anthropology.

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Alain KIYINDOU
Social networking sites and solidarity

In discussing the various uses of social networks, this article seeks to highlight signs and expressions of solidarity and sharing. We therefore observe what is being disclosed on emerging social networking sites that are seen as newcomers to a diaspora which is “recognised” as rooted in solidarity. Our discussion draws on data from an online survey conducted through a questionnaire among web users within the diaspora. The diaspora idea necessarily stems from the question of solidarity, insofar as it implies the goal of improving living conditions in the country or region where it originated. As for solidarity, this is inseparable from the question of social ties, since these reflect anything that maintains and sustains solidarity between the members of a community.

Keywords: solidarity, social networking sites, diaspora, social ties.

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Thomas STENGER
Everyday prescriptions on social networking sites: the dual strategy of exploitation and participation

Social networking sites, and Facebook in particular, have developed an original and sophisticated strategy for exploiting user participation. This involves instrumentalising every platform user by putting them in a position where they themselves have to prescribe usage on their own online networks. Through specific applications and a particular social structure, every user becomes a prescriptive relay. In this relentlessly prescriptive system, it is possible to identify at least two goals: prescribed consumption and brand names following a marketing logic, and prescribed collective action through online social networking.

Keywords: social networking sites, prescription, prescribing, collective action, participation, Facebook.

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Marc BASSONI et Félix WEYGAND
Social networking sites and the economic challenge of geolocation

In the last few years, social networking sites and the uses they are generating have become a rapidly expanding star in the Internet galaxy. Among these networks, those that end users can access free of charge do not yet have a stable economic model, despite their wide audiences (Facebook, for example). The challenge now facing these networks is how to turn their popular success into actual cash; in other words, how to press their capacities for targeting and filtering web users, and the communities they form, into the service of solvent advertisers. As shown by the aka’aki example, a geolocated mobile online network, the path is a narrow one and there is no guarantee of success. Increasing suspiciousness among Internet users as regards the transformation of private information into a marketable commodity is the main limitation to the business model now emerging.

Keywords: multi-sided market, network externalities, social networking sites, geo-location.

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Éric SAUTEDÉ
Social networking sites in China: a constellation of small worlds

Social networking sites have spread like wildfire in China, ever since the first sites appeared there in 2007. There are now some 210 million people using “social exchange sites”, which is exactly half of all Internet users in China, and the Chinese authorities are saying that the development of social networking sites is “irresistible”. As is often the case in China, the weight of numbers is equalled only by the distinctiveness of their Internet uses. It is this distinctiveness, which borders on the singular − very close links between online socialisation and navigation networks, predominance of national sites, content “harmonisation”, prevalence of strong links, etc. − that we attempt to bring out here, by successively investigating users, sites and the particular role played by China’s one-party State in the country’s social structures. The legacy of Communism once again stands out as a subtle mix between control over practices and the mobilisation of individuals and social organisations and a tolerance of the cathartic and corrective virtues of popular emotion aroused by feelings of injustice.

Keywords: social networking sites, socialisation, browsing, China, QZone, Sina Weibo.

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Nicolas OLIVERI
Internet addiction: an object for the information and communication sciences

Studies on Internet addiction are still largely confined to the field of psychology. However, addressing this new object from the multidisciplinary angle of the information and communication sciences can help to step back from conventional discourses on technophilia, but also on some instances of technophobia. Investigating the world of video and Internet games makes it possible to take stock of the many-faceted growth of virtual worlds, but also, and especially, of the inherent addictiveness of game playing and the use of information and communication technologies in general. The value of our approach lies therefore in taking an objective view of the consistently eulogistic discourse on new technologies while showing at the same time that technology, for all its power, will always be dependent on strongly marked cultural variables. The results of our empirical investigation shed light on the interaction of relationships between people, technology and culture, to show that, ultimately, it is culture that channels technology and not the reverse.

Keywords: Internet addiction, ICT, technological determinism, culture, technique.

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Marc PARMENTIER
Web dating and moral philosophy

This article looks into a series of moral philosophy issues that may shed light on the nature of the interactions taking place on web dating sites. Their wealth of possibilities raises the question of the role of imagination, but the virtual world is more than just fiction and fantasy, since the cyber-exchanges taking place are real. Personal stories and sociological surveys show that these exchanges establish a kind of natural state in which suspicion, arising from a sense of systematic bad faith, prevails. Communication therefore generally follows a standard pattern that obeys the rules of “seduction marketing” and, paradoxically, tends to depersonalise the protagonists. But the identity game then comes up against the question of moral responsibility and the new moral quandaries raised by the virtual world: it seems very difficult to decide, for example, whether virtual adultery is morally wrong, or not.

Keywords: dating websites, Internet, seduction, identity, adultery.

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Juremir MACHADO DA SILVA
Television and Internet in the 2010 brazilian presidential election’s

This article aims at shedding light on the role of television and Internet during de 2010 campaign, up to the election of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. While taking into consideration a political communication expert’s analysis about the influence of social networks and traditional medias in the election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores candidate, it discusses the ideas of Dominique Wolton on journalism, Internet, information, opinion and communication, at the intersection with various intellectuals thoughts in regards to a major political event.

Keywords: media, politics, Internet, television, marketing, culture, public sphere.