Finding meaning in messaging
“Before I was less sensitive to it. I felt a lot freer, less observed. It has too much advertising. They use your info for themselves. I’m more careful now.”
“I’m more reserved. I’m never sure what happens to the photos, I’m very cautious.”
“Before my child I had lots of photos on there, because I had nothing to hide. Now I don’t put photos of her up there because I don’t want them stored.”
I’m sure you can guess which social network they’re talking about. Yes, these are all opinions people hold about Facebook. With plenty of negative press recently, you’ve probably heard people say things just like this about Facebook. Except these quotes aren’t recent. In fact they come from 4-year old research I did with people living in the German speaking part of Switzerland. Two years before Snowden’s revelations, many middle and northern Europeans were already feeling distinctly uncomfortable about Facebook’s cavalier attitude to privacy and personal data.
At the time of this research, the most popular app in Switzerland was WhatsApp. People were crazy about private group messaging. It’s easy to jump to conclusions about privacy-conscious Europeans turning their backs on Facebook and flocking to WhatsApp. But it’s not the only reason why WhatsApp became so popular. Sending SMS in Switzerland is exorbitantly expensive, making messaging apps that use data allowances extremely appealing. In Europe, with many countries packed into roughly the same geographical area as the United States, it’s also far more common to have friends and relatives living abroad. It makes much more sense to send them messages on WhatsApp than to pay higher fees for an international SMS.
These circumstances combined to help WhatsApp become the number one app in the Swiss app store. While people were still looking at Facebook, many of them told us they had just stopped posting.
On a recent trip to Mali, I found a different set of dynamics around what gets used and why. Facebook is very popular in Mali. In fact, it comes preinstalled on many of the feature phones that people use. Drissa, a student, told me that he likes to use Facebook to chat with friends but he’s very careful about what he posts on there. He doesn’t post anything about religion that might spark debate. He sticks to conversations on topics that no-one has strong feelings about. In the context of conflict in the North that still divides the country, his concerns make a lot of sense, but they run counter to the easy assumptions we might make about African teenagers’ activist tendencies on social media.
In Mali, the most popular messaging app is Viber. We heard a story of it being introduced to the country by some exchange students and quickly going viral. Although WhatsApp is used in Mali, it’s much less popular than in neighbouring west African countries.
It’s tempting but dangerous to make sweeping generalisations about people’s behaviour in different countries, or across whole continents. There are big differences between countries and many micro-differences between different communities and cultures living in those countries. Whenever we talk in general terms, we’re probably reflecting the dominant digital behaviours within a country or community.
That’s why it’s so important to do research first hand so we can learn about the nuances from different people’s’ stories and experiences. What are people’s goals? What choices have they made about what to use and why? What are they doing differently? How has their behaviour changed in the last year? Why?
Making time to do research in context helps us craft more thoughtful services. Otherwise we risk collapsing complexity into a flat view of a country based on lazy assumptions and generalised facts. You might get away with that for a while, but long-term you’ll lose out to someone who really gets it.
