Paper presented at Social relations in turbulent times: 10th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Geneva, Switzerland, 7th-10th September 2011.

1. #FAIL
The submitted abstract evolved into two different papers
(and today I will talk about one of them)

2. SOCIAL INTERMEDIARIES AND THE
LOCATION OF AGENCY
A Conceptual Reconfiguration of Web 2.0 and Social Network Sites

3. Who’s talking?
Martin Berg
PhD in Sociology 2008, Lund University, Sweden
Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Halmstad University, Sweden
(Corporate) Senior Researcher at Good Old with financial
support from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (3
year post-doc project)

4. What’s the problem here?
During the last few years, the internet and its various applications
and services have undergone dramatic changes in terms of their
social functions and positions
A vast array of attempts to interpret the 'social turn' in the
(contemporary) history of the internet: a mixture of 'web 2.0
business manifestos' (van Dijck & Nieborg 2009) and academic
research
Despite increasing interpretive efforts, there is spectre of
conceptual confusion haunting internet studies and an adjusted
nomenclature is clearly needed

5. Contemporary accounts of Web
2.0/SNS simply love interactivity
Contemporary accounts of Web 2.0 and Social Network Sites (SNS)
often depart from descriptions and analyses of front-end
characteristics and their assumed functionality
It is often argued that Web 2.0 and SNS allow for an increased level
of interactivity while simultaneously facilitating creative processes of
various kinds (user-generated content as the motor of Web 2.0)
Web 2.0 can be regarded as ‘dynamic matrices of information
through which people observe others, expand the network, make
new ”friends”, edit and update content, blog, remix, post, respond,
share files, exhibit, tag and so on’ (Beer and Burrows 2007: 2.1)

6. However, people tend to disagree
with each other
Roughly speaking, it is possible to discern two parallell streams of
research that provide radically different answers to the question of
how Web 2.0 and SNS ought to be understood.
Although contemporary accounts of Web 2.0 and SNS often take
their point of departure in the assumed needs, desires and actions
of "users", some researchers have switched focus from a micro-level
towards a macro-level of analysis where the question of individual
utility appears as inferior to issues of power and institutional
exploitation.
Crucially, these research streams tend to locate agency at different
levels of analysis.

7. Currently, there are two
competing streams of research
Stream #1 (here labelled ’Egocentric networks and individual-
oriented agency’) leans toward a micro-sociological perspective,
focuses on individual experiences and perceived utility-value of
front-end functions, thus emphasising an individual-oriented
agency
Stream #2 (here termed ’Labour under siege and system-oriented
agency’) presents a certain affinity with a macro-sociological
perspective and, mainly highlighting back-end functionalities,
focuses on how Web 2.0/SNS act towards the individual user in an
exploitive manner, thus assuming a system-oriented agency

8. Egocentric networks and
individual-oriented agency
Web 2.0 and SNS provide a shift in social organisation: from
communities of interest to ‘egocentric‘ networks (and, to some
extent, back again through FB Pages, hashtags and so forth), thus
assuming processes of online individualisation
SNS: ’web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a
public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate
a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view
and traverse their list of connections and those made by others
within the system.’ (boyd and Ellison 2007)
Similarly, questions of privacy, connectivity and so forth are
frequently discussed from the viewpoint of the user.

9. Labour under siege and system-
oriented agency
’[Web 2.0 is] the new media capitalist technique of relying upon
users to supply and rank online media content /.../ [Users] are
expected to process digital objects by sharing content, making
connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing digital
content’ (Gehl 2011: 2)
’[T]he architecture of participation sometimes turns into an
architecture of exploitation’ (Petersen 2008)
Web 2.0/SNS place ’users under an almost invisible gaze, resulting
in a kind of anticipatory conformity, whereby the divulgence of
personal information become both routinized and
internalized’ (Zimmer 2008)

10. What’s the problem with
conceptual asymmetries?
These perspectives and their obvious asymmetry point at a number
of problems attached to the conceptual apparatus commonly used to
describe Web 2.0 phenomena in general and SNS in particular
Besides of frequently neglecting fundamental insights in their
respective arguments, these research streams tend to:
1. Conceptualise Web 2.0/SNS at different levels of analysis, thus
rendering the interrelationship between user and system unclear
2. Avoid a thorough exploration of the position that Web 2.0/SNS
take in the social realm from which they intervene by mediating,
regulating and structuring social/symbolic content

11. In search for a new nomenclature:
‘social intermediaries’
Having institutional characteristics as well as allowing individuals to
use them as a means for achieving certain tasks, Web 2.0 and SNS
are always more than mere applications
There is a need for a different conceptual apparatus that accounts
for both the technology as an actor as well as its relative position in
the social realm and within the context of social interaction
This paper suggests that web applications such as Facebook and
Twitter should be understood in terms of ’social intermediaries’
since they are mechanisms that intervene in the social realm by
offering a means for exchange of social/symbolic content between
social actors while simultaneously acting upon that content

12. But what does the term ‘social
intermediaries’ stand for. Really?
Social intermediaries are positioned between actors, tying them
together while also providing an infrastructural condition for social
interaction and the sustainment of social relationships. They act as
structuring links between actors by delivering as well as structuring
(and exploiting) social/symbolic content
Web applications such as Facebook and Twitter need to be ascribed
some sort of agency since they, in mediating conversations or other
forms of content, enter the social realm as actors on own behalf
The concept ‘social intermediaries’ takes its point of departure in
individual utility as well as the institutional arrangements in which
these applications are embedded

13. Isn’t the term ‘social
intermediaries’ just a tautology?
The term intermediary could be read both as a noun and adjective. It
is a question of ’the nature of action between two persons’ or
something that is ’[s]ituated or occurring between two things’. At
the same time, the term designates ’[o]ne who acts between others;
an intermediate agent’ (OED 2011)
Being situated ‘between others’ while at the same time acting on
one’s own behalf as well as in relation to the involved ‘others’, an
intermediary is by definition 'social' to some extent.
In this paper, a social intermediary is one that enters the social
realm as such and thereby actively intervenes in social flows and
exchanges

14. Reaching to a conclusion
This paper suggests that social intermediaries facilitate the
establishment and sustainment of social ties between social actors
At the same time, social intermediaries enter the social realm as
agential mechanisms positioned between others wherefrom an
exchange of social and symbolic content is facilitated
Furthermore, these mechanism partake, to various degrees, in such
exchanges by means of regulatory standards, network-based
suggestions and other forms of actions possible to undertake
through the processing of harvested personal data

15. Continuing to reach to a
conclusion
Social intermediaries are always acting from a position between
individuals while at the same time rendering themselves and their
interventions more or less invisible - social flows should be as
smooth as possible!
Social intermediaries thus always consist of both front- and back-
end characteristics that, acting in concert with and towards the user,
gains momentum by taking up a position in the field of
communication and social interaction
Such a conceptualisation facilitates a sociological understanding of
basic social processes involved from a micro- as well as macro-
sociological perspective

16. Thank you!
martin@goodold.se
twitter.com/martinberg
+46 735 46 50 10