speculum
exploring the brave new world of facebook
The participant observation took place on Facebook, all of my respondents were my “friends”. This I see as a limitation to my research – since users use their real-world identities, the anonymity is quite hard to achieve, and on the other hand requests sent to people not in my friend’s list were mostly ignored, since Facebook is based on networks of people who know each other. The aim of this paper is to examine the world of Slovak Facebook and the way Slovak users adapted to this new way of cultural expression. Understanding the environment At this point it is accurate to present the empirical background upon which this paper is based on. Slovakia, the country depicted in this paper, is located in Central Europe. It was under the influence of the Soviet Union for 40 years. Today it is a part of the European Union and since January 2009 uses Euro as an official currency. The number of internet users in Slovakia has risen above 50% according to a recent survey, and among them there are 75.000 users of Facebook. The monthly increase of Slovak users is 18%.The estimates are that by the end of 2009 there will be around 300.000 Facebook users from Slovakia. The other numbers I worked with were: the number of my friends (today 168); the number of friends who I sent the questionnaire (50); and the number of returned questionnaires (19). The selection was based mostly on nationality and my knowledge of their active use of the site. The Elections This year’s presidential elections were held in two rounds. In the first round there were eight candidates, three of which were women. The two with most preferences and the two, who actually won the first round, proceeded to the second round, where the next head of state was selected by the votes of the legal citizens. One of the successful candidates from the first round was Ivan Gašparovič, the recent president and a person with rich and colorful political past, who offered stability and the old ways, a politician who had an absolute support from the coalition in the government. The other was the prime minister, whose popularity among people is declining and is particularly on the level of zero in certain circles of the Slovak society. The hopes of those circles lied in the recent president’s opponent, Iveta Radičová, a woman of non-communist political past, offering a fresh look and highly advanced culture of making politics, which is something not so common in the described environment. She was favoured among the artists and students, who contributed to her election campaign a great deal. Most of the support from students came from the virtual world, in particularly the Facebook. The reminiscences of Barack Obama’s expressive campaign were still alive and could be defined as one of the significant impacts on her official election campaign. According to Steffen Dalsgaard there has been a “shift of presentation of self, that has occurred with the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook, it is a growing tendency of politicians to focus on mobilisation via such sites, as has been evidences by the overwhelming success of the ObamaBiden campaign, which mobilized millions of active campaigners and donors worldwide through sophisticated networking techniques.” (Dalsgaard 2008:8) For instance, the Facebook group “Students for Barack Obama” consisted of nearly 3 million members. Other similar groups had also very high number of members. On the other hand, Obama’s opponent John McCain known for his rather cold stance toward the internet did not have a significant following on Facebook. The same situation was in Slovakia and could be illustrated by the Facebook presentation of the two candidates for the president position. Ivan Gašparovič is known for his rather cold attitude toward the internet. His Facebook profile as a politician has a little less than 500 supporters. There are around 15 groups favoring him as president with 2-1000 members. On the other hand, Iveta Radičová uses Facebook as a private person; people can be her friends, not supporters. This suggests her use of the internet on more daily basis than Ivan Gašparovič. She has got about 500 friends, which is the same number as of Gašparovič’s supporters. The number of groups supporting her during elections was around 35. In the time of the elections each of them was ranging from 30 to 6000 members. Few of them stood out – the group “I vote Iveta Radičová for the President of the Republic was created by a young Slovak author, well known among the Slovak cultural underground. This is how he describes the group and also the broader campaign it was a part of: “My ‘President’ was the biggest citizen campaign in the history of Slovak internet. On Facebook it had more than 13 500 supporters and on the official website for the campaign there were more than 200.000 readers. On Saturday 4th of April we voted Iveta Radičová for the President of the Slovak Re public. She received nearly a million votes, but it wasn’t enough for the victory.” This campaign was also the biggest campaign supporting a politician in the history of independent Slovakia which was organized without the any influence of
2_2009
43