Faces and charts: platform strategies for visualising the audience, the case of Facebook

ABSTRACT

Although the audience as an industrial media product has been scrutinised by scholars for decades, the visual presentation of the audience has been nearly absent from scholarly analysis. This article examines the interfaces that Facebook uses to present its audience to three different user groups (ordinary Facebook members, publishers, and finally advertisers) using a social semiotic analytical framework to analyse visuals, interactive elements and desired user paths. The interface displayed to ordinary users, the Facebook Friends page, uses a visual language with roots in the college yearbook, showing rows of faces with minimal available interactivity. This interface preserves the humanity of the audience, suggesting egalitarian social structures and timeless space outside Facebook’s ordinary flow. The interfaces displayed to institutional users, Page Insights and Audience Insights, for publishers and advertisers respectively, are quite different, characterised by a multiplicity of charts and high interactivity, with a clear path for the user that ends in ‘boosting’ your page or ‘buying’ your audience. The Audience Insights pages for advertisers feature advanced interactive tools which use the conventions of experimental science. These two interfaces do significant rhetorical work, dehumanising and abstracting audiences into data quantities which can be packaged as products, and encouraging publishers to focus on the production of data measuring engagement. Both the promotion of the value of data and the elision of audience work and surveillance, graphically represented in the different interfaces, help platform businesses like Facebook strategically, by increasing the value of their data and by suppressing audience concerns about surveillance.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• platforms
• audiences
• social semiotics
• data visualisation

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible with the support of the Anne-Marie & Gustav Ander Foundation for Media Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Both text and pictures have been blurred on this screenshot of an image published on an ordinary user’s blog, and I have chosen this image specifically to discuss the interface without violating the privacy of the user’s friends.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Anne-Marie and Gustaf Ander Foundation for Media Research: [Algorithms and Media Organisations].

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Van Couvering

Dr Elizabeth Van Couvering is a Lecturer in Strategic Communications at the Department of Geography, Media and Communications at Karlstad University, Sweden. She has written about the political economy and culture of platforms, including a techno-economic history of search engines and a discussion of the discursive frames of search engine construction. [email: [email protected]]