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

Abstract

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