As the dust settles on Facebook's $19 billion WhatsApp takeover, a social networking researcher explains what really lies behind the deal
Now that Facebook has announced it is to buy the popular smartphone messaging platform WhatsApp, much has been made of the sum agreed, even more about might and power and competition rules. It's not what WhatsApp does (or might become) that the commentators are focusing on, but the billions Facebook is shelling out for it. Facebook has become, we are warned, a mighty leviathan of corporate wealth, and this is the proof.
Many ask whether this sort of corporate behaviour will negatively affect the world we live in. After all, the enormous and beneficial impact of the internet is precisely because it allows diversity and creativity; it creates new business possibilities. Is it one of the most successful of these possibilities that will now fund the net's sterilisation?
These concerns, legitimate and proper though they are, miss another question. WhatsApp is a communications technology, so one can understand the logic of Google's rumoured bid – subsequently denied – for it; it would have extended the portfolio of a search-engine enterprise. But surely Facebook has already cornered the market for messaging, via social networking?
What is WhatsApp? It's basically an instant messaging (IM) application: users log on and post text, an image or even a sound file, and this can be accessed immediately by the intended recipients. Only buddies or registered users can participate, so it's all safe and private.
Break with tradition
In some respects, however, WhatsApp is unlike other IM services. Content doesn't disappear when you log out; it lingers like graffiti on a virtual wall. Recipients can see it whenever they log on – it's waiting for them to drop by. It runs on most smartphones, too, so though it looks a bit like BlackBerry Messenger, it is not associated with any specific operating system or mobile network.
But doesn't Facebook offer all this? Can't you download its IM client on to your smartphone and tell your buddies 'what's up' through Facebook? Yes and no. The real distinction with WhatsApp - and the thing that made WhatsApp so appealing to Facebook - is how it is used. And this is in part a result of the way Facebook use has itself has evolved over the years and in part changes in the way we manage friendships digitally.
For many people, Facebook was one of the first social networking sites they used. This was where they first brought their friends together digitally to show and share; this was where they familiarised themselves with the basic grammar of status updates, postings and Likes. Facebook was also the place where they discovered that you can not only bring friends together, but also exclude people. As I noted in my book, Texture: Human expression in the age of communications overload , teenagers soon found that one of the key values of Facebook was that they could exclude mum and dad. If bedroom doors could be opened by nosy parents, access rights could be denied on Facebook.
But just as teenagers learned this, so did parents. Thus, as various anthropologists have pointed out, parents are insisting on access to the accounts of younger family members. And as these rights are gained, so teenagers have realised that they cannot just abandon Facebook altogether. Something has to be there, or else their parents would be suspicious.
Content on Facebook reflects this ebb and flow. What there is can best be described as anodyne - postings that articulate a public profile, tweaked with some intimacies, updates about a new job, say, or a major family event, but little more. And it is not just parents and teenagers who negotiate thus to produce this. It has become an augmented digital Yellow Pages with a personal spin. It's a personalised directory of people in the digital age.
Backing friendship
So what of friendship? Doesn't Facebook still support and enable it? Of course. But the way it does so is not sufficient to really let friendship in fully, and that's the value of WhatsApp.
When asked what they use WhatsApp for, many people will reply, with some embarrassment, that they can't actually say. "Well, it's for my friends. You know with your friends you don't really need to say anything, but we do sort of say something. I mean, it's mostly tosh." They might go further and say that, when using WhatsApp, they don't have to formulate proper sentences either. They can simply say out loud (as it were) what they are thinking, since a friend will understand; they might well be thinking the same thing.
And they might add that they use WhatsApp pretty much all the time. By way of further explanation, they might explain why Facebook doesn't do all they need. "I don't need to put up a status update. My friends know what I am up to; mostly they are doing it with me."
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