As opposed to reworking these debates, this paper considers what happens when
one ceases to privilege the presence or absence of a physical human face to support
meaningful communication. Instead, it introduces a broader understanding of what can
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be meant by the term ‘face,’ by extending the phenomenological and ethical philosophy
of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’ conception of the face was drawn out of his
examination of human encounters in the same physical space. However, his description
of the self-other encounter as “the face to face,” stresses that the face of the other is not
simply a set of physical features that can be seen, but rather the means by which the
other reveals themselves to the self (1969, p. 79-81). This conception of face as a means
of revealing otherness suggests that is it possible to extend Levinas’ description of the
ethical self-other encounter into online spaces. Therefore, although it is certainly not
something that Levinas’ himself would have done, this paper employs the idea of the
Levinasian face in support of new ways to frame the potential of interactions in
Facebook as part of higher education learning programs.
Facebook and online communication
Online platforms have extended the idea of computer-mediated communication (CMC)
beyond the confines of text. They have radically increased the ease of communicating
with other people, both individually and as a group, using a combination of text, audio,
still images and videos across spatial and temporal divisions. The sharing of these
different media forms adds to the richness of online communication in ways that
support many possibilities for disseminating information, indicating emotional reactions
and revealing aspects of personality, personal history and experiential knowledge.
Although this is true of a number of online communication platforms, in terms of
current popularity and number of users, “Facebook has no effective imitators” other
than a few specific services such as “Weibo in China and VK in Russia” designed to
cater for particular differences in language, politics and culture (Allen, 2012, p. 214). The
use of Facebook to keep in contact with ‘friends’ (who may fall into a number of
categories such as acquaintances or work colleagues) is now a feature of many people’s
everyday lives. Facebook is primarily thought of as a space for maintaining social
connections with others, but different people take this to mean different things, whether
sharing aspects of their everyday life experience, publicising the causes in which they
feel most heavily invested, or sharing interesting or amusing things they have seen on
the Internet.
Most educators and students are insistent that their personal Facebook networks
should be carefully separated, since neither group really wants the other to see
everything that is posted to their Facebook timelines. In addition, it has been suggested
that some educators might be uncomfortable with the Facebook environment, because
it reduces the hierarchical separation between teacher and learner that is familiar from
the lecture theater environment (Allen, 2012). Nonetheless, the popularity of Facebook
and the regularity with which it is checked by its users suggests that this Social Network
Site (SNS) might be a good way of making and maintaining contact between students
and teachers, to share information through a platform that is becoming increasingly
familiar, and is considerably more flexible than institutional email systems or commonly
used institutional Learning Management Systems (LMSs), such as Blackboard or
Moodle.
Facebook friend networks and Facebook groups in education
Facebook’s popularity with both students and teachers in higher education is not
primarily driven by the use of this SNS as an educational environment; instead, it is
more commonly understood as a way of maintaining a personal network of family,
friends and acquaintances. Whether the people in this network are family members, or
“Face
to
face”
3
met through school, college or university, through work, or socially, the majority of
them are also known offline. Indeed, boyd and Ellison note, “[w]hat makes social
network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that
they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks” (2007). This
general observation carries through to the specifics of “education-related interaction,”
where Facebook is again used “primarily for maintaining strong links between people
already in relatively tight-knit, emotionally close offline relationships, rather than
creating new points of contact” (Selwyn, 2009, p. 170). The interactions between
Facebook friends, including those in an educational context, are therefore often subject
to face-to-face rules that have already been defined in various specific offline contexts.
However, the granularity of interaction possible in Facebook will be dependent on
whether people in one’s Facebook network have been placed in specific lists (eg ‘Close
Friends,’ ‘Acquaintance,’ etc) appropriate to the context from which they are known and
the closeness of the relationship, or whether they remain categorised under the general
heading ‘Friends.’
Although boyd and Ellison’s contention that the most important aspect of SNSs is to
make one’s offline social networks visible is well supported, networks such as Facebook
do nonetheless enable online interactions between people who may remain strangers
offline. This is particularly the case when people become members of Facebook groups,
which can be understood as networks that define specific communities of users.
Importantly, these group networks are able to cut across users’ friendship networks, as
opposed to existing only within them. Group networks therefore enable interactions
between strangers, brought together only by their membership of the group. In
addition, posts (including comments and likes) within a closed group are shared only
with other members of that group, and are not shared across member’s friend networks
through the newsfeed. Interactions between people in closed groups are likely,
therefore, to be subject to different social rules from those between Facebook friends.
Within a closed group people may choose to reveal, through their posts to the group
wall, different aspects of their personality from those which they choose to share more
generally with their Facebook friend network.
Neil Selwyn notes that in public wall posts “online exchanges” were “merely a
continuation of how students talk to each other in other contexts” (2009, p. 172).
Therefore, students tended to portray the role of either “the passive, disengaged
student” or alternatively “the angry, critical student,” and students taking the
opportunity “to present a self-image of being more intellectually engaged or enthused by
one’s subject were noticeable by their absence” (2009, p. 172). John Suler suggests that
“[t]he self does not exist separate from the environment in which that self is expressed,”
and therefore “[d]ifferent modalities of online communication (e.g., e-mail, chat, video)
and different environments (e.g., social, vocational, fantasy) may facilitate diverse
expressions of self” (2004, p. 325). Importantly, none of these expressions “is
necessarily more true than another” (Suler, 2004, p. 325). It is therefore quite possible
that within a closed Facebook group, centered on a particular academic unit or subject
area, students might be more willing to appear openly interested in their studies, while
maintaining more of a disengaged or critical perspective in posts designed for their
Facebook friends.
A Facebook group provides a visible network of people involved with a course or
unit that have decided to join the group. It therefore acts as a collection point for
students, with the potential for supporting a community of learners in a particular
subject area. This community can be easily visualised, because Facebook keeps a record
of the group’s members and identifies them by their names and profile pictures for all
other members of the group to see. In some cases, students may use a pseudonym,
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and/or profile picture that hides their offline identity, but in general Facebook
promotes the idea of appearing as oneself. Depending on the privacy settings each
individual has applied to their Facebook profile, other information from these profiles
that is made publicly available will also be available to group members by clicking
through from the person’s name and profile image. Although some people who meet
through a group may decide to ‘friend’ one another on Facebook, it is also possible that
many will not, and they will therefore effectively remain strangers to one another,
brought together only by their enrolment in a particular unit or course of education.
This raises the question of how well these loosely connected groups operate as
communities, and also how best to understand the learning that might take place within
them.
Education and the value of critical and ethical communities
In “Reconsidering community and the stranger” (2007), Lucas Introna and Martin
Brigham note that the formation of strong communities is most often assumed to
depend upon physical closeness and/or the acceptance or development of “a particular
shared value,” such that a “community can only exist through the inculcation and
assimilation of others into the dominant concerns of the group” (p. 167). Central to this
conception of community is the idea that human communication acts as a bridge
between individuals, whether by enabling the accurate transmission or exchange of
information, supporting persuasive influence over others, creating shared
understandings of the world or promoting group agreement via critical rational debate.
However, some communications scholars, such as John Durham Peters (1999) and
Amit Pinchevski (2005),