Social Engagement in Times of Mourning

University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies New Media & Digital Culture MA Thesis 2015 -2016 24 June 2016

A Platform Analysis of the Social Activity in the Aftermath of the Paris and Brussels Attacks

By Jennifer Swagers | 5947030

Name supervisor: Esther Weltevrede | Name second reader: Richard Rogers ABSTRACT This thesis outlines how social engagement has been facilitated on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events. It states that there has been a shift towards a new kind of engagement that is partly dependent on Facebook’s grammars of action. To perform this study, this research made use of four cases and their data, namely the Pray For Paris Community Page, the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group, the Pray For Brussels Community Page, and the Pray for brussels Group. The four cases were created in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, which took place the 13th of November, 2015, and the 22nd of March, 2016. Through the Digital Methods tool Netvizz, this research extracted the data of the first two weeks of each of the four pages, after the related crisis event took place. This research is placed in a critical discursive analysis about engagement in relation to platform studies, by using theories about engagement, mourning, grammars of action, and affordances. The analysis indicates that the Like-endorsement is a new form of intentional memorialising in times of mourning as a result of crisis events, which leads to a contribution in the field of platform, mourning, and engagement studies.

KEYWORDS Mourning; Engagement; Facebook; Crisis events; Platform studies; Digital methods

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION -3

1. THEORETIC FRAMEWORK: SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT ON PLATFORMS - 5 1.1. USER ENGAGEMENT AS INVOLVEMENT-ENGAGEMENT - 6 1.2. ENGAGEMENT FACILITATED BY THE TECHNICITY OF PLATFORMS - 12

2. METHODOLOGY: ANALYSING DATA OF FACEBOOK PAGES - 19 2.1. PLATFORM STUDIES - 22 2.2. DIGITAL METHODS - 23 2.2.1. NETVIZZ - 23

3. ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK AND THE FOUR PAGES - 26 3.1. GRAMMARS AND ENGAGEMENT IN THE AFTERMATH - 27 3.2. TWO ADDITIONAL FEATURES - 48 3.3. THE LIKE-ENDORSEMENT - 51

4. CONCLUSION - 52

REFERENCE LIST - 54

2 INTRODUCTION When people are mourning, they used to act on the use of habits that are integrated into cultures and religions, like lighting candles, wearing black, walking silent marches, or praying to honour the deceased. This was, and still is, a way of thinking about someone who passed away, to memorialise a tragedy, or to show solidarity to the relatives of the victims. However, as the social life of people has experienced a partial shift towards social network, so did the various ways of mourning and the way in which people experience life and death. The Dutch funeral insurance, N.V. Nederlandse Uitvaartverzekering Maatschappij, argued for instance that they noticed a shift from obituaries in newspapers towards social network sites, like Facebook, where people reacted with comments out of sympathy and solidarity (Westerink n. pag.). But also online memorialising became a more regular thing with registers for condolences on specialised websites for victims of wars and crisis events, for famous people, but also for ordinary people who passed away (Walter et al. 282-283). On Facebook, profiles of deceased persons did turn into online memorialising pages. Also the digital RIP statuses of users on social network sites became a frequent phenomenon (Walter et al. 285). However, recently a new way of online mourning took place after the world was shaken up, again, with terror attacks by the Islamic State (IS) in Western Europe. On the 7th of January 2015, terrorists attacked the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. 17 people were killed by terrorists of the IS (NOS, 2015 n.pag.). A period of national mourning followed in France. It was all over the news, there were marches in and outside of France to show solidarity, powerful political figures publicly decried the attacks, people were laying down flowers and were lighting candles on the place of the attack. But, beside that, it was the social engagement on social media that was overwhelming in this time of mourning. People changed their profile picture into an image with the sentence “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), the hashtag #jesuischarlie was often shared, and many groups and community pages were created on Facebook with the name Je suis Charlie. This kind of social engagement was expanded in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, which took place on the 13th of November, 2015. An attack that became one of the most severe terrorist attacks since 9/11, whereby 130 people were killed by terrorists on multiple locations through self-bombing and shootings around the centre of Paris (NOS, 2015 n. pag.). The IS claimed the attacks (RTL Nieuws n. pag.). In the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks people around the world showed their support to all Parisians. On social media platforms, numerous users started sharing their engagement with the Parisians in different

3 ways. Especially the hashtag #prayforparis and the related image became popular among the users. After the London artist Jean Julien twittered a self made Eiffel Tower peace sign with the text “Peace for Paris”, it quickly became a symbol for the brutal attacks. This was also visible in the many new Facebook pages with the page name Pray for Paris that were created the day after the attacks to show their support to the Parisians. It was remarkable to notice how many people were actively socially engaged with the attacks on Facebook, in a time that was officially called as national mourning by President Hollande (Brummelman n.pag). Furthermore, Facebook launched for the first time features as support and solidarity towards the Parisians. On the 22nd of March, 2016, the world was shaken up by another unexpected crisis event. Brussels was startled with terror attacks at the airport Zaventem and their subway station. 32 people died as a result of the attacks (NOS, 2016 n. pag.). Also the days after the Brussels attacks were officially called a time of national mourning by the government of Belgium (NU.nl n. pag.). The attacks were memorialised on social network sites in a similar way as the previous attacks. People all over the world showed again their engagement on social network sites, this time with the hashtag #prayforbrussels. Although terrorist attacks are not new, neither is showing solidarity in times of mourning, but it was striking that people were so involved with these events, with the victims, and the survivors who they most likely did not know personally, but still felt the need to show solidarity in these times of mourning in the form of social engagement on social network sites like Facebook.

The research question taken by this thesis is: How is the social engagement facilitated on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events? The way this research is being done is through researching 4 case studies, related to the Paris and Brussels attacks, namely: the Pray For Paris Community Page, the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group, the Pray For Brussels Community Page, and the Pray for brussels Group. The Paris attacks are chosen, for the reason that they reached a new social engagement level on Facebook, that was facilitated by the users and by the platform as well. The Brussels attacks are chosen since they form the most recent crisis event in Western Europe at the moment of this research, and on the basis of these attacks this research is able to research if this new social engagement remained. Previous researches studied how engagement is formed, and how mourning experienced a shift towards social network sites. Previous researches also performed software studies to untangle technology that has been integrated and facilitated by platforms. Though

4 much has been written about online engagement on social network sites, how social media platforms are integrated in users’ daily lives, even so far as mourning on social network sites, no academic research has been conducted into, what this research argues, a new kind of social engagement on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events in Western Europe. A research that is important, since terror attacks in Western Europe are a current social problem, which has already led to a lot of victims with a huge extent and continuity of a threat for more terror attacks in Western European countries (National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism n. pag.). Furthermore, social network sites became a reflection of their users’ social lives and activities. Facebook alone has “1.09 billion daily active users on average for March 2016” (Facebook – Company Info). This contributes to the reason for measuring social engagement and topics of broad and current interest, in the field of digital media, and specifically on social network sites. The thesis is carried out from a digital cultural perspective, while doing a descriptive and methodological analysis. It will discuss in detail how user engagement is achieved in relation to technology, and particularly in times of mourning in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks. It will furthermore untangle how user engagement is facilitated by Facebook in relation to the four cases. This thesis suggests that there is a need for a new concept that can define this new kind of social engagement on Facebook.

1. THEORETIC FRAMEWORK: SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT ON PLATFORMS This research is placed in the critical dialogue about how social engagement is facilitated on Facebook in particular. It focuses partly on how engagement, in relation to times of mourning, is facilitated by the motivation of users, and partly how platforms, like Facebook, are able to structure engagement. Engagement is a concept that is focusing on connections, like relationships, alliances, or something similar between subjects, or subjects and objects on multiple levels. But, as Phil Turner already argued, engagement is a concept that appears in different disciplines, from pedagogic to its relation to art (34). It is, however, the engagement in the form of involvement, discussed as involvement-engagement, in the relation with technology that this research is interested in (Turner 34). In the field of human-computer interaction, engagement has been used to untangle the relationship between humans and the technology humans use to enable (social) interactivity. However, there are still, in the form of involvement-engagement, multiple perspectives about how to approach and define it. Ksiazek et al. claim that the way users are involved with media “is often expressed as interactivity”

5 (3). While, in contrast, Turner claims that interaction is a consequence of involvement- engagement (41). While using Ksiazek et al.’s position, “the fervour of discussion about engagement suggests that engaging interactions are sought after by both users and developers of computer systems and applications” (O’Brien & Toms 939). From this position, this research sketches on the one hand how user engagement in the form of involvement- engagement is established to define in what forms engagement can be facilitated, with a view to how social engagement is facilitated in times of solidarity and mourning after crisis events. And on the other hand, this research sketches how engagement is facilitated by platforms, Facebook in this case, with the help of grammars of action and affordances. To start with, user engagement as involvement-engagement.

1.1 USER ENGAGEMENT AS INVOLVEMENT-ENGAGEMENT User engagement is shaped through different motivations that eventually can lead to solidarity and mourning. A common thread in the approach of engagement, in the human- computer studies, is that the concept has been connected “to peoples’ experiences with technology” (O’Brien & Toms 938). Turner explains this connection as “a dyadic relationship with technology” in which “engagement then becomes a property of the technology to which we (as users) respond by becoming involved with it” (34). He argues furthermore that the availability of technology can be seen as an important requirement before any degree of involvement can occur (35). Ksiazek et al. claim furthermore that “engagement is a broad phenomenon that describes all sorts of user attention and involvement with media (3). The involvement that occurs is often compared with interactivity, as Ksiazek et al. argued, although Turner sees it as a consequence of involvement-engagement. Turner points out that people first have to make a connection with technology “in-order-to” check something, which is defined as interaction (41). According to Ksiazek et al. the interactivity between the user and the technology arises at the moment of three primary motivations as empirical research has sorted out (3). Information seeking, socialisation or social interaction, and entertainment are the primary motivations for interaction in this case (Ksiazek et al. 3). Information seeking is associated with the “multi-directional flow of information” (Ksiazek et al. 3). Flow is used by Raymond Williams to describe the continuous stream of images on television, that results in retaining people’s attention. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a condition “in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the

6 sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi in O’Brien & Toms 939). And Webster has described flow “as a multidimensional construct, encompassing perceptions of user control, attention focus, arousal of curiosity, and intrinsic interest in a computer interaction” (Webster in Webster & Ahuja 664-665). This similar kind of attention also occurs with involvement- engagement in combination with online media where information appears in a continuous flow. Think of online news websites, and social network sites where content is supplemented with great regularity. However, O’Brien & Toms argue that there is a difference between flow and engagement. “Flow requires sustained, long-term focus and loss of awareness of the outside world; engagement should still occur in the midst of today’s multitasking and dynamic computer environment” (O’Brien & Toms 939). This is consistent with the statement of Turner. Turner argues that technology is becoming familiar to use, it becomes ready-to-hand, which means “that we encounter/experience technology as being proximal or handy and as being available for immediate use or action” (37). Which means that people need less attention to perform an act with technology. The multi-directional is located in “the interactive nature of online media enables the audience to not only receive information but also disseminate and remark it” (Ksiazek et al. 3). This is especially something where social media platforms, like YouTube, Google+, and Facebook, contribute to, since users can upload their own (produced) content, the so called user-generated content (Van Dijck 8). It is furthermore the social network sites, like Facebook, that meet also the other two primary motivations of interaction, namely socialisation or social interaction, and entertainment. Social network sites “primarily promote interpersonal contact, whether between individuals or groups; they forge personal, professional, or geographical connections and encourage weak ties” (Van Dijck 8). And watching different content, like videos and images, of other persons can be understood as entertaining, for instance. These three motivations, information seeking, socialisation or social interaction, and entertainment, are further distinguished between two sorts of interactivity: user-content interactivity and user-user interactivity. User-content interactivity is mainly focusing on the need for information since it “involves a user interacting with content and producers such as posting an initial comment to a video thread” (Ksiazek et al. 3-4). User-user interactivity finds its motives in “the need for social interactions” which involves two or more users (Ksiazek et al. 3-4). “Both forms of interactivity signal a highly engaged user, where the individual is not just exposed to content, but demonstrates evidence of cognitive processing” (Ksiazek et al. 4). It is, subsequently, both forms of interactivity that can be seen as

7 involvement-engagement and which are visibly present on social network sites in the comments. However, each engagement will not last forever. There are four stages of user engagement, which form the process of engagement according to O’Brien & Toms. The four stages are: point of engagement; period of engagement; disengagement; and reengagement. The first stage, the point of engagement, forms the beginning of the process of engagement. It is in this stage that one feels somehow a trigger to participate, to engage with something. O’Brien & Toms explain this as a stage that “was initiated by the resonance of the aesthetic or informational composition of the system interface with users. These elements captured participants’ attention and interest and moved them forward into engagement” (943). After users pass the point of engagement, they enter the stage of period of engagement. In this stage the degree of the user’s attention and the level of interests are important. Both are “achieved by the presentation of feedback and novel information and features on the interface” (O’Brien & Toms 944). Besides that, a user likes to be challenged during the engagement, wants to get feedback on the information that has been communicated, and wants to feel some control on his action of engagement, thus O’Brien & Toms (944). It is also possible for users of engagement to enter the disengagement stage. “Disengagement occurred when participants made an internal decision to stop the activity, or when factors in the participants’ external environment caused them to cease being engaged” (O’Brien & Toms 944). Internal as well as external factors are playing a role in the development of disengagement. An internal factor could simply be that the user has a lack of interest and external factors could be that the novelty of the content is gone or that the technology is not working properly. After disengagement, there is one final stage: reengagement. Reengagement comes up when the disengagement was not the final stage, and the engagement has been put in motion again. The disengaging stage is in this case just a pause in the process of engagement. Besides the four stages in the process of engagement, it is possible that a user does not feel engaged at all. In that case the user is in a nonengagement stage. O’Brien & Toms define nonengagement as “the inability of the online experience to emulate a real-life encounter, technology issues such as information overload and pop-ups, communication tools that delay feedback, and being required to multitask or manage interruptions” (950). These four stages of engagement are based on the framework “the four threads of experience” which McCarthy & Wright introduce to describe user experience with technology (42). The four threads of experience, namely a. compositional b. spatiotemporal c. emotional and d. sensual, are intertwined with each other. The first one, compositional,

8 defines the narrative structure. If there are too many questions about the action itself, then one can assume that the compositional is not explicit enough. The second one, spatiotemporal, “draws attention to the quality and sense of space-time that pervades experience” (McCarthy & Wright 42). The emotional component refers to one’s “value judgments” like fun or sad, and how experience with technology itself has been judged (McCarthy & Wright 42). The last one, sensual, focuses on what “the design and texture and the overall atmosphere” feels like (McCarthy & Wright 42). This has to do with the device one is using and how social space around one is organised at the moment of the experience. These four components are standing in relation to six sense-making processes: anticipating; connecting; interpreting; reflecting; appropriating; and recounting (McCarthy & Wright 42- 43). Anticipating refers to the idea that everyone is already prejudiced and has expectations before engaging with technology. Connecting refers to the judgmental characteristic of humans. In a split second one can make up his mind about something. Interpreting defines how someone is working out the narrative structure. Reflecting refers to the way one examines the action that happened. Appropriating is in order when “we work out how a new experience fits with other experiences we have and with our sense of self” (McCarthy & Wright 43). The last one of the six sense-making processes, is recounting. Recounting includes the way one tells about the experience towards others, but also how he plays the stories for himself. All of these processes have their influences on the user’s experience with technology. Although the above explained how user engagement should be defined, including the different forms, it did not discuss how solidarity and mourning towards unknown others is related to user engagement in the online sphere. To do so, the next section will take a step towards online mourning and cosmopolitan solidarity in combination with the influence of journalism during crisis events. This stands in relation to this research considering the research question is about social engagement in times of mourning as a result of crisis events.

Mourning and cosmopolitan solidarity shaped by journalism There has been a shift from offline mourning towards online mourning. Walter et al. argue that where mourning used to be completely offline, mourning happens more and more on the Internet as well. It is the Web 2.0 that “has brought the personally known dead and dying onto the computer screens, mobile phones, and iPads which many people now spend more time on than they do watching television” (Walter et al. 285). This is reflected on social network sites, which can be seen as non-grief specific sites where intentional memorialising

9 and unintentional memorialising take place (Walter 282-283). Intentional memorialising in non-grief-specific sites occurs when people make a special memorial page for a deceased person on sites that are not originally designed for this purpose. And unintentional memorialising in non-grief specific sites refers to sites where “a person’s digital works can hang around in cyberspace indefinitely” (Walter et al. 283). However, with this shift from offline mourning towards online mourning, the grief has become less private and more public. “Mourning those you have never met has become common practice” (Walter et al. 288). Unknown others are wishing the bereaved the best, or mourning celebrities is shown with RIP statuses. Though Walker et al. focus mainly on mourning personal deceased, it is often the news that makes people aware of the death of famous people, or unexpected victims as a result of crisis events, like the terror attacks, which can lead to cosmopolitan solidarity. Cosmopolitan solidarity shaped by (convergent) journalism in the aftermath of crisis events, can lead to cosmopolitan mourning unknown others. Solidarity, in the structure of the humanitarian, refers to “the imperative to act towards vulnerable others without the anticipation of reciprocation” (Chouliaraki, ‘Improper distance’ 364). It gives, furthermore, “rise to social cohesion and depends upon an awareness of and identification with a collectivity” (Hunt & Benford 434). Journalism is partly responsible for the extent of solidarity that occurs in the aftermath of crisis events towards unknown people, which can eventually lead to social engagement. How journalism, and mainly convergent journalism, is establishing cosmopolitan solidarity towards distant others after crisis events, is discussed by Lilie Chouliaraki. Journalism does not only inform the public, but determines also “whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticism, how we articulate political analyses” (Butler 64). This is done through the three speech acts, namely the acts of informing, deliberating, and witnessing, according to Lilie Chouliaraki. She defines speech acts as a concept that “refers to those acts of communication that, beyond their referential value to conjure up the external world, simultaneously have pragmatic value in that they enact certain dispositions towards the social world and, thus, attempt to intervene practically in this world” (Re-mediation 270). The first of the three speech acts, informing, refers to the professional task of journalism to inform their public with facts, and to give the facts in the most objective form possible (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 271). The second one, deliberating, “is less about the assertion of facts and more about the creation of common spaces where people share views on matters of public concern” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 271). The last

10 one, witnessing, is about the task of journalism, “that turns evidence of human suffering into moral discourse so as to invite our judgment and action upon it” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 271). It is especially the last two speech acts that have the most influence on public opinions. However, each form of journalism varies in the extent of speech acts. The traditional mass journalism focuses mostly on the act of informing, but still has to decide what is newsworthy and what is not. The convergent journalism on the other hand, which has more forms of journalism like a printed newspaper, videos, and an online news stream on the website, places “more emphasis on the acts of deliberation and witnessing through ordinary voice” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 271). It is, eventually, the convergent journalism that Chouliaraki pays attention to in relation to ecstatic news, which she defines as “news so extraordinary that it warrants live coverage beyond the normal news bulletin, bringing global audiences together around a 24/7 mode of reporting” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 272). The ecstatic news is subjected, by Chouliaraki, to three structures of mediation: re-mediation, inter-mediation, and trans- mediation. The first one, re-mediation, is about how the news is “structured in the global news flow” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 273). Live-blogs, from news broadcasts for instance, contribute to a form of solidarity by the public. The live-blogs can consist of new information, but also of new footage that was recorded by ordinary people. This can lead to “an emotional public realm, where ordinary and expert voices coexist without hierarchies in a trans-national space of solidarity for distant sufferers” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 273) . The second one, inter-mediation, is about how media structures are connected to each other. Convergent journalism can also use social media channels to spread the news, to communicate with others, “with a view to facilitating the informational management of the disaster” (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 274). The last one, inter-mediation shows if the news leads to any form of physical action. An often physical action by ordinary people is for instance donating money, or donating blood to help the victims. By all of these three mediations, the voices of journalists are alternated with the voices of ordinary people which leads to “the disposition of “I have a voice”” for the ordinary people, a celebrated disposition according to Chouliaraki (Chouliaraki, Re-mediation 275). With the advent of the disposition of “I have a voice”, new ways of recognition and solidarity towards the vulnerable others arise. It also contributes to the way people can engage with content and make a contribution to social discussion topics, like crisis events. The voice of journalism and the voice of ordinary people can furthermore determine how other people think and feel emotionally engaged to a certain topic. Which is important in

11 relation to involvement-engagement since “emotions effectively guide our actions and decision-making (consciously and unconsciously)” (Turner 38). Martin argued that “negotiating solidarity is a complex process that may involve feelings of different kinds and thus communities with different membership (e.g. affect inviting sympathy on the one hand, versus judgment prescribing disapproval on the other hand)” (327). Martin further claims that by using typical words in the used language, like angry, tragedy, mourning, terrible, and terrorism, assumptions can be made about how to feel towards others, who the bad guys are, and who the victims are. The voice of journalism and the voice of ordinary people are, in the contemporary landscape of social media, often shared in the original or modified form on social network sites, which can lead to online mourning unknown others. How platforms, like social network sites, offer a stage for user engagement is discussed in the next subchapter.

1.2 ENGAGEMENT FACILITATED BY THE TECHNICITY OF PLATFORMS Platforms facilitate engagement through the technicity of grammars of action and affordances. “Each platform implements an intricate scheme of coding and branding strategies to shape specific niches of online sociality” (Van Dijck 41). Since certain platforms, like social media sites, can only work properly with user-generated content, it is necessary that the possibilities are there to encourage user activity and engagement. Developers of the platforms focus on this aspect as Gerlitz & Helmond argued. “Developers can create apps and buttons that allow users to perform any custom action on any web object. The expansion is driven by the desire to enable more social web engagement” (Gerlitz & Helmond 2). Platforms, like Facebook, have next to the purpose of making the platform social, also a commercial purpose. Both purposes are explained on the basis of the concepts grammars of action and affordances.

Grammars of action: the captivity and structuring of activities Grammars of action enables platforms to use the input for measuring and structuring user activity. This process could lead to certain behaviours and activities on platforms, like showing solidarity in moments of mourning. Philip Agre has discussed the concept of grammars of action in his text Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy (1994). With this definition, this part will provide a better understanding of how certain user engagement is structured by the platform, due to its character of a tethered appliance. A tethered appliance possesses power due to its built-in technicity which cannot be changed by unauthorised people. This can be explained on the basis of appliancisation.

12 Appliancisation is a concept that Jonathan Zittrain introduced in his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008). Traditional media devices used to be a simple working device with the technology integrated. It had all its functionality in it and users were able to improve and generate it by tinkering with it. Over the years this has changed into a device with network technology in it. The technology can be changed or upgraded from a distance through the network by only the manufacturer of the technology. The consequence is that the user cannot tinker with the technology anymore. “Updates come from only one source, with a model of product development limited to non-user innovation” (Zittrain 106). Zittrain refers to this kind of device as tethered appliances (106). According to Zittrain, “tethered appliances belong to a new class of technology” (106). He defines it as follows: “They are appliances in that they are easy to use, while not easy to tinker with. They are tethered because it is easy for their vendors to change them from afar, long after the devices have left the warehouses and showrooms” (Zittrain 106). The iPhone is such an example of a tethered appliance since they “receive remote updates from the manufacturer, but they generally are not configured to allow anyone else to tinker with them” (Zittrain 106). A tethered appliance appears not only in the physical form of a device, but users can also find it in applications and websites nowadays. Van Dijck refers to Zittrain’s denomination of “appliancisation” when discussing the shift of websites, because although before they “were generally operated as conduits for social activity, the new platforms increasingly turn these conduits into applied services, rendering the Internet easier to use but more difficult to tinker with” (Van Dijck 6). Van Dijck refers furthermore explicitly to social media platforms as being part of this development. “Social media platforms, as they are now commonly called, epitomise the larger conversion from all-purpose devices to linear applied services” thus Van Dijck (6). There are, naturally, some changes that come with this development. The tethered appliances are becoming easier to use, and because of their updates they are constantly improving, but at the same time they “are much more powerful than traditional appliances” (Zittrain 107). Furthermore, an appliance will only work properly as long as the maker allows it to. The consequence, according to Zittrain, is that “appliances become contingent: rented instead of owned, even if one pays up front for them, since they are subject to instantaneous revision” (Zittrain 107). Although Zittrain explained it comprehensively, not much has been written about the concept of appliancisation and it can be enlarged in the field of social network sites. One of the options that tethered appliances have to structure activities and maintain a certain power, is through adding and changing the grammars of action to their functions on the platform.

13 Grammars of action is a certain software system that is based on specific algorithms that translate or ‘grammatise’ the input into a meaningful output that organise human activity. Philip Agre argues that “each employs formal “languages” for representing human activities. Human activities is thus effectively treated as a kind of language itself, for which a good representation scheme provides an accurate grammar. This grammar specifies a unitary action” (106-107). Agre continues saying that “what matters in each case is not the sequences of “inputs” to or “outputs” from a given machine, but rather the ways in which human activities have been structured” (107). But, as Agre argued, if (new) human activities are not able to be grammatised by the system, then these activities need to be structured into an activity that can be grammatised (108). In this way human activities are being structured into new forms of activities by platforms due to grammars of action, which could lead to new or other kinds of user engagement on platforms. To perform grammars of action, the human activities need to be captured, in order to serve as the input. For this reason grammars of action are associated with privacy related topics. Agre connects the concept grammars of action to two models of privacy, namely the surveillance model and the capture model. The first one, the surveillance model is a model that is about being watched, visibly and invisibly. Agre defined this model as “currently dominant in the public discourse of at least the English-speaking world, is build upon visual metaphors and derives from historical experiences of secret police surveillance” (101). Agre also compares this model with Orwell’s “Big Brother is watching you” (104). The second one, the capture model, is the other model of privacy that Agre discussed in his text. Agre describes ‘capture’ as a term with two uses. “The first and most frequent refers to a computer system’s (figurative) act of acquiring certain data as input, whether from a human operator or from an electronic or electromechanical device” (Agre 105). Agre continues with “the second use of “capture,” which is more common in artificial intelligence research, refers to a representation scheme’s ability to fully, accurately, or “cleanly” express particular semantic notions or distinctions, without reference to the actual taking-in of data” (105). To define the grammar of action for platforms, and Facebook in particular, this research is mainly interested in the captivity of human activity. The captivity of grammatised activity has for Facebook a social value, but also a commercial value. “Facebook has shaped sociality at the same time and by the same means as it has been shaped by technological advances, legal codes, and market forces” as Van Dijck argued (65). This claim is explained on the basis of the Like button as a feature which is integrated with grammars of action. The Like button on Facebook is described by Van Dijck

14 as “a feature that lets users express their instant approval of a specific idea or item and share it” (Van Dijck 49). It was introduced by Facebook in 2009, after they noticed that reactions in the form of comments were hard to rate, hard to grammatise (Facebook - “I like this”). This new form of saying ‘I like this’, contributes by changing previous behaviours of saying ‘Awesome’, but also ‘So sad’ into ‘Like’ with a click on the Like button, which changed the way how people can show engagement in a changing architecture of the platform. However, as Facebook noticed, not everything is likeable; sometimes users wish to dislike the content in times of mourning for example. Subsequently, Facebook expanded on the 24th of February, 2016, the Like button under comments with multiple Reaction features. With this, “Mark Zuckerberg had finally conceded that the platform needed a more nuanced way for users to interact with posts, for the obvious reason that not every post in likeable” (Stinson). Now a like can be a simple ‘Like’, but also a ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, or ‘Angry’ Reaction, by clicking on the fitted emoji button. “Facebook decided to focus on the sentiments its users expressed most often” (Stinson). A ‘Like’ can now be categorised into these six options, when doing research into the social engagement of users on Facebook. But moreover, the human activity of clicking on the Like button is now even better to grammatise than before, by Facebook, with the multiple Reaction features. However, it is overall still the total number of clicks on the Like button, as before, that shows the “social activity that can be performed on most shared objects within Facebook, such as status updates, photos, links or comments” (Gerlitz & Helmond 5). The Like button, in its original form, is not only present in the surroundings of Facebook, but it is also present on external websites as a link to Facebook. The Like button and other social buttons are becoming important when the social activity needs to be measured. Ksiazek et al. already mentioned, in relation to user engagement, that “as digital platforms afford us greater ability to track behaviour in more subtle ways, we can disentangle popularity and interactivity, examine the relationship between them, and better understand these alternative measures of engagement” (Ksiazek et al. 5). Gerlitz & Helmond argue that “hits and links function as central measurements for user engagement” (2). They claim “that what is in the making, is not only a social web, but also a recentralised, data-intensive infrastructure which we conceptualise as a ‘Like economy’” (Gerlitz & Helmond 2). In the Like economy it is Facebook that is “seen as the emerging agent of the social web” (Helmond). Helmond explained this further with the idea that “the company’s recent effort to make the entire web experience more social marks the advent of a different type of economy which is based on social indexing of the web”. Social indexing is established through liking,

15 commenting, sharing, and by using other social buttons. With a simple click a user can share his ‘like’ with his friends on Facebook who can do the same in turn. Each like and each hit has economic value to Facebook, but also the third parties who buy this captivity of grammatised activities (Van Dijck 47). Furthermore with this data, Facebook is able to improve certain connectedness on their platform, which can “empower and enriching social experiences” (Van Dijck 47). One way of doing so, is by “engineering and manipulating connections” as an automated system (Van Dijck 12). “In order to be able to recognise what people want and like, Facebook and other platforms track desires by coding relationships between people, things, and ideas into algorithms” (Van Dijck 12). This eventually leads to the development of “tools to create and steer specific needs” (Van Dijck 12). Tools such as the Like button contribute furthermore to the socialisation on Facebook and the connectedness of humans, something that Van Dijck calls human connectedness (11- 12). Each ‘like’ is being seen “as a shortcut to commenting in order to replace short affective statements” (Gerlitz & Helmond 5). The Like button is in this respect a button that contributes to social connectivity, but also to the commercial part of Facebook which can be found in the grammars of the button. With the provision of the Like button, the platform structured user engagement into a simple act that contributes to social activities of users, and to the commercial part of Facebook. However, there are more ways to structure activities. “Underlying these features are proprietary algorithms” like Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm (Van Dijck 49). To support personal activities, and thereby the grammars, platforms like Facebook are making use of ranking systems, specially created for their own service. These ranking systems consist of algorithms to structure human activity by giving a personalised updating flow of, among others, posts of friends, groups the user joined, Pages the user liked or friends are liking, to make suggestions and to support users to make use of their grammars integrated in their platform. The News Feed Algorithm ensures that each user sees a personalised News Feed and “it determines which of your connections is the most important to you and thus appears most frequently, and which kinds of content should appear higher than others” (Newman n. pag.). The News Feed Algorithm, in the case of Facebook, forms the underlying structure of features like the Like button. For this reason platforms cannot be seen as only facilitating platforms, since they contribute to the process of making certain choices in their environment. Van Dijck argues that “it is a common fallacy, though, to think of platforms as merely facilitating networking activities; instead, the construction of platforms and social practices is mutually constitutive” (6). Van Dijck sees platforms furthermore as “the

16 providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into computational architecture” (29). This can be done since the platforms “process (meta) data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with default settings that reflect the platform owner’s strategic choices” (Van Dijck 29). Through the personalised News Feed users are encouraged more to like things, and to use the features with integrated grammars, like the Like button for instance, more often. Another way platforms structure certain activities is by using multiple affordances, which are structuring and encouraging the users to use the grammars of the platform, as well as structuring the normative claim of the platform.

Affordances structure the normative claim of the platform Affordances structure user activities into the grammars of the platform. These affordances contribute to the field of analysing interfaces as discursive interface with taking “a critical perspective attentive to unequal power between industry and site visitors” (Stanfill 1062). Each site produces a different normative claim which can be revealed through untangling the different affordances that are built in the interface. These affordances eventually structure user engagement in the direction of the grammars of the platforms. To define affordances, this research is based on the theory of Stanfill (2015), Norman (1999), and Hartson (2003). An affordance is used in software studies to refer to the relationship between the actor, in this case the human, and the computer, also defined as the human-computer interaction (Hartson 315). In 1999 Norman made a distinction between perceived affordances and real affordances to imply that not all affordances are the same (41). Perceived affordances are, according to Norman, “visual feedback that advertise the affordances” (40). A perceived affordance is visible on the screen. It “is about characteristics in the appearance of a device that gives clues for its proper operation” (Hartson 316). Real affordances, on the other hand, “do not always have to have a visible presence (and in some cases, it is best to hide the real affordance)” (Norman 40). A real affordance is furthermore “about physical characteristics of a device or interface that allow its operation” (Hartson 316). Hartson built further on Norman’s idea, but instead of perceived and real affordances she is using cognitive affordance (instead of perceived) and physical affordance (instead of real) along with two others, sensory affordance and functional affordance to conceptualise interactive design. Hartson approaches affordances “as an attribute of an interaction design feature is what that feature offers the user, what it provides or furnishes” (316). This approach is used by Stanfill as well, while discussing that interfaces can be seen as a discourse. Although Stanfill is using

17 affordances to build on his claim, he is eventually using three of the four affordances of Hartson to untangle discursive designed interfaces, namely functional affordance, cognitive affordance, and sensory affordance. How can the functional affordance be defined? To answer that question, another simple question can be asked: “what functionality does the site have” (Stanfill 1063)? The functional affordance focuses on the functionality and technological structure of a site and seeks to find an answer to “what a site can actually do” (Stanfill 1063). In some cases the user can download content from a site, in some cases content is only readable, or on some sites, the users can copy/paste content. These functions are part of the functional affordances and “produce norms, as allowing this and not that implies that Users ought to do this and not that, demonstrating how power is productive” (Stanfill 1063). The cognitive affordance focuses on how the interface is part of cognitive sense making by its users. It focuses on “how Users know what a site can do” and it “facilitates processing information, and is therefore closely tied to the social act of meaning-making” (Stanfill 1063). Often the name of a website and how the menu is labelled implies what a user can expect from it. Moreover, cognitive affordance can be facilitated by imperative verbs or by using Louis Althusser’s interpellation theory from 1971 (Stanfill 1063). When using sentences like “Hey, you there”, users could feel addressed and will know what to do (Stanfill 1063). The last one, sensory affordance, is focusing on the layout of the site. It can be “analysed through visibility, legibility, and audibility” (Stanfill 1064). Some parts of an interface are more visible in size than others, while another part is more visible in terms of colour and sound and would get more attention than other parts. These elements are facilitated in the sensory affordances since it “enables the user in sensing (e.g., seeing, hearing, feeling) something” (Stanfill 1063). The sensory affordance arranges furthermore how important the commercial part of a site is. This can be studied, for instance, through looking on how present the advertisements are on a site. It is in this way that sensory affordance is discursive; it tells the users what is important and where the attention should go to. This research builds on the ideas of affordances to subject Facebook to a discursive interface analysis. It agrees with Stanfill’s claim that interfaces can be seen as a discourse and with his distinction between the different affordances in an interface. However, this is a relatively new theory and has experienced few academic elaborations so far, at least not publicly. Furthermore, Stanfill is focusing on non-social network sites. This research

18 contributes to this missing aspect, and claims that affordances on social network sites can be more intertwined with each other than on the sites discussed by Stanfill.

In conclusion, this theoretical framework has discussed how involvement-engagement is facilitated by users and how external factors, like convergent journalism, are playing an important role by creating solidarity and eventually mourning. Furthermore this framework showed how engagement is being structured by platforms which can be seen as tether appliances, while discussing grammars of action and affordances. However, none of the above studies were implicit about user engagement on Facebook in the aftermath of any crisis event. They give, nevertheless, a clear image of how engagement can be defined, but not in particular what kind of engagement is facilitated on social network sites in the aftermath of crisis events. This research will seek to find a concept that includes the characteristics of engagement, but is a typical form of social engagement in the aftermath of crisis events. Before this research will move to the case study, the next chapter will discuss the methodology used in this research.

2. METHODOLOGY: ANALYSING DATA OF FACEBOOK PAGES For this research, two cases have been studied with the related research question: How is social engagement facilitated on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events? There are two recent terrorist attacks chosen for this research, namely the Paris attacks on November 13, 2015, and the Brussels attacks on March 22, 2016. These two have been chosen for several reasons. After the Paris attacks a lot of people were talking about it on social network sites. On Twitter the hashtag #porteouverte was used in Paris at the night of the attacks, to let people know they could take shelter in their houses. On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook the post of Jean Julien of the Eiffel Tower in a peace sign with the text Peace for Paris, as shown in Figure 1, went viral (Gonzalez n. pag.). Soon many users took over and changed the name Peace for Paris into Pray for Paris, but the image remained more or less the same. It was eventually the hashtag #prayforparis that has been shared the most by the users, whether or not in combination with the picture, to show their support (Laurent). On Facebook a lot of groups and community pages were created with the name Pray for Paris. A few months later, on March 22, 2016, something comparable happened for Brussels. The hashtag #prayforbrussels was shared a lot and Facebook groups and communities with the name Pray for Brussels were created. To make a stronger argument, this research focuses on both events

19 to make a comparison. Although the Paris and Brussels attacks eventually did not have the same size, the attacks are comparable with each other since they were both carried out by the Islamic State while they were pursuing the same aim, they happened within a relatively short period of time from each other, Paris and Brussels are both capitals, it was world news, and in both cases national and international civilians became victims as a result of the attacks.

Figure 1: Peace for Paris sign, made by Jean Julien. (Screenshot of the Peace for Paris sign on Instagram). Source: Instagram, user jean_jullien.

Subsequently, this research pays attention to the groups and community pages with the name Pray for Paris and Pray for Brussels. Why Facebook, and why did this research choose these groups and community pages? Facebook is, besides being one of the biggest social network sites, also a platform with a lot of different engagement possibilities that have been made possible by the architecture of the platform. Furthermore, at the same time it was Facebook that introduced adapted (temporary) features for the first time for France after the Paris attacks in November that were designed for crisis events (Charlton n. pag.). For this reason Facebook forms an interesting platform to measure and analyse the social engagement in the aftermath of the discussed terrorist attacks. To measure the social engagement, this research focuses on how users facilitate engagement and how engagement is structured by the platform. This is done on Facebook’s community Pages and in groups, which are related to the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks. They are a fitted and interesting way of measuring and analysing social engagement

20 during crisis events, since they form an environment where people are gathered with others. A Facebook community Page or group tells something about the possibilities Facebook offers in general, its architecture, but also how the possibilities and architecture are being used in specific cases. It is, however, important to note that users can create multiple Pages with different characteristics on Facebook to organise a gathering between users. A Page can be created for a “local business or place; company, organisation or institution; brand or product; artist, band or public figure; entertainment; or cause or community” (Facebook – Create a Page). Since this research focuses on how people react and engage after crisis events, a community Page fits the profile. Beside Pages, users can also create groups. A group differs from Pages in its architecture and how the focus is concentrated on different kinds of content. The purpose of a group is creating a gathering between users as well. Besides a community Page, a group also fits the profile for this research. In the continuation of this research, when referring both to the community Page as to the group, the term ‘pages’ is used. To narrow this research down, all the available data of two Facebook community Pages and two Facebook groups is collected. One community Page and one group dedicated to the Paris attacks and one community Page and one group to the Brussels attack. These pages are selected out of many other pages that were created in the aftermath of the attacks. The selection criteria for these pages had firstly to do with the name they carry, Pray for Paris and Pray for Brussels, as explained earlier. The popularity of the name is visible in the numbers of the created Facebook pages with the same name and the same purpose. The second criterion is that the pages are a community Page or a group. This criterion is because both kinds of pages differ in the options users have and the architecture of the page. This will discussed in the sequel of this research. The third criterion is that the page is public; everyone should be able to join the community Page or group. Fourth, the amount of users that joined the group or liked the community Page is important. These four pages are the largest in their section. And the last criterion is that all these four pages were created the day of the attacks or the day after. Since the Paris attacks happened in the evening, most pages were created the day after. The Brussels attacks happened in the morning, so most pages were created on the day itself. The two Facebook community Pages and the two Facebook groups that are finally selected are visible in Table 11 below.

1 The data has been extracted on April 8th, 2016.

Table 1: The four selected Facebook pages, related to the Paris and Brussels attacks. (Displayed with the characteristics of name, date of creation, if it is a group or community, and the amount of members/likes the pages received). Source: Facebook.

To perform this study, this research will make use of the platform studies and the digital methods approach. It will use furthermore the related digital methods tool Netvizz to extract data from Facebook. Excel and Wizard are used to visualise and order the data when analysing. Infogr.am and Snagit will be subsequently used to visualise the findings into graphs, tables, and images. They all form the method of this research and will be discussed first, before going further to the case study. To start with, defining platform studies.

2.1 PLATFORM STUDIES Platform studies focuses on computational platforms and is defined as “a set of approaches which investigate the underlying computer systems that support creative work” (Bogost and Montfort 1). Platform studies examines the foundation of platforms, how they function and how technological parts stand in relation to social and cultural elements. “The approach recognises that not only the user’s experience, but also interface, form and function, code, and platform, are fully embedded in culture” (Bogost and Montfort 6). From this perspective, this research will examine the ontological status and distinctiveness of Facebook. This research is interested in how Facebook facilitated user engagement in times of mourning and what the platform specifics were in the aftermath of the crisis events. For this reason, this research will use platform studies to discuss and perform a Facebook discursive interface analysis, which uses the theory of affordances and grammars of action to do so. From this position, this research will use platform studies as a theoretical and methodological approach. This discursive interface analysis “provides a research tool to improve understanding of how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications” (Stanfill 1060). Based on Stanfill’s claim that interfaces can be seen as a

22 discourse, this discursive interface analysis is “examining the assumptions built into interfaces as the normative or ‘correct’ or path of least resistance - though, like all norms, this is not deterministically guaranteed in the actual encounter with a site visitor” (Stanfill 1060).

2.2 DIGITAL METHODS The other method that is being used is digital methods. The overall aim of digital methods “is to rework methods for Internet-related research” (Rogers 19). From this approach this method wants “to diagnose cultural change and societal conditions by means of the Internet” (Rogers 21). In the digital methods approach it is the Internet that is used as a source to work with. In this particular case, it is Facebook that will be used as a source to determine the cultural change and societal conditions that are made on the platform in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks. By collecting data from Facebook, this research seeks to repurpose the output. By means of digital methods, this research follows the term online groundedness that has been introduced “to conceptualise research that follows the medium, captures its dynamics, and makes grounded claims about cultural and societal change” (Rogers 23). By using digital methods, this research examines, besides ontological distinctiveness, also the epistemology of the platform. To start, the data needs to be extracted from the four Facebook pages. Something that Wilson et al. defined as data crawling: “gleaning information about users from their profiles without their active participation” (Wilson et al. 215). This research is using the digital methods tool, Netvizz, to extract data from the selected pages and “facilitate this latter approach” (Rieder n pag). Netvizz is a tool “that allows researchers to generate data files in standard formats for different sections of the Facebook social networking service without having to resort to manual collecting or custom programming” (Rieder n. pag). Thanks to the use of Netvizz, the user engagement on Facebook can be examined and mapped.

2.2.1 NETVIZZ Netvizz is a digital methods technique that specifically works with the data of Facebook. It extracts data from specific groups, pages, pages network connected through likes, searches, or link stats dependent on the input that fits the research purpose. It is important that the specific data is publicly available for the Facebook user as researcher, since Netvizz can only extract what is public and accessible on Facebook. For this research, the option ‘page data’ is interesting. It “creates networks and tabular files for user activity around posts on pages” (Netvizz n. pag.). In “this way, one can not only detect the most active users, but also identify

23 the posts that produced the highest amount of engagement” (Rieder n. pag). To compare the data and the social engagement with each other, the timetable of all the pages should be the same. Since the Brussels attacks was later than the one in Paris, the timetable is unequal. To equalise this, only the data that is in the timeframe of the first 14 days after the attacks, is extracted. Although the Paris attacks happened on the evening of November 13th, 2015, and the first news items reported on the attacks on the 13th, the impact became clear in the night of 13 on 14 November. Furthermore the Pages were created on the 14th of November. For this reason the timeframe of Paris is: 14 November 2015 up to and including 27 November 2015. The Brussels attacks happened in the morning of March 22nd, 2016, and the Brussels pages were created on the same day. The timeframe of Brussels is: 22 March 2016 up to and including 4 April 2016. In this way we retrieved four datasets, with 149 posts (Pray For Paris Community Page), 10 posts (Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group), 87 posts (Pray For Brussels Community Page), and 15 posts (Pray for brussels Group).

Data Pray For Paris Community Page On the 6th of April, 2016, the community had 23.322 likes of users and 12 people who were talking about this community. With this number of likes it became the biggest community of this section at the date of study. However at June 23, 2016, the community had 23.103 likes left from out of 45 different countries. The most of them, 20.477, are from France. The second most are with 498 members, from Canada. Belgium follows with 399 members. Since this community was created the day after, the extracted data contains data of 14 days started at the 14th of November. The data of November 14th, 2015, up and till November 27th, 2015, are extracted with Netvizz. In the first two weeks, Netvizz retrieved in total 149 posts. In this time period, the community received data of 71.617 likes on posts by users, and 87.781 comments on posts. Of the 149 post, 70 of them contains a photo, 38 a video, 28 contains a status, and 13 were links. The most of these 149 posts were published by the users, namely 106 posts. The rest, 43 posts, were published by the community itself.

Data Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group By the time this research was performed, the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group counted 169 members. With this number of members, the group became the biggest in this section. However, at June 23, 2016, this group had 166 members left. Netvizz extracted the data from the 14th up and till the 27th of November, 2015. In these 14 days, Netvizz retrieved 10 posts in total. This includes 4 photo posts, 2 video posts, 2 status posts, and 2 link posts.

24 Data Pray For Brussels Community Page On the 6th of April, 2016, this community had 24.205 likes and 31 people who were talking about this community. With this number of likes, it is the biggest Page in this section, but also the biggest Page in this research at the date of study. Though, on the June 23, 2016 the community had 23.937 likes left. The users behind the like are originated from 45 different countries. The community received the most likes, 14.315 likes, from out of France. The second most likes are from users out of Belgium. Reunion follows with 305 likes. The attacks took place on the 22nd of March, 2016, at the same day this community was created. The extracted data contains data of 14 days started at the 22nd of March up and till the 4th of April, 2016. In these first two weeks, Netvizz retrieved in total 87 posts. Of the 87 post, 38 of them contains a photo, 13 a video, 26 a status, 9 were links, and 1 an event. The most of these 87 posts were published by the users, namely 59 posts. The rest, 28 posts, were published by the community itself.

Data Pray for brussels Group The Pray for brussels Group counted 75 members. With this number of members, the group became the biggest in this section. However, at June 23, 2016, this group had 72 members left. Netvizz extracted data from the 22nd of March up and till the 4th of April, 2016. Netvizz received 15 posts in total. This includes 6 photo posts, 1 video post, 7 status posts, and 1 link post. All these posts are sorted under ‘posted by user’. However, the post are manual divided between posts published by the admin and published by other users. 10 posts were made by the admin, the other 5 were published by other users.

These posts will be further categorised and analysed by their content and popularity. A distinction will be made between most ‘liked’ and most ‘commented’ posts to analyse the posts. Thanks to this tool, the qualitative and quantitative aspects of pages can be examined. It is, however, important to note that the Like button changed in between the attacks. At the time of the Paris attacks, the Like button was only a ‘Like’ emotive icon. But at the time of the Brussels attacks, users could choose between more emotive icons, namely ‘Like’, ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, and ‘Angry’, when clicking on that same button. The extracted data will be revealed in the next chapter. When reading this research, keep in mind that the data was extracted on the 6th of April, 2016. It is possible that the data has changed since it was first published. Comments or posts could be removed for instance. The extracted data will be visualised with the help of the following tools.

The other tools: Wizard, Excel, Infogr.am, and Snagit Wizard is software that is able to order .tsv files into a clear and visible overview. Microsoft Excel offers this functionality as well. Both are used to order and visualise the data that is retrieved by Netvizz. Within a few steps, data can be ordered by type and date of publishing for instance. This improves the process of study. Infogr.am is an online website where users can make infographics and interactive online charts (Infogr.am). The data, that will be extracted with Netvizz, will be made visible in the graphs and charts. This provides a better overview of how the data is connected to the research. The graphs and charts will be filled in on the website before being added to this research. Snagit is software that enables users to make a screenshot of their desktop, or parts of it, and to edit it afterwards. Furthermore, Snagit enables the user to make images or videos. The software is mainly used in this research to highlight the discussed features of Facebook.

3. ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK AND THE FOUR PAGES The terror attacks in Paris and Brussels came as a unpleasant surprise. It soon became ecstatic news. It was on the television channels, the radio, newspapers and online news websites. There were live blogs, which did report 24/7 about the attacks. For instance, Elgot et al. did report on a liveblog for the Guardian about the Paris attacks, and Lawson did report in a liveblog about the Brussels attacks. Footage was repeatedly viewed and re-mediated. Some of the footage was recorded by ordinary people, even by survivors, and other footage was made by journalists. It was however an alternation of different kind of images, and an alternation of ordinary voices and voices of experts that appeared in the news. Soon the liveblogs started to use certain words, like terror, attack, victims, time of mourning, IS, threat, and barbaric. And with these first images and words, the emotional assumptions could be already made, according to Martin (327). How these emotions were reflected in social engagement on Facebook will be discussed in this chapter, which gives a critical analysis of the four cases: the Pray For Paris Community Page, the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group, the Pray For Brussels Community Page, and the Pray for brussels Group. This chapter will untangle how Facebook is able to structure user engagement on the platform by offering different architectures for different purposes. On the basis of affordances and grammars of action, the focus lies on the norms

26 and assumptions that Facebook built into the interface to make engagement possible in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks. Moreover, this part will be embedded with an examination of how the users made use of Facebook in times of mourning in the aftermath of the attacks and what the notable characteristics of the engagement are. While doing so, this chapter will work towards answering the research question: How is the social engagement facilitated on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events?

3.1 GRAMMARS AND ENGAGEMENT IN THE AFTERMATH As the Paris and Brussels attacks took place unexpectedly, Facebook was at that time organised in the same way as it was the moments before: as a social network site, and moreover as a non-grief-specific site. Nevertheless, Facebook offered the users a platform where they could react in multiple ways to the terror attacks. As a reaction to these terror attacks users showed engagement by joining groups and liking community Pages. Furthermore, after the Paris attacks, Facebook added two features as a reaction to the event. To start with defining how the users engage on the four pages. Although the terror attacks already took place and there was no way this disaster could be undone, many users felt the need to engage with others, in the relatively public spaces of Facebook, in a time of mourning. While analysing the four pages, it became clear that the pages had the characteristics of intentional memorialising, however, there were remarkable characteristics of the social engagement which will be discussed in three parts. The first part will discuss the big difference between the community Pages and the Groups. The second part will discuss actual engagement in times of mourning on the pages. And the last part will discuss the disengagement of the users.

The difference between the community Pages and the groups To start with the first point, as many users liked the biggest community Page in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, namely 23.322, relatively few users joined the biggest group, namely 169. This was also notable in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks: 24.205 users liked the biggest community Page, but only 75 users joined the biggest group. The reason for this can, at first, be found in the different architecture of a community Page and the group, which reflect the functions of these pages as described by Facebook. A community Page is described as “a Page about an organisation, celebrity or topic that it doesn’t officially represent” that can only be created by users who are an official representative (Facebook - Help Centre n. pag.). A group, on the other hand, can be created by any user and its function

27 is to “provide a space for people to communicate about shared interests” (Facebook - Help Centre n. pag.). Both definitions are visible in the four cases. How a community Page and a group differ from each other becomes already clear in the way people initially show their engagement to these pages, structured by Facebook’s functions. In the case of community Pages, users are liking the Page (see Figure 2). This is moreover not required on the Pray For Paris and Pray For Brussels Community Pages to show further engagement as a visitor. But when liking the Page, the user starts to receive updates in their News Feed of posts published by the Page, unless they adjust their settings.

Figure 2: The Like button on the Cover Photo on the Pray For Paris Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

In the case of groups, users are becoming a member if they press the ‘+ Join group’ button (see Figure 3). Any update that occurs in the group will be visible on the member's News Feed unless they adjust their settings. Although the activity in the form of clicking on a button is the same in the act, both buttons differ for Facebook as an organised human activity but also in its cognitive expression for users. A ‘Like’ implies someone’s interests with no further expectation for participation, while a ‘+ Join group’ already implies more participation after the user presses the button.

Figure 3: The ‘+ Join group’ button in the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group.

The admins of the pages are the second main difference between the community Pages and the groups. As Facebook predetermined for pages in general, there are admins on the Pray For Paris Community Page, and on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. The admin is also known as the administrator or creator of the Page. It is however, for both community Pages, unknown who the admins are, since they decided to stay anonymous. In both cases they publish posts under the name of the community on the Pages. The admins of the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 and Pray for brussels Group are, on the other hand, known. The admin of the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group is Sean Andrew Robson. According to his Facebook profile, Robson is a nineteen-year-old, British male who is still living in the UK. The admin of the Pray for brussels Group is Fem van de Frisse. Van de Frisse is, according to her Facebook profile, an under age Belgian girl who speaks Dutch/Flemish. The both young admins give the impression that the groups form a more unprofessional, young gathering compared to the anonymous admins on the community Page. Something that is mainly reflected in the Pray for brussels Group, where the admin is not that consistent with the use of proper spelling and punctuation. The third main difference between community Pages and groups is the fact that both offer the user a different layout, with different features. It is the admins of the community Pages, who “very much set the agenda for interaction on the page” (Poell et al. 7). The admin is responsible for the settings of the Page, he can delete the page or the posts, he can remove members of the Page, accept or decline new members, add advertisements, add applications,

29 and edit the Page. Although the Pages are in default public, the admins “can set country restrictions and age restrictions to control who can see and like” the Page (Facebook - Help Centre n.pag.). But, as the visitors of the Pages show, both communities are public. The admin can furthermore “control publishing preferences and proactively moderate content” in the settings (Facebook - Help Centre n. pag.). This determines mainly the level of engagement on a Page. The sensory affordance, subsequently, ensures that the admin’s posts are more visible in the layout than the visitors’ posts (see Figure 4). The layout of the Page’s interface is organised so that the posts of the admin are more prominent in size and place compared to the comments of users on the admin’s post or compared to the posts published by visitors. “Admin posts, displayed on the Page Timeline, are directly visible to users. By contrast, user comments, except for the last few, can only be accessed through further clicking” (Poell et al. 7). This makes the visitors’ comments inferior to the posts of the admin. And since the visitors' posts are placed under the Visitor Posts section, which the admins in both cases allowed, and not on the Timeline, the visitors’ posts are looking less relevant on the left side of the Page. The admins decided furthermore that photos and videos published by the visitors should not appear immediately under the Photos and Videos section on the Page. Only the photos of the visitors are visible if the user clicks further. An additional action is thus required. The admins can also decide “to review the posts of other people before they’re shown” (Facebook - Help Centre n. pag.). But how this was organised during the timeframe is not clear. However, the architecture of the community Page and the settings of the admins did result in limited engagement possibilities for the visitors of the Page during the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks. Moreover, these functional and sensory affordances enable the admin to structure user engagement and to structure the kind of mourning that occur on the Page. Although Robson and Van der Frisse are carrying the same title as the anonymous admins in the community Pages, the admins in groups are less decisive. The admin is, however, also responsible for the settings of the group. The setting of a group is by default public, but can be changed into closed, and even secret. In this case both groups are public. This means that the groups and their content are available for every user. Each user is also allowed to join the groups, without the admin’s permission. Besides that, the user does not have to be a Facebook friend of the administrator or any other member. However, members can be removed from the group by the admin.

Figure 4: The posts of the admins on the Timeline vs. the posts of the visitors under Visitor posts on a community Page. (Visitors posts in green and admin posts in red). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

31 In these groups the posts are all equal to each other and appear in one single chronological row without any distinction. The posts appear under the layer of Discussion, which is due to the layout most visible in the group (see Figure 5). The comments on the posts are attached to the posts, the last few are visible and the rest of the comments can be made visible by further clicking as well. All the published photo posts can be retrieved by clicking on ‘Photos’. Members can further share files and events with the other members. With these characteristics, the groups are offering a more equal way to show engagement in times of mourning in comparison to the community Pages.

Figure 5: The posts of all members in a group under Discussion. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Group.

32 But with this discussed, the next questions are coming up: In what way did the users engage in these predetermined architectures of community Pages and groups in times of mourning? How can this be characterised?

Engagement in times of mourning Each of the four pages formed an intentional memorialising surrounding, which was made visible by their admins through the Cover Photo, their name, and in case of the community pages, the Profile Picture. After the users started their engagement process by liking the Page, or joining the group, what happened? At first, the users including the admins, gave shape to the time of mourning by sharing most of all photos. Photos are the most shared type of post by each of the four cases, which have been made visible in Figures 6.a, b, c and d.

Figure 6.a: Type of post on the Pray For Paris Community Page. (149 posts divided in the types of appearance shown in percents between 14/11/2015 - 27/11/2015). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

Figure 6.b: Type of post on the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group. (10 posts divided in the types of appearance shown in percents between 14/11/2015 - 27/11/2015). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group.

Figure 6.c: Type of post on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. (87 posts divided in the types of appearance shown in percents between 22/03/2016 - 04/04/2016). Source: Facebook, Pray For Brussels Community Page.

Figure 6.d: Type of post on the Pray for brussels Group. (15 posts divided in the types of appearance shown in percents between 22/03/2016 - 04/04/2016). Source: Facebook, Pray for brussels Group.

The photos contain mainly characteristics of nationalism, solidarity, indirect violence, and actualities. The nationalistic mood was created by most of the photos, containing the colours of the French or Belgian flag and typical French or Belgian elements like the Eiffel Tower and the Manneken Pis statue. Solidarity was created through the photos of hearts, tears, and images of people who were mourning and were showing love and peace (see Figure 8 for an example). The indirect violence was created by photos which contain rockets (see Figure 7 for an example), or a drawing of the Manneken Pis statue who is peeing on terrorists (see Figure 9 for an example). The actualities are reflected in many published photos. Many photos that turned up in the news, taken by journalists and ordinary people, were re-mediated by the users and published on the pages. These photos contain images of the victims, of survivors, and of the terrorists (see Figure 10 for an example). However, the user-content, and the user-user interactivity as a reaction to these posts differ on each page. As discussed before, the admins of the community Pages are mainly responsible for the kind of topics that appear on the Pages, and how the Page is organised as an intentional memorialising, non-grief-specific site. It is the admins who are providing the visitors of the Page with the most visible information, social interaction, and entertainment to motivate visitors to show engagement which may support the multi-directional flow on the Page. On the Pray For Paris Community Page this resulted in 149 posts in total of which 43 posts were published by the admins. These posts received more engagement than the 106 posts published by visitors, which is not surprising due to the layout. But, as there were

35 23.222 likes, only a few visitors decided to engage in their initiative, since the Page only received 106 visitor posts. The most engaged post, published by the admins, is a photo post published on the 15th of November 2016. The photo, visible in Figure 7, shows some indirect violence by showing rockets with the text “From Paris with love”. It comes with the following description: “From Paris with love”: les Américains ont largué un cadeau à l’État islamique ce matin. This is loosely translated as “From Paris with love”: the Americans have dumped a gift to the Islamic State this morning. The photo received 37.289 likes, 3.942 immediate comments, and was shared 16.030 times. The most users react positively in their comments to this photo. In contrast with this engagement to an admin post, the most engaged post published by a visitor received 286 likes, 7 comments, and 39 shares. The photo, visible in Figure 8, was published on the 16th of November by the user Ines Cottin. The photo, with caption “Un hommage du Lycee Aiguerande pour toutes les victimes #PrayForParis”, shows people who created a peace sign by standing in the right position. However, this engagement with a visitor post is remarkably high compared to the second most engaged visitor post on the Pray For Paris Community Page, which received 44 likes (see Figure 8). And, moreover, compared to most visitor posts of the Pray for Paris Community Page, which did not receive any form of engagement during the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Figure 7: The most engaged post published by the admins of the Pray For Paris Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

Figure 8: The most engaged post published by a visitor of the Pray For Paris Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page, Ines Cottin.

Figure 9: The second most engaged post published by a visitor of the Pray For Paris Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page, Anouk Vazzoler.

The same thing happened on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. Also the admins of this Page were in the position to support the multi-directional flow on the Page and to motivate the visitors for more interaction. Although the Page did receive 24.205 likes, there were 87 posts published during the first two weeks. The admins published fewer posts, namely 28, compared to the visitors, who published 59 posts. But 59 posts compared to the 24.205 likes, shows that only a few users really did post something. It was furthermore, again, an admin’s post that received the most engagement. The admin published on the 22nd of March, 2016, a photo of the statue of Manneken Pis peeing on an Islamic terrorist (see Figure 10). This post was published initially as a profile photo. It received in total 6.699 likes, 60 immediate comments, and 21.438 shares during the time frame. During this time frame, the Like button was already expanded with more emotive icons. Now users can use Like, Love, Sad, Haha, Angry or Wow. The 6.699 likes is in this case the sum of using all these emotive icons. The

38 Like was, however, with 6.400 Like still the most used emotive icon. The photo received furthermore 135 Love, 113 Sad, 26 Haha, 24 Angry, and 1 Wow. Most comments are supportive to the post, a minority however criticises the photo.

Figure 10: The most engaged post published by the admins on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Brussels Community Post.

The engagement with visitor posts was very low on this Page. Not one post of a normal user received more than 5 forms of engagement. But it was remarkable that other previously created community Pages in memory of the Paris attacks, did tag the Pray For Brussels Community Page in their posts, so that the posts became visible on their own Timeline and under visitor posts on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. The post received for that reason engagement on both Pages (see Figure 11). This could explain the high numbers of engagement. The most engaged visitor post in this case became a photo post published on the 23rd of March, 2016, by the Paris Community Page with the text “Live - # Brussels: 34 dead and 230 injured according to a new interim report -> Pray For Brussels”. The post shows 4 images of the moments after the explosion. The chaos and injured people are clearly visible on the photos. The post received 16.646 likes, 2000 immediate comments, and 21.203 shares within the timeframe. The 16.646 include 9.858 Like, 8 Love, 3453 Sad, 7 Haha, 3.237 Angry, and 83 Wow.

Figure 11: The most engaged post under Visitor Posts published on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. Source: Facebook, Pray For Brussels Community Page.

With these posts and their engagement, it became clear how important the admins are on the community Pages and how they set the mood for other users to engage with the crisis events in a time of mourning. Furthermore, it was remarkable how many users prefer to use Facebook’s grammar buttons, as in the Like button and the Share button, instead of commenting on the content. With these grammar buttons, Facebook did not only organise a way to grammatise the activity, but it also gives the user a more passive function to interact with content in the form of user-content interaction. The user-user interaction through commenting on each other's comments stayed on a low level. The comments were mainly directed towards the content, so any real form of social discussion stayed out. It is furthermore notable that the highest form of engagement took place in the first week after the Pages were created, and mainly in the first three days.

What happened in the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group and Pray for brussels Group? Although the users’ posts are equal to each other and appear under Discussion, the most engaged post in the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group was published by the admin. In contrast to the community Pages, the most engaged post is a status update. This post was published on the 14th of November, 2015, and is visible in Figure 12 including the text of the status. Besides the 9 likes, there is no further activity with this post.

Figure 12: The most engaged post published in the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group. (Status update published by the admin of the group). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group, Sean Andrew Robson.

In the Pray for brussels Group, the most engaged post was a description update post published by the admin under Discussion and under Description. This post, as shown in Figure 13, was published on the 22nd of March, 2016, and received 5 likes (2 Like and 3 Sad), 7 direct comments, and 0 shares. The text is loosely translated as Belgium is solidary with the victim and family.

Figure 13: The most engaged post published in the Pray for brussels Group. (Status update published by the admin of the group). Source: Facebook, Pray for brussels Group, Fem van de Frisse.

Although the post received 7 direct comments, 3 of them are comments published by Van de Frisse. These and the received replies on her comments, resulted in small user-user interaction which was more about adopting the status than creating a discussion. Also in the groups, users did engage rather through the grammar buttons, as in the Like button, than through an own created reaction in the form of a comment. Although groups initially form an online surrounding to share a common interest, the members shared very little with each other and the highest forms of engagement took place on the first day after the groups were created. This brings this research to the next point.

The disengagement stage The users arrived quite soon in a disengagement stage on each of the four pages. Despite most of the users still liking the pages, or still being a member of the group during this research, the extracted data showed that there was less engagement in each case after the first week of the attacks. Moreover, the most engaged posts were posted in the first 7 days. In the second week the engagement stayed pretty low or did not occur at all in the case of the Pray for brussels Group. Also the admins of the Pray for Brussels Community Page did not post anything at all in the second week. The line of engagement is visible in Figure 14.a, b, c, d, e, and f. In case of the community Pages, a distinction has been made between the posts of the admins and the posts of the visitors, since both are separately presented on the Page. As

42 Figure 14.a, c, d, e, and f are showing a relative decreasing line, it is Figure 14.b that shows a more unpredictable line. But, for example, there were still only four different users who posted something under Visitor Post on the 27th of November.

Figure 14.a: The 43 posts published by the admins on Pray For Paris Community Page. (Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing between 14/11/2015 - 27/11/2015). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

Figure 14.b: The 106 posts, published by the visitors on the Pray For Paris Community Page. (Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing. Posted between 14/11/2015 - 27/11/2015). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris Community Page.

Figure 14.c: The 10 posts, published by the members (and admin) in the Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group. (Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing. Posted between 14/11/2015 - 27/11/2015). Source: Facebook, Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group.

Figure 14.d: The 28 posts, published by the admins on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing. Posted between 22/03/2016 - 04/04/2016). Source: Facebook, Pray For Brussels Community Page.

Figure 14.e: The 59 posts, published by the visitors, on the Pray For Brussels Community Page. (Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing. Posted between 22/03/2016 - 04/04/2016). Source: Facebook, Pray For Brussels Community Page.

Figure 14.f: The 15 posts, published by the members (and admin) in the Pray for brussels Group. (Posts are scheduled by type and date of publishing. Posted between 22/03/2016 - 04/04/2016). Source: Facebook, Pray for brussels Group.

As these Figures are showing, most visitors came into a disengagement status after they started the engagement by liking the Pages or joining the groups. This already became clear in the previous part, where the low engagement compared to the likes and members on the pages was discussed. Some users did reengage by placing a like or a comment to a post. But eventually the visitors, the members, and admins entered a disengagement status, since the activity stopped on the pages. A few made the effort to reengage again, only to click on the ‘Dislike’ button in case of the community Pages, or by clicking on the ‘Unfollow Group’ button in case of the groups. With these grammar buttons it is Facebook who can grammar that a user wishes to be disconnected, and no longer wants to receive any updates from the particular Page or group. However due to Facebook it is also the only way for users to be detached from a former connection. With this activity, the user enters the disengagement stage and will leave the page. To show the disengagement, the difference in numbers of likes and members is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: The disengagement on the four pages visible in numbers ordered by date. Source: Facebook.

There are a few causes that could have led to disengagement on the pages. In the case of the groups, the Discussion layer offered the members a place to, as the cognitive affordance already implies, discuss. But there were no discussions in either group. In case of the Pray For Paris Community Page, the 10 posts were published by only 4 of the 169 members. The rest of the members, 165, did not feel the need to show more engagement than the few that pressed the Like button. The same happened in the Pray for brussels Group, where only 6 of the 75 members published a post. The result is that the members did not become stimulated by new content, new information, new social interaction, or new entertainment. The reason for the low engagement on the community Pages could be, that the users did not feel the urge to post something because of the already discussed architecture of the community. Moreover, since the admin stopped publishing the posts, he also stopped providing a multi-directional flow which contained information, social interaction, and entertainment: the three motivations for interaction. The admin did eventually structure the Page, as discussed. Another reason could be that a simple click on the Like button was already enough for users to show a message of solidarity, support and endorsement. The button is already a replacement for full written reactions, it could also be used to show solidarity. And although Facebook did expand the grammars behind the Like button with multiple reactions, the Like is still the most used reaction. Furthermore, there was not much that the users could do. The attacks already took place. Users could not change this anymore. This is different in cases where the event is still ongoing, or lies in the future, in that case the user could be able to change the event by showing engagement. In cases like that, a form of activism or slacktivism can appear as a result of engagement. However, users were offered to engage in two other ways in the aftermath of the attacks, features that they used.

47 3.2 TWO ADDITIONAL FEATURES After the Paris attacks, Facebook was able to launch two features on their platform as a reaction to the event. At first, the Safety Check became available in the early hours on the 14th of November, 2015. Although it is not a new feature, is was the first time that the Safety Check was used after a terror attack. The Safety Check was launched the year before in 2014 as a medium to help users after natural disasters (Zuckerberg n. pag.). This feature enabled users, who were in the area of the attacks, to let other users know that they were safe. Due to users’ captured data, like location, Facebook was able to offer this feature to a selected group of users. With this feature, Facebook is now able to grammatise if users are safe, after they pressed the Safety Check button. This was not possible before, since users could communicate their safety to others in many ways. This grammar button is enabling Facebook to structure engagement after a disaster in a new way since it offers the user an easy and new way to communicate that they are safe. It can also function as a replacement for the previous communication that took place between concerned Facebook friends. But it is of course, an option to use it and not an obligation. However, Facebook received a lot of critique after they launched the Safety Check in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. The main question that came up was why Facebook did not launch the Safety Check the day before when Beirut had to deal with a bombing. Or during other previous human disasters in war zones. As a reaction Facebook announced that they are planning to do this for all kinds of human disasters in the future (Parool n. pag.). To go back to the Paris attacks, users of who Facebook thought they were in the area of the attacks received a notification and did use its function. The affordances of the notification already encouraged users to use the Safety Check. The sensory affordance ensures that the notifications are always visible when using Facebook due to the horizontal menu. The Notification button is visible under number 7 in Figure 15.

Figure 15: The horizontal menu of Facebook. (Home button (1), Search bar (2), Profile button (3), another Home button (4), Friend requests button (5), Messages button (6), Notifications button (7), Privacy Shortcuts button (8), and a ‘more’ button (9) to see other functions like Create Page or Create Group). Source: Facebook.

48 The Safety Check further represents who of the user’s friends are already marked safe. Friends are able to react on friends’ Safety Check with a comment, like, and share. It shows a map of the area of the threat. And it shows a description of the disaster. In case of the Paris terror attacks, the Safety Check said on the 14th of November:

“French President François Hollande has declared a state of emergency across France after a series of terror attacks on Friday night. The duration of the state of emergency remains unknown” (Facebook - Safety Check for Paris Terror Attacks).

After a certain amount of time, Facebook turned the Safety Check for Paris off. A personal Safety Check for the Paris Terror Attacks is visible in Figure 16.

Figure 16: A personal screenshot of the Safety Check for the Paris Terror Attacks. Source: Facebook.

Facebook also expanded the platform with a Safety Check after the Brussels terror attacks. And the feature was once again used by the users. On the 22nd of March the Safety Check described the crisis as follows:

“Reports indicate multiple explosions at the Zaventem Airport in Brussels, as well as at least one metro station in the city. The airport has been shutdown and all flights diverted. The metro, tram, and bus systems have also been shut down citywide” (Facebook - Safety Check for Brussels Explosions).

The Safety Check functioned the same way as it did with the Paris terror attacks. This Safety Check was also turned off by Facebook after a while. A personal Safety Check for the Brussels terror attacks is visible in Figure 17.

Figure 17: A personal screenshot of the Safety Check for the Brussels Terror Attacks. Source: Facebook.

Subsequently, on the 14th of November, Facebook added a feature to the profile photos. Now users were able to add a French flag filter over their profile picture. Facebook added the option to remove the filter automatically after 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or never (Mulshine n. pag.). This function enabled users to determine upfront how long their online mourning should take. The aim of this feature was, according to Facebook’s status update: “Change your profile picture to support France and the people of Paris” (Staufenberg n. pag.). Many users added the filter (Nourhussen n. pag.). However, users who had friends already using the filter were more encouraged than others. Under the friends’ profile pictures with filter, the users could find the button ‘Try It’. Others who had no friends with this filter, had to change it through their settings. This feature, with a grammar button, allowed Facebook to measure how many users engaged with the attack. In a previous attack on Charlie Hebdo, many users changed their profile picture into one with Je suis Charlie. However, all these different formats were hard to grammatise by Facebook. Subsequently, after Facebook added the feature in reaction to the Paris attacks, it was criticised. It was the same as with the Safety Check, why did Facebook add the feature with the Paris attacks, but not with other previous

50 attacks like in Beirut (Nourhussen n. pag.)? According to Nourhussen, with this feature Facebook structures engagement and solidarity towards the Paris attacks. And not to other disasters which are, from a social and economic perspective, less interesting for Facebook (n. pag.). Others argued that a French flag did not help in the fight against IS (Mulvaney n. pag.). However, Facebook did not launch a Belgian filter flag in the aftermath of the attacks in Brussels. After the Brussels attacks, many users did add a filter flag to their profile picture through external applications, which many of them also removed after a certain amount of time. The filter flag of Facebook showed again that online mourning became a simple activity through the grammar button, but online mourning can also be very temporary, as the 1 hour option showed.

3.3 THE LIKE-ENDORSEMENT This analysis shows that many users felt the need to show online mourning in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks. The users had the opportunity to show solidarity through the multiple grammar buttons on the platform, which they frequently used. Since these buttons are there to capture human activity, the buttons only need a click to start the engagement. For instance, the Like button to show interest in a Page, the Try me button to add a flag filter, the + Join group button to become a member, the Safety Check button to confirm the safety, and the Like button to show engagement with the post. Each of these buttons contributes to ease the engagement, but it also leads to a more passive way of engagement, a more structured way with less creative written reactions. This kind of engagement is reflected on the four pages. After most users used a grammar button to become member of a group or to like a Page, the engagement ended. Although they became part of an online mourning process, the act to join others in this process, was enough for many. Some users decided that it was time for them to even Dislike the page or to Unfollow the group, which makes their online intentional mourning on this non-grief-specific site temporary. For these reasons, this research claims that there should be a new concept to reflect these characteristics. A concept such as Like-endorsement would suit the kind of engagement that occurred on Facebook in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussel attacks. This concept is not meant to affect the meaning behind the user or to criticise the kind of engagement that took place. The Like-endorsement wants to reflect the simplicity of online mourning, made possible by Facebook, really going into a direction of measuring the world, in happy and sad days.

51 4. CONCLUSION In summary, the purpose of this research is to answer the research question: How is the social engagement facilitated on Facebook in times of mourning as a result of crisis events? To perform this research, the data was extracted from the Pray For Paris Community Page, Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group, Pray For Brussels Community Page, and the Pray for brussels Group. Through analysing the data, studying how Facebook is able to facilitate user engagement, and studying how the users made use of Facebook in times of mourning, this research was able to perform the task. This research has shown that Facebook, as a non-grief- specific site, functions for intentional memorialising. Online mourning is not only reflected on the community Pages and groups, but also outside of these pages, in the form of filter flags and Safety Checks. This research concludes that there are three remarkable outcomes. Firstly, online mourning was mainly facilitated on community Pages, where the admins are mainly responsible for the multi-directional flow in the divided layout of the Page. Many users felt the need to like the Pages, but did not feel the need afterwards to show others how involved they were. Only a few did. The same is applicable to the groups, although strikingly, fewer users decided to join groups. A group asks for more discussion and relies on posts of admins and the other members to create a multi-directional flow to encourage further engagement. Furthermore the admins of the groups were young and not anonymous. The community in contrast provided a more professional surrounding, created by the admins. Furthermore photos are a commonly used medium to express emotions in times of mourning, categorising the setting of mourning as nationalistic, solidary, angry towards the terrorists by showing indirect violence, and curious towards news concerning the victims but also the terrorists. Although the engagement stayed quite low compared to the likes that the Pages received, these community Pages with many visitors have led online mourning towards the next level, showing solidarity with other unknown users towards unknown victims, in times of mourning. Secondly, although many users did engage with the crisis events, most of them did that through using the grammar buttons on Facebook instead of creating their own suitable reaction. This enables Facebook to structure engagement also in times of mourning, by offering features with grammar buttons. These are easy to use and, as it turns out, easily adopted by the users, as the flag filter and Safety Check have shown. However, this research states that this kind of engagement needs a concept to reflect it through grammar buttons in times of mourning as a result of crisis events. For that reason, this research introduces the

52 concept Like-endorsement. Simple activities enable users to engage with emotional topics, irrespective of how deeply the user is touched by the event. Thirdly, as Facebook is primarily a non-grief-specific site, it offers ways that make online mourning a bigger and more relevant subject to its users. Facebook in this respect offers a platform to also cope with the dark side of life. For that reason, previous researches about Facebook as an unrealistically positive representation of daily life, are slowly becoming outdated. The approach of this research can contribute to future studies on how social engagement is facilitated in contrasting crisis events, like natural vs. human disasters, or Western vs. non-Western disasters. This approach can also be used to study if the Like- endorsement is present during ongoing crisis events that should ask for more action, like the Syrian civil war. But, for now, this research sees the struggles of daily life, and the struggles of unexpected disasters, only slightly more represented on Facebook in times of mourning.

53 REFERENCE LIST Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy.” The Information Society 10.2 (1994): 101-127.

Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort eds. Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers. Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 12 December 2009, University of California. Irvine: UC Irvine, 2009.

Brummelman, Wim. “Zes vragen over de aanslagen in Parijs.” NRC. 2015. NRC. 10 June 2016. .

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable. London: Verso, 2009.

Charlton, Alistair. “Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook Safety Check against ‘Western bias’ after Paris attacks.” International Business Times. 2015. 10 April 2016. .

Chouliaraki, Lilie. “‘Improper distance’: Towards a critical account of solidarity as irony.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14.4 (2011): 363-381.

Chouliaraki, Lilie. “Re-mediation, Inter-mediation, Trans-mediation: The cosmopolitan trajectories of convergent journalism.” Journalism Studies 14.2 (2013): 267-283.

Elgot, Jessica, Claire Phipps, and Jonathan Bucks. “Paris attacks: day after atrocity - as it happened.” The Guardian. 2015. 5 June 2016. .

Facebook – About. 2016. Facebook. 3 April 2016. < https://www.facebook.com/facebook/info/?tab=page_info>.

Facebook – Create a Page. 2016. Facebook. 3 April 2016.

54 < https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/?ref_type=logout_gear>.

Facebook – Data Policy. 2016. Facebook. 3 April 2016. .

Facebook - Help Centre. 2016. Facebook. 3 April 2016. .

Facebook - “I like this”. 2016. Facebook. 10 juni 2016. .

Facebook - Pray For Brussels Community Page. 2016. Facebook. 5 April 2016. .

Facebook - Pray for brussels Group. 2016. Facebook. 5 April 2016. .

Facebook - Pray For Paris Community Page. 2015. Facebook. 5 April 2016. .

Facebook - Pray For Paris 13/11/2015 Group. 2015. Facebook. 5 April 2016. .

Facebook - Safety Check for Brussels Terror Attacks. 2016. Facebook. 26 May 2016. .

Facebook - Safety Check for Paris Terror Attacks. 2016. Facebook. 26 May 2016. .

Gerlitz, Carolin, and Anne Helmond. “The Like economy: Social buttons and the data- intensive web.” New Media & Society 0.0 (2013): 1-18.

55 Gonzalez, Robbie. “Meet Jean Julien, The Artist Behind The “Peace For Paris” Symbol.” Wired. 2015. 14 November 2015. .

Hartson, Rex. “Cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional affordances in interaction design.” Behaviour & Information Technology 22.5 (2003): 315-338.

Helmond, Anne. “Hit, Link and Share. Organizing the social and the fabric of the web in a Like economy.” Anne Helmond. 16 April 2011. 7 April 2016. .

Hunt, Scott A., and Robert D. Benford. “Collective identity. Solidarity, and commitment.” The Blackwell companion to social movements. Eds. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 433-457.

Julien, Jean. Peace for Paris. 2015. 20 June 2016. .

Ksiazek, Thomas B., Limor Peer, and Kevin Lessard. “User engagement with online news: Conceptualizing interactivity and exploring the relationship between online news videos and user comments.” New Media & Society (2014): 1-19.

Laurent, Olivier. “70 Million People Shared Their Prayers for Paris on Instagram This Weekend.” Time. 2015. 3 May 2016. .

Lawson, Alastair. “Brussels attacks: Latest updates.” BBC News. 2016. BBC News Service.19 June 2016. .

Martin, J.R.. “Mourning: how we get aligned.” Discourse & Society 15.2-3 (2004): 321-344.

McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. “Technology as experience.” Magazine Interactions – Funology 11.5 (2004): 42-43.

56 Mulshine, Molly. “How to change your Facebook photo to blue, white, and red for Paris.” Tech Insider. 2015. Business Insider. 8 April 2016. .

Mulvaney, James. “Enough with the the French Flag Facebook logo.” CNN. 2015. CNN Internation Edition+. 14 May 2016. .

National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism. 2016. Ministry of Security and Justice. 10 May 2016. .

Newman, Kelvin. “The ultimate guide to the Facebook Edgerank algorithm.” Econsultancy. 16 August 2011. 2 May 2016. < https://econsultancy.com/blog/7885-the-ultimate-guide-to- the-facebook-edgerank-algorithm>.

Nourhussen, Seaba. “Facebook, waarom moet ik de Franse vlag tonen en niet de Libanese?.” Trouw. 2015. De Persgroep Nederland. 15 June 2016. .

Norman, Donald. “Affordance, Conventions, and Design.” Interactions 6.3 (1990): 38-43.

NOS. “Terreur in Europa; een bloedige lijst.” NOS. 2015. 2 April 2016. .

NOS. “Aantal doden Brussel naar beneden bijgesteld.” NOS. 2016. 10 June 2016. .

NU.nl. “Nationale rouw in België na aanslagen, vliegveld Brussel nog dicht.” NU.nl. 2016. 10 June 2016. .

O’Brien, Heather L., and Elaine G. Toms. “What is User Engagement? A conceptual Framework for Defining User Engagement with Technology.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.6 (2008): 938-955.

Parool. 2015. De Persgroep. 20 June 2016. .

Rieder, Bernhard. Studying Facebook via Data Extraction: The Netvizz Application. Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, May 2013, New York (NY). New York: ACM, 2013.

Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Cambridge (MA), and London: The MIT Press, 2013.

RTL Nieuws. “Zij stierven in Parijs; slachtoffers aanslagen krijgen een gezicht.” RTL. 2016. 25 April 2016. .

Stanfill, Mel. “The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design.” New Media & Society 17.7 (2015): 1059–1074.

Staufenberg, Jess. “Facebook adds optional French flag for profile pictures in Paris solidarity move.” 2015. The Independent. 10 May 2016. .

Stinson, Liz. “Facebook Reactions, The Totally Redesigned Like Button, Is Here.” Wired. 2016. 7 April 2016. .

Turner, Phil. “The Figure and Ground of Engagement.” AI & Society 29 (2014): 33-43.

Van Dijck, José. The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: University Press, 2013.

Walter, Tony, Rachid Hourizi, Wendy Moncur, and Stacey Pitsillides. “Does the Internet change how we die and mourn? Overview and analysis.” Omega 64.4 (2011-2012): 275- 302.

Webster, Jane, and Jaspreet S. Ahuja. “Enhancing the Design of Web Navigation Systems: The Influence of User Disorientation on Engagement and Performance.” MIS Quarterly 30.3 (2006): 661-678.

Westerink, Daan. “Erkenning zoeken op social media.” NUVEMA. N.d. N.V. Nederlandse Uitvaartverzekering Maatschappij. 10 June 2016. .

Willams, Raymond. Television: Technology and cultural form. New York: Schocken, 1975.

Wilson, Robert E., Samuel D. Gosling, and Lindsay T. Graham. “A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences.” Perspective on Psychological Science 7.3 (2012): 203-220.

Zittrain, Jonathan. The future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

Zuckerberg, Mark. “Today we announced the launch of Safety Check on Facebook.” Facebook. 2014. Facebook. 20 June 2016. .