notes from the (home) field

Since I have been in the US awaiting my residency visa for Chile, today I give you a note from the home field. 

In the early days, they each brought notes they had collected while browsing at Barnes and Noble. Now, using Kindles or iPads, they check out their personalized recommendations on Amazon.com, noting in particular pages counts for each electronic edition of the book, as they balance a glass of wine in the other hand. These seven women, between the ages of 50 and 60 live in a town of 2,000 people nestled in Midwestern United States farming country. They are middle class women who teach elementary school, work as hospital administrators, or have recently retired from corporate insurance company jobs. All have grown children and though some are previously divorced, all are married now. 

the book club women search Amazon reviews for their next reading in July 2013

These group meetings, though specifically organized around reading and discussion, always involve wine, politically charged discussions (one woman left the group after criticizing the others for being too liberal), and gossip. Even today, rather than finding out about life events on Facebook, I often find out about former high school classmates’ engagements or expected children through these women’s exchanges of information. And while these are great topics, the best gossip for them are younger men and women’s extramarital affairs. “We’re old and lead boring lives,” states Jane, with one son living nearby and the other several hours away. “We have to live vicariously through other people’s scandals.” Their favorite was when a neighbor of Katherine, a mother of two daughters who now live abroad, split with his young wife and moved in with the older and in their judgment, “trashier” woman across the street. They began referring to her as the “real housewife” of the town, referencing the popular Bravo channel reality television shows about wealthy women in cities around the United States. When the neighbor’s divorce was final and he moved with his new girlfriend to a nearby town, they were all disappointed that their first-row seat to the drama no longer existed. 

Today, at a casual gathering for lunch, these same seven women drank coffee, ate quiche, and talked about Facebook. More accurately, one of the women described it as “bitching.” “I don’t care that your little Timmy lost his first tooth. I don’t need to see a picture of that!” said Katherine, an elementary school teacher. They complained about too many pictures of food, and status updates about cooking. “I mean, if they’re a famous chef fine. But I’m sorry, Mr. Smith from the pharmacy, I just really don’t care that you’re cooking sausage for dinner tonight” retorted Lucinda, whose two daughters, their husbands, and her three grandchildren both live in the suburbs of Chicago. She continued, “But that’s better than the ones who post really exciting things and just make you feel bad about yourself: Oh great, you went on vacation in Jamaica. Oh what a beautiful new pool you had put in. Oh, and your daughter graduated from law school. Give me a break!” “But we still look at it” shouted Lucinda’s sister Louise. “Why?” “Well,” chimed in Marlene—whose four children are spread from across town to across the country, “we have to keep tabs on them.” Then imitating mouse clicks she sneered, “What’s that bitch up to today/” Lucinda added, “Plus when I get Christmas letters in the mail I know which ones I just really don’t want to read. The ones with Caribbean vacations and kids with doctors just go straight in the garbage. I don’t need them making me feel bad about myself!” 

It’s been a common finding among the fieldsites of the Global Social Media Impact Study, that parents primarily use Facebook to keep in touch with their children (you can find a number of examples on the blog). To an extent this is true among these women, many of whom have children and grandchildren far away. They post silly videos of grandkids, and comment on their daughters’ and sons’ photos and status messages. One who is something of a fictive aunt to me constantly chides my posting on Facebook in Spanish, because she can’t understand what I say. Though usually when she does the other women offer to show her the translate button that automatically appears. But as their conversation over lunch reveals, Facebook is also a venue for keeping tabs on the community. They learn the gossip they later discuss in person. 

As Henry Jenkins describes in the film Teenage Paparazzo, “When we gossip about someone, the person we're gossiping about is actually less important than the exchange that takes place between us. We’re using that other person—the celebrity, the town whore, or whatever—as a vehicle for us to share values with each other, to sort through central issues.

In many ways, the women use information from facebook to police the boundaries of their in-group, as well as what is acceptable social behavior and what is not. Though they all do so good-naturedly, and would never want this information to be learned by those they criticize, this gossip and criticism form a major part of their friendship bonds with each other. As such, social networking, and Facebook in particular contribute to a major way that these women learn information about the community, to be discussed in person.