This post from Fred Wilson touched a nerve this morning. In it, he points to Dick Costolo who Twitters “Thinking that i don’t like the term ’social graph’” and Fred goes on to ask “Why can’t Facebook people call it a social network?” I’ll pile on and agree that this term irks me as well – it just feels like something Facebook paid Frank Luntz to come up with. Just global warming became “climate change”, our social networks are now social graphs, in which our friends are simply dots on some map articulable in a computer processor.
But let’s step back for a second, and examine this term. Why has the social network become the social graph? Over the past few years, the term “social network” has become common – we knew Friendster and then Myspace and then Facebook as social networks. Through the media, social networks became scary places for parents; and while we couldn’t exactly agree what a social network site is, we came to think of most of these new, “connective” sites as social networks. In essence, the term became genericized, much like search or messaging.
It is clear that Facebook wants to step out of the mold; they are not a social network – as we’ve been told many times, they are a social utility that operates on your social graph. This is message control 101, and to the extent that thought-leaders are utilizing the term, it’s working. In Postman’s Technopoly he describes the sublimation of culture by technology – in which a society “seeks its authorization in technology.” Just as we came to think of our social relationships (the human) as social networks (the scientific), we’re heading towards thinking of them as social graphs (the computational). We’re willing to accept the mechanization of what was formerly human.
I’d be negligent if I didn’t mention my conceit; I’ve spent many hours trying to reduce the human negotiation of a network down to a statistic. That said, I still feel that we lose something as we describe our networks as graphs. The term network is mysterious; a network is a complex, organic, multifaceted thing. A graph, on the other hand, is cold, calculating and purely scientific. It is the reduction of all things essential about relationships to a chart of edges and nodes. It is computational, anti-human. Of course, it reflects all that our technological culture prizes – efficiency, searchability, and a sense of truth in knowing just how valuable another person is to you (p < .05, of course).
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s tremendous value in the computational articulation of our networks. We’re offloading the difficult measures of social management onto a computer, thus increasing our ability to store and access more friends. This is the classic role of the computer. However, as our ability to store objects increases (be they spreadsheets, books, music or friends), our relationship to the object changes inherently. I think we should be mindful of this; each reduction or level of abstraction we add to friendship changes the nature of friendship – and jumping from thinking of our relationships as “networks” to our relationships as “graphs” seems a pretty big leap for me.
Tags: facebook, political economy
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
By self-defining as a graph, doesn’t Facebook precisely gets out of the way, and state: “we are just trying to keep a big database working; social network is human, it is what you do, not us”?
I actually like the three tiered picture they are drawing:
- graphs,
- information access&format (apps)
- interpretation.
More Bob Shrum than Frank Luntz. Luntz at least came up with stuff that sounded good even if it obscured real meaning – going from “social network” to “social graph” both sounds worse and I think obscures meaning. People who use these sites know what “social network” means to them – and Facebook is trying to tell them they’re wrong? I hate to sing the same song over and over again, but it still amazes me that Facebook has been unable to absorb this very basic, fundamental (and at this point, pretty old) law of online social networking/utilities/software/graphs: don’t try to dictate user behavior. Yeesh.
Whether or not Facebook is set up for a big fall, this is one of those things that I think Zuckerberg is going to look back on in 5-10 years and think “I was really that concerned with that?”
I’m not sure I’d agree Bertil. It’s hard to view Facebook as a value-free intermediary in our milieu. I’d say their role is much more active.
I think there’s a meaningful distinction here. Rather than belabor this point, I’ll be lazy and let Dare Obasanjo do it for me.