focuses more on the technology and how it inserts itself between people. I choose to spend some time presenting the two approaches as well as other literature, as these two interpretations will be presented and discussed throughout the thesis as a tool to analyze my ethnographic material. Theoretical Discussion Technology as Facilitator My bachelor essay on communication through social media was drawing on Wilson and Person and how they aim at a definition of what “the internet” is (Samuel M. Wilson & Peterson, 2002). They discuss how the internet was understood as cyberspace and that what happens in this place can be interpreted as a hallucination, as a space outside the bodily world (Gibson, 1984). However, this understanding was not persistent, and Wilson and Peterson argued towards an interpretation that internet, or social media, do not grow as space beside the physical world, but instead becomes a part of it (Samuel M. Wilson & Peterson, 2002). It is therefore not a hallucination, but rather a reality that becomes implemented into our understanding of our surroundings. This interpretation of internet, or social media, recognized the importance they play in day-to-day life as well as a recognition of the communication online as real in the same way as with face-to-face communication. “The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist in it are in themselves cultural products” (Samuel M. Wilson & Peterson, 2002, p. 449). With this point of view, social media is researchable and should be studied, as well as it opens up for a discussion if social media mediates or facilitates conversations. Daniel Miller is an anthropologist that initially worked with consumer studies and later approached social media and new technologies. In his later work, he has addressed social media as something that becomes part of the human and our humanity. He claims that social media is a skill a person can attain, as with driving a car, social media can, therefore, be a natural part of being human and humanity. The technology makes no difference whatsoever to our essential humanity (Daniel Miller, 2016, p. 8). Miller studied Facebook in Trinidad where he would refer to Facebook as “the book of truth” and how Facebook has the potential to destroy privacy as we know it and transform it into something public (Daniel Miller, 2011, pp. 172-173). He discusses how Facebook never exists in its isolation and that it, therefore, cannot show the totality of the people we meet and how the “public” is on Facebook. This is better understood 14

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