10: ‘Facebooking’ Through Edwardian Book Inscriptions: A Review

Over the past ten weeks, I have explored a range of contemporary literacy practices across social media and revealed longer-term patterns in their forms and functions, namely in relation to Victorian and Edwardian inscriptive practices. In this last blog post of the series, I thought it would be a good idea to review some of the major (dis)continuities between the two platforms by grouping them into themes.

Interactivity A key component of book inscriptions and social media is interactivity. Users depend on the semi-public nature of the platforms to share information with one another, make announcements and deliver calls to action, all of which require some form of response from readers/followers. In many cases, these literacy practices are co-created as users work together to create and sustain meanings or interactions, which form an integral part of interpersonal relations and friendship management. On both platforms, this interactivity is heavily bound up with notions of control, communication direction and synchronicity (Liu and Shrum, 2002). In other words, the degree to which users can freely select how to read, in what order and at what pace; the provision of feedback to each other; and whether reader responses are simultaneous or not. While this level of interactivity is undoubtedly faster on social media, the face-to-face exchange of books also ensured that oral or written feedback took place with relative speed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Interactivity could also play out in multi-layered inscriptions that showed how books were passed from one person to another over a period of time.

Immediacy Related to interactivity is the immediacy of book inscriptions and social media posts. Status updates in particular, whether regarding a personal or national event, create a sense of urgency and emotional disclosure in the ‘here and now’. This “culture of speed” (Keep, 2001, p. 151) meant that inscriptions/posts were often only given attention or understood in their immediate context, before readers/users moved on to the next one. Like with interactivity, this immediacy might be more apparent on social media thanks to its instantaneous nature and frequent alerts/notifications, but it can also be identified in book inscriptions according to the affordances of the time. We see this fast-pacedness in the emergence of the parody bookplate into its own unique genre in just a few years, as well as the viral impact of Hartley’s dissemination of 40,000 books on temperance and his subsequent guest lecturer invitations.

Face Management Face management – i.e., controlling how others perceive you – was just as important for Victorian and Edwardian inscribers as it is for contemporary users of social media. Through their literacy practices, writers seek to balance the need not to impose on somebody and the need to be liked (Brown and Levinson, 1987, p. 62). Potential face-threatening acts surrounding instances of “programmed sociality” (Bucher, 2013), such as remembering birthdays and filling in confession books or clean-copy challenges, must be managed with particular care, as well as unfriending somebody or publicly leaving feedback on a person or a service. For many, social validation plays an important role in their literacy practices, enacted through inscriptions or posts that present them in a positive light. The presence of written errors/typos can hamper this validation as it risks the writer being perceived by others as lacking intelligence.

Identity Performance Whether creating a bookplate in 1901 or taking a selfie in 2020, the two practices share one common trait: identity performance. Identity performance, described by Butler (2004) as the construction and expression of identity through language, gesture and symbolic social signs, leads users to carry out complex multimodal acts to frame themselves in particular ways, whether as opinion leaders or as ‘tribalists’ in relation to notions of class, gender, age, nationality or political/religious view. We see multiple acts of social posturing and virtue signalling from users through deliberate lies in confession books/clean-copy challenges, questionable authenticity of bookplates/selfies, incorrect foreign language use, select camera angles or perspectives and even aliases to hide identities. However, as my multimodal ethnohistorical methodology has shown, these ‘performances’ are often far more complex than they seem on the surface and require deeper levels of engagement to challenge or unearth some of the other motivations that may guide users’ choices.

Sociocultural Norms What also becomes clear when comparing literacy practices across book inscriptions and social media is the importance of sociocultural norms. In both past and present society, specific unspoken rules were unconsciously learnt, culturally embedded, passed around discourse communities and adhered to in visual/verbal texts. Most Victorians and Edwardians understood the necessity of writing in somebody’s confession book, wishing somebody happy birthday, following appropriate guidance on ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behaviour, avoiding confrontations, complying with bookplate guidelines and reading in a ‘correct’ manner. Equally, social media users learn the subtleties of social interactions between followers and quickly develop an understanding of the faux pas to be avoided in future posts. While these sociocultural norms have clearly evolved over the past 100 years or so (particularly regarding notions of respectability, morality and gender expectations), they, nonetheless, show the enduring significance of rules in behaviour, expression and values that govern communication. This is particularly true for practices surrounding death and mourning, which show the least amount of change, suggesting that we continue to face similar difficulties to our ancestors when it comes to dealing with the death of loved ones.

Social Pressure Oral history and newspaper articles make it clear that Victorian and Edwardian book inscribers felt just as much social pressure to engage with friends and enact their social relationships as modern-day users of social media feel. This was particularly the case with birthday books, confession books and calls to action, which required an immediate response and would often be accompanied by a physical face-to-face confrontation with the person in question. Whereas today we might pretend that we did not see the notification or had not logged into Facebook for a while, Victorians and Edwardians did not have this luxury, so they had far less opportunities to evade interactions. Furthermore, as these interactions were heavily tied to sociocultural norms regarding respectability, they perhaps felt a greater sense of obligation to respond in order to uphold expected standards than we do today.

Portability The size and nature of books and mobile phones make them examples of “portable property” (Plotz, 2008, p. 2) that can be carried around easily by a person. This portability came with pros and cons. On the one hand, carrying a book or phone moves items beyond their functional purposes and grants them with new meanings based on the display of their owners’ social standing or respectability. But on the other hand, this comes with the social pressure to respond quickly to messages as it is expected that you will never be too far from the item. Again, the problems of portability are more relevant to the contemporary age, yet birthday book and confession book users in particular must have felt similar pressures regarding the immediacy of communication. Furthermore, the very portability of books also made them susceptible to theft, which led to the emergence of a new type of bookplate – the admonition – to ward off potential intruders.

Viewing the seven key traits identified above together highlights the importance of considering the different affordances and constraints of modes and media when adopting a transhistorical approach. It may seem that digital technology has made communication more complex and multi-layered, yet many of its ‘novel’ aspects were, in fact, widely established and used in the Victorian age. Furthermore, in some ways, pre-digital communication allowed for greater opportunities of creativity as it was not subject to the customisation restrictions of social media and relied heavily on the performative nature of handwriting. However, in a face-to-face world, greater effort was required to maintain social relations and manage face, while less privacy controls meant that inscriptions could be viewed by nosy domestic servants or siblings.

These differences in “meaning potential” (Halliday, 1978, p. 30) in terms of what can be expressed also makes it clear that both inscriptive practices and social media practices require more textured analyses to understand their subtle nuances and the varying ways in which people manage complex relationships, navigate their sociocultural landscape and make sense of their lives.

Throughout this series, I have explained and contextualised apparently ‘new’ literacy practices by providing a historical backdrop to them and considering them within a longer trajectory of socially and technologically mediated change. Looking to historical book inscriptions can help us identify similarities in the aspects that drive human communication, as well as pinpoint any differences and use historical resources to understand reasons for these inconsistencies. I hope my posts have provided you with a good introduction to transhistorical approaches and, hopefully, will encourage far more literacy and multimodal research into this fascinating area of study.

References:

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press.

Bucher, T, 2013. The friendship assemblage: Investigating programmed sociality on Facebook, Television & New Media, 14(6), pp. 479-93.

Butler, J. 2004. Undoing Gender, Routledge.

Halliday, M. 1978. Language as a Social Semiotic, Edward Arnold.

Keep, C. 2001. Blinded by the type: Gender and information technology at the turn of the century, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, pp. 149-173.

Liu-Thompkins, Y. and Shrum, L.J. 2002. What Is Interactivity and Is It Always Such a Good Thing? Implications of Definition, Person, and Situation for the Influence of Interactivity on Advertising Effectiveness, Journal of Advertising 31, pp. 53-64.