Information, Communication & Society
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SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE
Zeena Feldman
To cite this article: Zeena Feldman (2012) SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE, Information,
Communication & Society, 15:2, 297-319, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.647045
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.647045
Published online: 11 Jan 2012.
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Zeena Feldman
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SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE
Research in the humanities and social sciences is increasingly concerned with social
media technologies and their use. This article argues that such research could benefit
substantially by drawing on the work of the sociologist –psychologist– philosopher
Georg Simmel (1858 – 1918). Simmel’s conceptualization of belonging, social space
and domination are among his many contributions to social media theory; yet, the
significance of this work remains woefully overlooked in studies of computermediated communication (CMC) and the information society, more broadly. To
redress this disciplinary obscurity, this article fleshes out some of Simmel’s most relevant contributions to CMC scholarship and provides a close reading of his 1908
essay, The Stranger. I suggest that the subjectivity to which social media give
life can be best understood as a resurrection of Simmel’s stranger archetype – a
figure of paradox beholden to the competing demands of inclusion and exclusion,
proximity and distance, mobility and stasis. Ultimately, this article insists that
not only does Simmel’s work help scholars to unpack the sociality of social
media, but it also helps locate the changes and continuities of discourse surrounding
the relationship between sociality and knowledge.
Keywords Georg Simmel; social media; computer-mediated
communication; space; sociality; belonging
(Received 20 July 2011; final version received 02 December 2011)
We cannot have an image of ourselves.
Do we have one of others?
No doubt, but we never know, alas, if it is the right one.
– Edmond Jabès (2001, p. 31)
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 15, No. 2, March 2012, pp. 297 –319
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.647045
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Introduction
At first glance, Georg Simmel (1858 – 1918) may seem an odd fit for the iCS Key
Thinkers series. He never writes about the information society or the media,
save for one short piece on handwritten communication (1950b [1908]). And
within this series’ diversity remit, he does little to challenge the white, male,
heterosexual claims on academic history. Yet in spite of these ‘lacks’,
Simmel’s work offers robust, discursively salient concepts for confronting the
contemporary fascination with social media and digital culture and for explicating
the relationship between information and communication technologies and
subjectivity production.
Theoretically, Simmel’s writings contain countless resources for disrupting
the naturalization of the social media trope. And methodologically, his work
offers a refreshing departure from empiricism and literature review fetishism.
This is a man concerned with theorizing forms of sociality – case studies and references be damned! As Donald Levine (1971, p. x) notes, ‘[n]either in Simmel’s text
nor in annotations does one find acknowledgement of scholarly predecessors or
contemporaries. He speaks for himself, along with the immortal dead’.
Simmel’s writings articulate an abiding interest in interaction and the individual
and demonstrate a staunch refusal to reify society. These commitments ally
well with scholarship interested in the substance and specificity of computermediated communication (CMC), and Simmel provides an array of temporally
durable provocations for analyzing social media beyond their technological
infrastructures.
This article thus seeks to champion the theoretical import of Simmel’s work
vis-à-vis social media and particularly to theorization of computer-mediated
belonging. In outlining Simmel’s significant, yet woefully overlooked contributions to the field, I pay particular attention to the essay, The Stranger (1971b
[1908]). This focus provides for an analytically intimate conversation between
past and present by insisting that, despite considerable material changes
between then and now, what was has much to tell us about what is. At the
same time, this approach can help to locate the limits of past scholarship. In
that sense, what is missing from Simmel’s stranger is discussion of communication
technology and its relationship to sociality and subjectivity. I will attempt to fill
this gap by drawing on Simmel’s ‘strangeness’ framework to examine how
social media articulate belonging.
For Simmel, belonging is a paradox co-constituted by the resources of
inclusion and exclusion, movement and stasis, distance and proximity.
Simmel’s stranger defies easy distinction between insider and outsider, and,
indeed, Simmel suggests that the self is never quite free from the other. This
framework – which privileges complexity over the transparency of binaries –
encourages scholars to more deftly conceptualize how belonging is configured
and provisioned through online interaction and to critically assess the
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instruments by which it is conferred and withdrawn. Such an approach is particularly valuable to thinking about the ethics and politics of social media practice,
where participation is not a neutral act but a specific articulation of knowledge.
During his lifetime, Simmel made many important contributions to social
theory. But the real value of his work comes from its ability to outlive its
author and to inspire future generations of scholarship. To that end, this
article insists that Simmel has much to offer contemporary research on online
sociality, especially research concerned with how mediated social interaction
challenges distinction between the self and the other. While Simmel’s import
to the study of CMC has yet to be recognized, the time has certainly come to
rescue these works from obscurity.
This article proceeds in five sections. The first sketches Simmel’s biographical
portrait and situates his intellectual corpus vis-à-vis that of his contemporaries.
The second section critically engages with The Stranger to outline Simmel’s paradoxical conceptualization of belonging. Therein, I also consider how Simmel’s
stranger can be understood against other wanderer archetypes, including the
nomad, traveller and flâneur. Subsequently, the article explores ways in which
social media platforms position users within Simmel’s insider – outsider framework. The penultimate section goes beyond ‘strangeness’ to reveal the relevance
of Simmel’s other writings to the study of information, communication and
society, paying particular attention to his theorization of social space, domination
and corporeality. To conclude, the article suggests that Simmel’s work helps us to
rethink belonging by emphasizing the limits of analytical categories such as ‘self’
and ‘other’. In turn, these limits pry open important questions about links
between social media, knowledge and power – questions that urge us to consider
the ethics of logging in.
Simmel in context
The 25 monographs and hundreds of articles Simmel published during his lifetime articulate a clear and abiding concern for social relations, interactions
and forms. He is a figure ‘whom George Santayana called “the brightest man
in Europe”, whose ideas shaped the argument of Heidegger’s Being and Time,
and whose extraordinary impact on European interwar intellectual life Jürgen
Habermas extolled’ (Andrews & Levine 2010, p. x). Writing at the turn of
the twentieth century, Simmel is admired by contemporaries Max Weber and
Walter Benjamin. His students include George Lukács, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried
Kracauer, and accordingly, Simmel proves a powerful influence on a generation
of Marxist thought (Frisby 2002, p. 107).1
Yet, despite a formidable intellect, peer recognition and prolific academic
output, Simmel – the father of German sociology2 – remains a marginal
figure in the German academy throughout his professional life. He spends the
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bulk of his career at the University of Berlin as a Privatdozent – an unsalaried
lecturer – and is appointed chair of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg
only four years before his death (Levine 1971, p. x). This lack of institutional
success is attributed to various factors: professional jealousy; the period’s
rampant anti-Semitism; Simmel’s one-time association with socialist circles;
sociology’s precarious position in German universities and perhaps most so, a
result of Simmel’s own unconventional practice (Frisby 1992b). Where the
emerging sociological tradition focused on detailed empirical accounts,
Simmel writes speculative works with barely a footnote or reference to other
thinkers. Bloch consequently dubs him ‘a philosopher of the “perhaps”’ (Frisby
1992b, p. 99), while his work is described by Schermer (1991) as ‘sociology
of the as-if’. His contemporaries ‘stressed the dazzling brilliance of his writings
and the brittle elegance, but they also noted the lack of systematic exposition and
the almost studied disorderliness of his method’ (Coser 1958, p. 635).
The work’s disorderliness, combined with its speculative style, suggests
Simmel’s explicit rejection of Durkheim’s (1895) scientific ‘rules’ of sociological
methodology. For Durkheim, these rules seek to establish ‘“social facts” that are
“external to individuals”. Methodologically, sociologists must strive for objectivity’ (Calhoun et al. 2002, p. 105). Thus, where Durkheim is concerned with
‘scientific’ methodology, objectivity and the external, Simmel is concerned
with precisely the opposite – speculative analysis, subjectivity and internal modalities of meaning. This stylistic unorthodoxy, far from bringing him accolades
and disciples, contributes to Simmel remaining on the fringe of the academy.
And he is an outsider from within the institution from the very beginning of
his career, when he publishes his first dissertation – after its formal rejection,
against the advice of his professors and without making any of their recommended revisions (Levine 1971, p. xi). Like the iCS Key Thinker Walter Benjamin, Simmel’s relationship with academia is an uneasy one, at best (Franklin
2002, p. 596).
A further explanation for Simmel’s canonical neglect vis-à-vis his contemporaries can be traced to the scalar difference at which he and his peers locate
their work. For Simmel, the minutia of everyday social practice remains a
primary focal point. His concern is for the individual, not for society as such.
Where Durkheim (1858 – 1917) and Weber (1864 –1920) develop macro theories by which to explain social life or social systems, Simmel remains loyal
to exploring the multiplicity of human behavior and thought at a micro level.
Unlike his contemporaries, Simmel refuses to consider the social world in the
singular. So while Durkheim investigates what holds society together – or
‘the sources and nature of moral authority as an integrating force in society’
(Calhoun et al. 2002, p. 105) – and Weber examines bureaucracies, states
and religions as structures of social order (Calhoun et al. 2002, p. 167),
Simmel is interested in the experience of the individual, as related to his/her
SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE
specific context. Indeed, unlike many sociologists of his time and ours, Simmel
does not take society to be a priori given. He argues instead that:
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Society is not an absolute entity which must first exist so that all the individual relations of its members . . . can develop within its framework or
be represented by it: it is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of these specific interactions. Any one of these interactions may, of
course, be eliminated and ‘society’ still exist. . .
(Simmel in Frisby 1992b, p. 96)
As a consequence of this conviction, Simmel is concerned with the diversity of
social life. His work, rather than strive for a single truth by which to explain
society, attempts to understand society through its idiosyncratic, co-present
modalities.
The topical breadth of Simmel’s work is another likely cause of its neglect.
He writes on a dizzying array of subjects – including fashion, love, mealtime,
prostitution, flirtation, secrecy, literature, art, urban life, money, conflict,
religion, greed, gratitude and shame – and his publications traverse philosophy, psychology and sociology. He defies disciplinary containment, and
together with his unconventional writing style and methodology, this poses
too bold a challenge for the rigidity of the German academy. In response to
Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, for instance, Durkheim declares that
‘almost all these three hundred pages defy analysis; too many different
issues are examined in turn, and it is not always easy to make out the thread
that binds them into a unified whole’ (Frisby 2002, p. 142). But that thread
exists in the form of Simmel’s abiding interest in sociality, and it is this
theme that underwrites his relevance for research on social media and the
information society, more broadly.
Mediating strangeness
One of Simmel’s best-known works is the essay, The Stranger (1908). The Stranger
is a compelling exploration of the challenges and paradoxes of belonging. Yet for
all its richness, the essay does not address technology’s role in subjectivity production. While this is not a concern for Simmel’s phenomenology of the social, it
certainly deserves attention in our (post)modern age where social relations are
increasingly enacted through digital platforms.
The current landscape of CMC is one in which over 30 per cent of the world
population has Internet access and where there are more ‘social networking and
online world’ accounts than there are people in the world (In-Stat 2011; Internet
World Stats 2011). In a recent lecture I delivered, I asked a class of 30 students to
raise their hand if they were not on Facebook. No one made a move. Less
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anecdotally, a survey of university students finds that more than one-third report
spending between 30 minutes and 2 hours on Facebook every single day; less than
5 per cent of respondents report zero Facebook usage (Valenzuela et al. 2009).
Surely, such ‘mediatization’ (Hepp 2009) of the social has something to tell
us about the relationship between communication technologies and
production of the self and the other. Thus, Simmel’s text opens up a discursively
valuable opportunity to explore this relationship vis-à-vis the difficulties of
belonging.
As we know from now classic texts in CMC studies (e.g. Rheingold 1993;
Turkle 1995; Stone 1996; Plant 1997; Hayles 1999), technology is an enormously important modality through which social roles are performed and
‘tried on’ and a modality through which social knowledge and power are constituted, exercised and negotiated. Social media thus represent one category of
what Don Ihde (2002) terms ‘epistemology engines’ – ‘devices . . . that bring
human knowers into intimate relations with technologies or machinic agencies
through which some defined model of what is taken as knowledge is produced’
(Ihde 2002, p. 69). Like other technologies, social media articulate paradigms of
knowledge, laying claim not only to what is knowledge and what is outside of it,
but also to who is knowledgeable and who is excluded from knowing. As such,
they become tools for managing the production of online belonging, and The
Stranger provides a theoretically robust platform from which to investigate this
process and to locate ways in which social media articulate belonging in challenge
to the insider – outsider binary.
Simmel’s stranger
The Stranger first appears in 1908 in Soziologie: Untersuchungen iiber die Formen der
Vergesellschaftung (Sociology: studies in the forms of sociation) – a massive tome
that Kurt Wolff dubs Simmel’s ‘major work in sociology’ (1960, p. 519).3
The Stranger is quintessential Simmelian analysis, propelled by its speculative
style, its concern for the workings of consciousness and its complete lack of
reference to other thinkers. The piece offers nuanced examination of the paradoxical insider – outsider subjectivity that emerges through intersections of
place, mobility and social relations. These intersections form (and inform) the
stranger, and they are critical to understanding social media beyond their technological affordances, as conjunctions of mind and social space. The Stranger is
therefore an important text for bridging Simmel’s world with contemporary
research on social media.
In this section, I outline the formal characteristics of Simmel’s stranger.
Through this, I erect a conceptual framework by which to later demonstrate
the utility of Simmel’s theorization to social media, where an imprint of the
stranger – torn between inclusion and exclusion, circumscribed by paradox –
endures.
SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE
I also contrast the contours and proclivities of Simmel’s stranger with those
of three other wanderer types: the nomad, the traveller and the flâneur. This
comparison hinges on Simmel’s rejection of the stranger as a wanderer
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in the usual sense of term, as the [one] who comes today and goes tomorrow,
but rather as the man [sic] who comes today and stays tomorrow – the
potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further,
has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going.
(Simmel 1971b, p. 143)
The stranger’s spatial fixity is not imposed from the outside, yet s/he seems
unable, or unwilling, to move elsewhere. S/he is rendered ambivalent precisely
by this refusal to wander, in a kind of bastardization of hospitality: the stranger is
the uninvited guest who will not leave, the one who stays so long that s/he
becomes part of the landscape. And indeed, this is a viable portrait of
Simmel’s own experience in academia, as the unwelcomed interloper who
would not leave (n.b. Coser 1965).4
In Simmel’s own words
For Simmel, the stranger is ‘a foreign body in our existence which is yet
somehow connected with the center; the outside, if only by a long and unfamiliar
detour, is formally an aspect of the inside’ (Simmel 1971a, p. 188). This characterization immediately disturbs easy opposition between self and other, or us and
them, because it insists that the other – the stranger – belongs to us, the collective self, the centre. The stranger is at once foreign and native.
Simmel (1971b, p. 143) posits that
If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in
space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of ‘the stranger’ presents the synthesis, as it were, of both of
these properties.
The stranger is hereby positioned as paradox, tied to a spatiality that fuses movement with stasis, where attachment invokes disconnection. Here, the stranger’s
social role becomes a function of spatial paradox, framed by the dialectic of mobility. As Simmel explains, ‘spatial relations not only are determining conditions of
relationships among men [sic], but are also symbolic of those relationships’
(1971b, p. 143). For the stranger, tension between movement and stasis
becomes embedded in the enactment of interaction and self-knowledge. This
tension circumscribes the stranger’s corporeal and symbolic spaces of belonging,
pointing to a defining paradox: if movement and stasis – attachment and
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disconnection – co-constitute the stranger, then his/her mode of belonging can
only be articulated through exclusion.
As indicated above, the stranger is framed in territorially embedded terms, as
the one who refuses to leave. For Simmel, this prototype is represented by the
trader – the figure who lives in a particular community but is always attendant to
an elsewhere (1971b, p. 144). The trader embodies spatial and social polygamy,
subject to ‘factors of repulsion and distance [that] work to create a form of being
together, a form of union based on interaction’ (1971b, p. 144). The trader is the
mediator of spatialities and socialities, bridging the territorial source of his/her
goods with the market for them. S/he occupies a plurality of spaces at once, yet
belongs firmly in none of them. In this sense, the stranger is the ghost – the one
who haunts, the one we cannot grasp or own, the one stuck between worlds. The
stranger, like the ghost, articulates the irreconcilable cohabitation of distance and closeness. No matter that we might see him/her daily, the stranger is not quite one of us.
Part of what contributes to the stranger’s existential crisis is dwelling, for
‘[m]an’s [sic] relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in
his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling’ (Heidegger 1971, p. 157). Thus, for a figure who is homeless at home, we
see the failure of dwelling to deliver one from otherness and into a space of
unchallenged belonging. This failure is due in no small part to the stranger’s
inability to access the language of collective storytelling. Through Angelika
Bammer, David Morley (2000) reminds us that shared fictions are essential to
enacting a sense of inclusion because the telling of these stories
‘has the power to create the “we” who are engaged in telling them’ and to
also create ‘the discursive right to a space (a country, a neighbourhood, a
place to live) that is due us . . . in the name of the “we-ness” we have just
constructed’
(Bammer in Morley 2000, p. 16)
But because the stranger-who-stays-tomorrow sits ill at ease with the collective
We, s/he is barred from the instruments of collective mythmaking and as a
result, his/her only viable claim on the shared space of the We is through the
stance of the totemic Other. After all, ‘the nation requires strangers in order
to exist’ (Ahmed 2002, p. 100).
This evokes something of Jacques Rancière’s description of the collective
experience of looking at art, which he frames as a project of ‘being together
apart’ (2009, p. 53). Therein, the viewer is bound to her fellow viewers
through contemplative separation. It is a form of togetherness predicated on the
unbridgeable distance of consciousness. In a similar configuration of communality
and metaphysical remoteness, the stranger is spatially proximate to his/her neighbors but cognitively apart, and it is through this paradoxical togetherness that the
shared dwelling of the community is constituted, together with its internal borders.
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For Simmel, distance from belonging endows the stranger with certain advantages and thus rescues him/her, if only provisionally and nominally, from the onedimensional post of disempowered victim (Feldman 2011). For instance, Simmel
suggests that through the stranger’s bifurcated identity as foreigner –local, s/he
acquires indefatigable objectivity. ‘Because [the stranger] is not bound by roots
to his particular constituents and partisan dispositions of the group, he confronts
all of these with a distinctly “objective” attitude’ (Simmel 1971b, p. 145). Put
another way, the stranger’s lack of rooted belonging endows him/her with an
uncompromised, and seemingly uncompromisable, impartiality.
For Simmel, such impartiality is a positive (and achievable) relation that
develops by virtue of the stranger’s precarity of belonging. The stranger’s outsider – insider role renders him/her impervious to communal normativities
and moral claims. Through this trust is generated, for the stranger ‘often
receives the most surprising revelations and confidences, at times reminiscent
of a confessional, about matters which are kept carefully hidden from everybody with whom [the local] is close’ (Simmel 1971b). It is as if symbolic distance from those nearby imbues the stranger with an infallible rationality, and
this rationality inspires trust. This disrupts the stranger’s menacing otherness,
for if s/he can be trusted with highly personal matters, then surely s/he cannot
be a pure threat. And this is, at least in part, a moment of redemption for the
stranger. S/he is no longer merely someone to be tolerated or feared.
But in this temporary escape from the ‘stranger danger’ discourse, we see a
more troubling logic at work. Why would someone trust the stranger over a
close friend? Or rather, why is the friend not to be trusted? I suspect that the
answer can be found in the danger which underpins intimacy: friendship is
always accompanied by the risk of betrayal. Indeed, ‘[t]he closer we are to
our friends, the more able they are to betray us’ (Pahl 2000, p. 63). The fact
that the stranger can be trusted, then, suggests a lack of power to betray; the
stranger cannot use the confession to harm the confessor. It turns out that
‘trust’ in this scenario is little more than an oppressive logic leveraged on the
stranger’s inability to speak back (cf. Spivak 1988).
But to assume that the stranger is objective in the first instance commits the
error of what Sara Ahmed (2002) calls ‘figure fetishism’, whereby the stranger is
stripped of any history, prejudice or moral claims of her own. Simmel ‘invests
the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as [he] cuts “the stranger”
off from the histories of its determination’ (Ahmed 2002, p. 5). We neither
know nor care where the stranger comes from. We simply know that now
s/he is ours to deal with.
In closing, Simmel’s stranger is defined through tensions between movement
and stasis, distance and nearness, objectivity and agency. S/he is a mediator of
spatialities and socialities, though significantly, s/he remains firmly rooted in
his/her community of residence. The stranger moves while staying still.
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Other wanderers
Guided by the stranger’s relationship to space and movement, it is possible to
distinguish Simmel’s figure from three other wanderer types: the nomad, the traveller and the flâneur. This task of distinction is important because it reveals the
stranger’s unique suitability for locating how social media tools organize belonging through the co-production of inclusion and exclusion.
In anthropological orthodoxy, the nomad is configured through what James
Clifford (1997) calls ‘dwelling-in-travel’: the nomad resides in movement. There
is both privilege and freedom implicit in this characterization, for the nomad can
afford perpetual movement and to be unhinged from spatial and social fixity.
Caren Kaplan (1996) usefully situates this ideal-type within the history of modernist
individualism and its ‘inventions of the Self’. There, the nomad symbolizes resistance
to ‘nation-state and/or bourgeois organization and mastery [. . .] (and) represents a
subject position that offers an idealized model of movement based on perpetual displacement’ (Kaplan 1996, p. 66). In this configuration, the nomad is the exotic
Other, an icon of romanticized homelessness. This is, of course, to ignore actual
nomadic practice, rooted in specific geographic and economic landscapes where
‘mobile pastoralism’ (Humphrey & Sneath 1999) is not a political project of emancipation or resistance, but a situated strategy for survival. What most differentiates
the stranger from both the idealized nomad and her real-life counterpart is concern
over movement. Where the nomad’s mythic and real-world biographies insist on
embodied mobility, Simmel emphasizes the stranger’s spatial fixity.
The traveller, meanwhile, is approached either as a seeker of leisure, excitement or ‘authenticity’ whose temporally limited quests are pursued outside her
community of residence (e.g. Rojek 1995; Urry 2001). Like the nomad, the traveller moves, but unlike the nomad, for whom home is the journey, the traveller’s
mobility is enacted through the understanding that it is bookended by the security
of a fixed home. Meanwhile, the stranger sits awkwardly between home and away,
where there is neither a right of return nor a demand for constant movement.
Like the nomad, discourse about the traveller is accompanied by material
and symbolic economies of privilege. After all, not everyone can afford a
holiday. Similarly, not every holidaymaker has what it takes to be a traveller
– a cultivated knowledge seeker; many are confined to the unremarkable
ranks of ‘tourist’ or the crass visitor interested only in ‘seeing the usual sites’
(Percy 1977, p. 51). The stranger, meanwhile, is neither knowledge seeker
nor monument hopper. Indeed, strangeness does not result from the stranger
looking out; instead, the identity is conferred onto him/her through being
looked at. Ahmed (2002) calls this moment an ‘encounter’, for ‘it is only
through meeting with an-other that the identity of a given person comes to be
inhabited as living’ (Ahmed 2002, p. 8, emphasis original). Where the traveller
establishes her own identity through activity, the stranger is marked out in the
encounter by the judgment of an-other.
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Within this typology of wanderers, Baudelaire’s (1863) figure of the flâneur
sits closest to the traveller. The flâneur is a bourgeois poet who walks the streets
in order to capture the city’s essence. For Baudelaire, this ‘poet is the “man” [sic]
. . . who can reap aesthetic meaning and an individual kind of existential security
from the spectacle of the teeming crowds – the visible public – of the metropolitan environment of Paris’ (Tester 1994, pp. 1 –2). The flâneur’s is an ocular
claim on knowledge. This claim hinges on looking while remaining invisible: the
poet can be one with the crowd and ‘be at the very centre of the world, and yet
to be unseen of the world’ (Baudelaire in Tester 1994, p. 3). This points to the
critical distinction between the stranger and flâneur. The flâneur blends so naturally into his surroundings that we do not see him and certainly not enough to
label him as Other. The stranger, in contrast, cannot escape the gaze of the
crowd; s/he lacks the proper camouflage that comes with the aesthetics of
belonging. While the flâneur looks, the stranger cannot deflect the gaze.
Simmel and social media
To locate Simmel’s contributions to social media theory, it is first necessary to
delineate what I mean by ‘social media’. The literature offers a huge glossary
of neologisms and claims, and in an effort to synthesize these with an eye
toward Simmel, I define social media as digital platforms of interaction
between technology, space and social relations. Social media function precisely
through dialogue between these three vectors, whereby distant geographies
are bridged and social exchanges are enacted through the hardware of digital
communication (e.g. data centres, laptops and modems).
Interaction is a keyword for both social media and Simmel. Indeed, The
Stranger can be read as a lament about the failure of interaction to deliver belonging. Thus, in approaching social media as structures and processes of interaction,
we are well positioned to explore whether Simmel’s stranger remains relevant in
the digital age and to identify ways in which social media may be changing how
we understand belonging. To that end, this section explores the efforts and limits
of social media’s ability to control ‘strangeness’.
Online belongings
One of The Stranger’s foremost contributions to social theory is its domestication
of the other. Simmel’s stranger is not a recluse living alone on a desert island, nor
is s/he a serial killer hidden from view by prison walls. Rather, the stranger is a
critical resource for her community of residence and an embedded part of its
social texture. Simmel’s essay shows that the stranger is both near belonging
and far from it, a fixture of the group that also acts as an irritant or challenge.
Here, self and other reside in the same neighborhood, as it were. But while
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de-pathologizing the stranger, Simmel also reveals how little security can be
gained from the fact that the stranger and I live next door to one another. We
see instead that being neighbors is not enough to shield one from otherness.
Through this, Simmel acknowledges the complexity of community as such,
where the operative reality is not of homogeneous collectivity, but of embodied
diversity in which some members are more welcome than others.
I want to suggest that this notion of community – as an aggregate of people
who belong differently, and to different degrees – is precisely the one enacted
within social media platforms. There, signing up for an account is not synonymous with inclusion. As Simmel shows, belonging is a malleable concept
capable of accommodating degrees of exclusion. We must therefore consider
the multiple ways in which belonging, as a dialectic, can be codified and practiced
in a given space. Where Simmel’s text helps to conceptualize the paradoxes of
strangeness, social media research is able to illuminate how these paradoxes
are structurally encoded online.
One of the ways in which social media platforms manage belonging is by
systematizing forms of participation. This is achieved through a process I call
templatization, wherein interaction becomes a function of, if not reduced to,
website templates. Design specifications circumscribe how the user is able to
represent herself online by providing a profile template through which selfarticulation occurs. This is to say, the user’s self-presentation is governed by
the parameters of the template.
Through pre-programmed content fields that the user is intended to fill in,
the template expresses a claim on what ideal belonging looks like. At the same
time, by examining what the template lacks (i.e. the missing content fields), we
can begin to locate a platform’s conceptualization of transgressive belonging. For
instance, on LinkedIn – an online professional networking platform which claims
over 135 million members (LinkedIn 2011) – the profile template invites me to
disclose my education and work histories. It does not, however, ask me to list my
favorite books or films. Meanwhile, Facebook’s template emphasizes visual forms
of knowledge by prompting users to upload photos. This suggests that not having
any photos on one’s Facebook profile, or listing favorite foods in the LinkedIn
space allocated for work details, can be interpreted as markers of ‘bad’
belonging. This matters because the extent to which a user deviates from the
norms of the template systemically captures her degrees of belonging and
strangeness. In this way, templatization concurrently manages the production
of the mediated self and the mediated other.5
The template provides the user with the opportunity to make herself known
– to build a biography – and in this way, it acts as an instrument for mitigating
against the lack of knowledge with which Simmel associates the stranger. (Recall,
we know nothing about the stranger’s past; we know only that he will not leave.)
The unknown is precisely what renders the stranger a figure of fear, danger or
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distrust. But the template, through its demand on self-disclosure, effectively
deactivates this threat; it mitigates against surprise.
Yet making oneself known through the template does not provide for an
unproblematic mode of belonging. On the one hand, the universality of the template integrates one into the group. It is something that every user has. But
according to Simmel’s framework, a barrier to belonging remains precisely
because of this universality. He warns that:
A similarity so widely shared could just as easily unite each person with
every possible other. [. . .] To the extent to which the similarities assume a
universal nature, the warmth of the connection based on them will
acquire an element of coolness, a sense of the contingent nature of precisely
this relation [. . .] The stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him
[sic] and ourselves similarities of nationality or social position, of occupation
or of general human nature. He is far from us insofar as these similarities
extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a
great many people.
(1971b, p. 147, emphasis original)
When being is reduced to the template, and the template to the basic unit of
online sociality, the possibility of transcending strangeness seems foreclosed
upon. With the template, it becomes easy to establish bonds based on shared
preferences, but it is exactly the general nature of these bonds that results in
estrangement.
By privileging the general over the particular, the template highlights the
limits of screen-based knowledge to deliver one from the stranger. Moreover,
the logic of self-disclosure poses an additional threat to what one can know
from the screen, because self-disclosure is always accompanied by self-control.
On the social network site, I share what I want, when I want, with whom I
want. I can accept a Facebook friend request but modify my privacy settings
to ensure that my new ‘friend’ only sees what I want her to see. Social media
make sharing as easy as withholding; they make boundary construction as easy
as boundary dissolution. As emerging literature on cyberbullying shows, social
media can be spaces of friendship just as easily as they can be sites of oppression
(e.g. Schrock & boyd 2011). The point here is that the user’s mode and degree of
belonging within a social media platform can change dramatically from one
moment to the next. This highlights the conceptual limits of thinking about
online sociality through the insider – outsider opposition; online these terms
are not static identity markers. There, belonging is neither monolithic nor
stable; rather, it is open to constant negotiation and contestation and leveraged
on the co-existence of inclusion and exclusion, ‘which constitutes the formal
position of the stranger’ (Simmel 1971b, p. 145).
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Beyond the template, belonging is also conferred through a platform’s management of user rights. Zizi Papacharissi (2009), for instance, explores how
differences in the design of three social network sites impact on user interaction.
Most relevant to Simmel’s stranger is her description of the differential rights
users gain, or fail to gain, within each ‘virtual community’ (Rheingold 1993)
after they join. In the case of ASmallWorld, we learn that only some
members have the ability to invite non-members into the network (Papacharissi
2009, p. 201). In my own work on the ‘passion-based’ social network site CouchSurfing, I explore a similar discrepancy in user rights, where in a community of
over 3.5 million users, fewer than 6.1 per cent have the ability to ‘vouch’ for
other users.6 In both examples, technical design specifications delimit the possibilities and forms of interaction. Through this, they organize knowledge of the
self and the other – of the insider and outsider – via the discourse of rights.
This is not to suggest that the insider and outsider are clearly demarcated identities. On the contrary, what social media platforms tell us is that one is created
through the other, resulting in a plurality of modes of belonging. A Facebook
user, for instance, might lack even a single Facebook friend, but be a member
of many Facebook groups and a ‘fan’ of many Facebook business pages. Alternately, one can have a Facebook account, never use it (i.e. never post status
updates, upload photos or add friends) and even turn off account visibility so as
not to show up in other members’ search results. Surely, this is the epitome of
‘bad’ citizenship in a site aimed at ‘help[ing] you connect and share with the
people in your life’ (Facebook 2011). Yet, this is still one way of being part of Facebook, and indeed, such users are included in the network’s total member count.
This demonstrates a clear challenge to the constitutional transparency of ‘insider’
and ‘outsider’. These terms are neither self-evident nor mutually exclusive.
In social media, the terms of belonging resist stability; rather, their meaning
is negotiated through interaction. The difficulty of online belonging is captured in
how the discipline conceptualizes its audience. This is what Bruns (2006) dubs
the ‘produser’ – the hybrid constituent who can watch YouTube videos, but
also ‘tweet’ about what she watches, broadcast her own videos and find out
what her Facebook friends are watching. The produser can move seamlessly
between acts of production and consumption, and as Simmel notes,‘[t]he appearance of . . . mobility within a bounded group occasions that synthesis of nearness
and remoteness which constitutes the formal position of the stranger’ (1971b,
p. 145). With the produser’s constant, if hypothetical, movement between
making and being made, it becomes tricky to identify with any degree of certainty which users belong more than which others. It is precisely that social
media platforms enable this possibility of movement between roles that challenges the terms and stability of belonging, for it is difficult to label something
that keeps moving. Online subjectivity then is a project of negotiation between
modes of exclusion and inclusion – a project enacted through competing
claims on the resources of knowledge.
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Uses of Simmel: space, power, agency
Beyond The Stranger, Simmel provides many other frameworks relevant to the
social media scholar interested in productions of belonging. One such framework
is located in Simmel’s recurring interest in the social underpinnings of spatial
formations. This has much to offer contemporary research concerned with the
sociality of cyberspace and to a literature full of spatial idioms, in which ‘[t]he
architecture of borders, walls, doors, and locks gives way to that of passwords,
fire walls, public key encryption, and security certificates’ (Wigley 2006, p. 375).
While Simmel does not write about the online world, he is concerned –
especially in The Metropolis and Mental Life (1971c [1903]) and The Sociology of
Space (Frisby 1992a) – with how social interaction assembles spatial specificity
and the resulting consequences for experience, knowledge and power. For
Simmel, space is not merely a geographical territory. It is first and foremost
– as it would later be for Lefebvre (1974) – a social construct. The Metropolis
and Mental Life, for example, insists that the city is ‘not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially’ (Frisby
2002, p. 131). It is a sphere produced through social relations, whereby ‘interaction makes what was previously empty and void into something for us, it fills it
in insofar as it makes it possible’ (Frisby 2002, p. 126, emphasis original).
Simmel refuses to reify space, arguing that it is not a priori of sociality.
Rather, sociality – as a performed, contingent and interactive practice –
makes space by inscribing it with meaning.
This stance is significant for social media research because it insists that a
spatial formation’s meaning – together with its claims on power, knowledge
and belonging – can only be ascertained through the social interactions it
hosts. According to this view, a website is conceptually vacant if it is not used
– a crucial starting point for practice theory concerned with the specificity of
social media use. For CMC scholars, such a position guards against technological
determinism to the degree that it views technology – itself a spatial formation –
to be constituted by the social.7 Simmel’s conceptualization of space thus discourages monolithic readings of social media platforms by shifting the analytical
focus toward the myriad interactions by which a platform is performed. Here,
Simmel shares much with Doreen Massey, another iCS Key Thinker who
thoughtfully attends to the interactions by which space is made (Rodgers
2004). It is precisely through these interactions that we can begin to locate
the various processes of inclusion, exclusion, border making and border breaking
that make online spaces meaningful sites of study.
In The Sociology of Space, Simmel provides some valuable tools with which to
conduct this work. There, he outlines five spatial factors that affect the form and
texture of social interaction. These include ‘the exclusiveness or uniqueness of
space, the boundaries of space, the fixing of social forms in space, spatial proximity
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and distance and the movement of space’ (Frisby 1992a, p. 104). These are the
factors that make space meaningful for those who occupy it, providing frameworks
by which to analyze links between conditions of interaction and modes of belonging.
As such, they provide a conceptual goldmine for social media researchers concerned
with the sociality of digital platforms. For example, examining how online boundaries are produced and transgressed within a particular platform can be of great
benefit to literature on cyberbullying and sexual harassment (e.g. Walker et al.
2011), for it encourages researchers to explore the utility and limits of online
privacy management. Meanwhile, tension between the uniqueness of a particular
web platform – for instance, ASmallWorld – and the ease of digital reproduction
and content dissemination could contribute to studies of online impression management (e.g. Krämer & Winter 2008). Meanwhile, Simmel’s exploration of the
dialogue between proximity and distance offers much to studies of diasporic populations’ use of CMC; for if social media are tools for managing the relationship
between proximity and distance, then Simmel’s framework can be used to investigate how mediating distance might impact on migrants’ sense of belonging to their
home and host countries (e.g. Hiller & Franz 2004; Helland 2007).
For Simmel, space is an active process of social construction; it is something
that is done rather than something that is and, most importantly, it is something
that can be done in different ways. This view is of particular value to social media
researchers because it discourages platform fetishism or the act of ascribing meaning
to something without first understanding how it is constituted. This concept draws
on Ahmed’s (2002) ‘figure fetishism’, a process by which we misrecognize the
stranger by failing to acknowledge the complexity and specificity of her being.
In such fetishism, ‘[w]hat is at stake is the “cutting off ” of figures from the
social and material relations which over-determine their existence, and the consequent perception that such figures (and web platforms) have a “life of their own”’
(Ahmed 2002, p. 5). Simmel’s work offers a robust disruption of platform fetishism because it demands examination of how social media platforms are made
meaningful by and for users and how these meanings shift. And it is by looking
at the how that we are able to see the production of borders and hierarchies –
instruments of inclusion, exclusion and power – online.
Simmel’s view of space as something that is ‘done’ rather than something
that simply ‘is’ is reminiscent of work by Doreen Massey, Nigel Thrift, David
Harvey and Edward Soja, among other (post)modern thinkers of space. The
fact that Simmel’s ideas predate such works by almost a century is a bold testament to their theoretical weight. Simmel’s work also seems to foreshadow the
‘network society’ discourse (cf. Castells 1996), for it approaches space as ‘a
web of networks of intersecting spheres of the division of labour, distribution,
communications, the money economy, commodity exchange, intellectual and
cultural circles’ (Frisby 1992a, p. 100). Indeed, through attention to how
space and meaning are produced through interaction, Simmel insists on the contingency of meaning and the affective power of various forms of social, material
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and psychic resources. This results in his approaching ‘the metropolis [as] that of
a complex web of criss-crossing interactions and a site of myriad intersections of
social circles or networks and their social boundaries’ (Frisby 2002, p. xxvii). In
this sketching of the city, Simmel articulates an ideal metaphor for the social
network site.
Within Simmel’s interest in circulation and interaction is concern for the
production of power. He is not interested in circulation and interaction as
such; rather, he is concerned with how these matter as modalities of control.
Simmel’s theory of domination (1950a [1908]) is of particular use to those interested in the philosophy of technology and the politics of CMC because it articulates a framework for thinking about the distribution of power within a network.
Simmel’s conceptualization of ‘subordination under objects’, in particular, highlights the asymmetrical power geometries engendered in the relationship
between social media tools and their users, for ‘inasmuch as a man [sic] is subordinate by virtue of belonging to a thing, he himself psychologically sinks to the
category of mere thing’ (1950a [1908], p. 253). This claim is a useful starting
point for human – computer interaction (HCI) scholarship, which explores circuits of influence between humans and machines. To embrace Simmel’s
premise, then, requires exploring potentially stark consequences for human
agency online, particularly when considered alongside Donna Haraway’s
cyborg vision (1991, p. 152) in which:
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural
and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and
many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
And in prescient anticipation of HCI research and Haraway’s manifesto,
Simmel suggests in The Metropolis and Mental Life that ‘[a] person does not
end with [the] limits of his [sic] physical body or with the area to which his
physical activity is immediately confined, but embraces, rather, the totality
of meaningful effects which emanates from his temporality and spatiality’
(1971c, p. 335; n.b. Franklin 2002). To claim that the human is more than
both the body and the space in which it physically is poses important questions
for the ethics of technology use.
Taken together, Simmel’s theories of space, domination and his insight into
the limits of the body prompt a significant disruption to the liberation optimism
of a certain strand of social media scholarship. It also suggests the need to
retheorize democracy and other forms of political emancipation achieved
through machines. Ultimately, by attending to the import of interaction, the
specificity of context and the production of boundaries, Simmel gives scholars
a bevy of conceptual tools for locating ways in which social media platforms
acquire and create modes of belonging, power and knowledge.
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Conclusion
This article interpolated the ‘new’ through the ‘old’ as a way of critically engaging
with the social media discipline and delineating the subjectivity to which it gives
life. I suggested that this subjectivity can be best understood as a resurrection of
Georg Simmel’s (1908) stranger archetype. This is to say that social media –
approached strictly as the hyphenation of social relations with networked communication technologies – actively engender a figure who ‘is an element of the
group itself . . . [but] an element whose membership in the group involves both
being outside it and confronting it’ (Simmel 1971b [1908], p. 144). Simmel positions the stranger as both insider and outsider. Throughout this article, I argued
that via social media structures and ontological efficacies (i.e. the way they are
and the things they help us do), social media platforms birth a consciousness
defined by this paradoxical mode of belonging.
In theorizing computer-mediated subjectivity as that of both insider and outsider, it has been my goal to disrupt a binaried view of belonging as a discourse of
either/or. Here, social media use ceases to be a choice between inclusion and
exclusion and becomes instead a conversation about how inside and outside
co-exist and are co-produced, one within the other.
Approaching social media use in this way – as processes that concurrently
demand both the user’s participation in and estrangement from the group –
helps to pry open questions about how we might distinguish between the computer-mediated self and other and, indeed, helps to locate the limits of these
analytic categories. These limits are important because they foreground the slippery position of knowledge within social media practice. For if we can no longer
take for granted what it means to belong online – what it means, for instance, to
confirm a Facebook friend request – how can we register the ethics of clicking
‘accept’? And crucially, if we no longer know what we are doing online (or,
indeed, who we are), how can we possibly know when we are doing wrong?
Social media function as platforms for choice and interaction, and they
provide myriad possibilities for (self)expression and (self)censorship. Understanding how our interactions then coalesce into what we think we know –
into truth claims and discourses of knowledge – is crucial if we are to begin
thinking about the rightness, wrongness or just plain ambivalence of what we
do online. Analyzing our social media choices, then, becomes a pathway
toward identifying the power structures that we can erect and dismantle with
each keystroke. And it is precisely through recognition of online power structures – and our complicity in their construction and destruction – that we
can begin to locate the ethics of logging in.
These provocations are more than abstract distractions. They are crucial
considerations for contemporary social media practice, particularly when that
practice is framed as political act. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’, for example,
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brings into sharp relief the paradox of connecting online, where posting to an
anti-government Facebook group in Egypt articulated links to compatriots
while also signalling to state monitors who to arrest, abduct and, more generally,
who to mark out as political other (Howard & Hussain 2011). The Egyptian case
demonstrates how social media use can rupture easy distinction between insider
and outsider, and it is precisely this mediated co-production of one within the
other that Georg Simmel’s stranger can help us to make sense of.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marianne Franklin, editor of the Key Thinkers series, and two
anonymous reviewers for their insightful and generous comments. I am also grateful to Juliet Steyn and Jenny Kidd for feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Notes
1
2
3
4
This influence stems chiefly from The Philosophy of Money (Simmel
1978 [1907]), in which Simmel presents his theory of value, exchange
and alienation. Many of the ideas proposed in this treatise share much
in common with Marx’s (1959) Paris Manuscripts, but significantly, the
latter text is only ‘discovered’ and published in the early 1930s – a
quarter century after Simmel’s (Frisby 2002, p. 107).
Peter Hamilton dubs him ‘the unfairly neglected founding father of
sociology’ (Frisby 2002, p. viii).
Since 1908, portions of Soziologie have been translated into English by
a coterie of dedicated scholars, including Donald Levine (1971), Kurt
Wolff (1950, 1959) and David Frisby (2002). But the first – and as of
this writing, the sole – English translation of the complete volume
appeared only in 2009 (Simmel 2009), more than a century after
the original German publication.
It is important to note that for Simmel, the stranger is unambiguously
male. This pronoun choice reflects the era’s prevailing mode of academic address, and unfortunately, it is one of the few scholarly traditions
the renegade thinker does not challenge. Yet, Simmel seems well aware
of the ideological underpinning of his discursive gendering. While in
Female Culture (Simmel 1984 [1902]) he insists that ‘with the exception
of a very few areas, our objective culture is thoroughly male’, Simmel
goes on to argue that, in this male culture, ‘the naı̈ve conflation of male
values with values as such . . . is based on historical power relations’
(Simmel in Frisby 2002, p. xxi). This is to say that he is not completely
inured to, or oblivious of, the political economy of gender. And as Frisby
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5
6
7
(2002, p. 27) notes, Simmel is ‘one of the first to permit women as
“guest students” to his lectures long before they [are] allowed to enter
Prussian universities as full students in 1908’.
As Stuart Hall notes, ‘. . . identities are constructed through, not
outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition
that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to
what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its
constitutive outside that the “positive” meaning of any term – and
thus its “identity” – can be constructed’ (Hall 1996, pp. 4 – 5).
Vouching is a practice by which a CouchSurfing user can formally
attest to the trustworthiness of another user. A vouch displays on
the vouched-for user’s profile, and it is only after obtaining three
vouches that a user gains vouching privileges.
This does, unfortunately, edge into social determinism, ignoring Jan
van Dijk’s observation that ‘technology is . . . both defining and
enabling, and that technologies and human beings are mutually
shaping’ (2006, p. 17).
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Zeena Feldman is a PhD candidate in cultural criticism at the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management, City University London. Her research focuses on
the relationship between passion-based social network sites, belonging and
cosmopolitanism. Address: Centre for Cultural Policy and Management, City
University London, A129 College Building, Northampton Square, London
EC1V 0HB, UK. [email: [email protected]]
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