I’ve written this essay for a forthcoming volume on activism in Web 2.0 technologies and I’d like to open it up for critique and suggestion. This is a rough draft and I’ve got some time before my deadline – thanks for your help!
There is something essentially placeful about online social networks; as I log in, I am engaged by a cross-section of my social relationships. In an instant, information is revealed, opportunities are discovered, and a website becomes a social nexus – from which I can derive a sense of gratification, meaning and identity. Over the last few years, millions of us have come to know sites like MySpace and Facebook as social spaces, where the virtual and the real collapse, where a sense of community and interaction is integral to the experience. danah boyd has described social network sites as digital publics; in her extensive research she has discovered these digital spaces to be the third place for youth.
As political campaigns and organizing endeavors attempt to establish their place in these digital publics, should we take a step back and look at the characteristics of these spaces to determine what makes them vital? Can we think of social networks as digital cities, inhabited by permanently in-flux digital bodies? And if we’re always in flux, what about an online social space makes us actually want to stick around? In her 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the sidewalk ballet of a vital urban environment. Jacobs argued that a vibrant and diverse city should possess four characteristic design elements, the first being that a neighborhood should be multifunction, creating activity throughout the day. Next, a city should have short blocks and its buildings should be multiform, creating interest and promoting exploration by inhabitants. Finally, Jacobs argued for density, in which different populations intersperse, affording variety and shared resources.
Applying Jacobs’ criteria to an online space creates a challenge; as a neighborhood jumps from the physical to the virtual, the nature of its goods changes. For example, while the neighborhood cinema is a rivalrous good, a video viewed in the context of an online space is non-rivalrous. While the scarcity and required sharing of resources is central to Jacobs’ philosophy, we can clearly see the sidewalk ballet enacted in online social spaces. As an example, let’s consider Facebook’s Newsfeed. When one logs into Facebook, they are provided a list of recent activity in their social network; a message may inform you that friend has written on another friend’s wall, or that a friend has posted an event. Originally unpopular due to privacy concerns, the Newsfeed has become one of the most popular features in the service. The Newsfeed creates the impression of activity; any time an individual logs on she is presented with a plethora of opportunities to engage with their social spheres.
Arguing for shorter blocks, Jacobs felt that this type of design would foster exploration by city dwellers. The “short blocks” analogy is alive and well in online social networks, where the ability to browse and explore fellow network participants fuels use. In a social network, we enumerate our identity as we describe our interests, tag each other, and post on walls and message boards. These “digital traces” are often hyperlinked, permitting endless point-and-click exploration of the social space. As it happens, people are very interesting to each other, and social networks leverage our interests by providing endless opportunities to explore those we know and care about. In fact, the articulation of identity in social networks might be analogized to Jacob’s call for variety in architecture and style in a neighborhood. Love it or hate it, the unending ability to customize Myspace profiles provides significant, desired variety in the space. It drives learning and adoption of the service, as individuals collaborate to make their space better represent their identity.
Indeed, online social networks are concentrated; in this sense they are unlike any neighborhood. Social networks allow for the centralization of one’s network in a single place; geographic boundaries are rendered insignificant as we connect across place and time. The social network allows the work friends to intermingle with grade school friends in an odd, often awkward dance.
While Jacobs’ perspective is instructive, we can also leverage it as an effective critique of online social networks. While the vibrant neighborhood was constructed to afford a variety of individuals the interesting and serendipitous experience of urban dwelling, online social networks often reinforce existing bonds, rather than encouraging exploration. In a study conducted at Michigan State University (Lampe, 2006), researchers found that friendships in social networks often began offline and migrated online, rather than the other way around. The city requires individuals of a variety of backgrounds and interests to share space and resources; how would Jacobs feel about an online space designed to self-reinforce bonds rather than encourage the development of new ties?
There is something otherworldly in being able to reach across a community with a search box or hyperlink; in online social spaces, we can access and “be present” with our friends in the click of a button. The social cost of relationship maintenance decreases; the birthday card is replaced with a wall post. We can certainly lament the depersonalization of online interaction, but we can’t impugn the outcome – we are able to manage larger collections of friends with less effort than ever before. Do these extended friend networks increase sociality or simply introduce new digital tethers to our social life? That is a question we’ll work towards answering, as the effects of these digital publics on our real world is explored.
We do know that online social networks represent meaningful digital spaces to millions of people. The daily life of the city, from the mundane to the significant, is being conducted in these spaces. We flirt, we interact, we do business, we seek out information and gratification, finding a complex social world at our fingertips. While the digital spaces we inhabit will have a good deal in common with our cities of concrete and granite, they are unique places with unique challenges. While the technological emphasis of relevance and searchability will create new types of interactions online, it would be wise for developers to pay attention to Jacbos; they will find both the meaning and the letter of her laws instructive.
References:
Lampe, C., Ellison, N. and Steinfeld, C. (2006) A Face(book) in the Crowd: Social Searching vs. Social Browsing. In Proceedings of CSCW 2006. ACM, New York: 167-170
This article is being developed for the book Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Engage & Activate Youth to be published by Jossey-Bass an imprint of John Wiley & Sons in early Spring 2008. A Rock the Vote project.
Tags: politics, social networks
The activity in one’s virtual block is the genius of Twitter. Nothing fancy, just simple blips of information that are largely meaningless when taken individually or as part of the huge community at once. Their value arises when they are parsed into small, manageable communities – personal streams of highly relevant data that at once paints a picture of that particular group and allows for a sense of connection with low investment and high return.
There is a lot in your use of Jacobs’ work that is very compelling as a framework for online interaction. Thanks for writing about it.
Interesting.
I think Jacobs’ density concept would fit well in there too, taken purely as density of participants (in addition to the shared/varied resources aspect). Second Life, for example, has lots of stuff, but I can’t count the number of times people have said “…I wandered around for a while but I didn’t see anyone else”. Pretty and diverse, interesting, but not vibrant.
Great essay, I really love the English — and I want some more. (You probably have a target number of words, though.)
I’m surprised by your assessment that Virtual space induce more closed ties: only one study, not necessary compelling, with a lacking definition for “ties” and no statistic to measure how “closed” are networks: homophily, centrality, clustering coefficient still lead to contradictions—promising, but so much work is ahead. I’ll have to take a closer look at their paper before I draft something.
However, I really fancy your city analogy (made a not so compelling one myself recently) The reason I can’t leave the city I live in is because you can walk to so many different places… Having anything a click away on-line feels similarly blissful; thank you for helping me connect two of my passions.
Regarding that closer circle, my non-representative, un-scientific, personal experience is that people tend to meet new people through on-line relations: it’s more obvious though blogging. A very interesting way to explain it is through lack of context: (according to my advisor’s latest book, Internet Economics) on-line ties cary less implicit information, so all I know about people I meet on-line makes them worth talking to. Five years ago, I couldn’t imagine to have any interest in someone with the dresscode and the personal life of danah: being deprived of her appearance, and able to focus on her work, having the other aspect of her drip from her sayings instead of jump at me at the first second of her physical presence. To resume to your comparison, it means on-line neighborhoods don’t have to make sense: a not-so-shinny area can be so close to the posh quarter.
What you describe as odd moments are more experiments in manipulating what used to be blatant, but is now an artifact. Couldn’t you have you colleagues on LinkedIn, College friends on Facebook and gangsta’s on MySpace? You have less awkward feelings in having two irrelevant websites on your screen then carrying the wrong magazine or the wrong outfit. I confess, in this vision, I anticipate Facebook implementing context the way Google Calendar already has made me able to do. (How do you deter your advisor from asking you to meet him the morning after a party night?) The reason of these awkward moments is more because the sophisticated framings each one of us tries to integrate don’t match on-line then because you can’t hide things with privacy features.
Because I can comment and receive an answer without revealing anything more about my identity, I can be part of that movement — while having people connect the dots, judge me not from a too informed perspective or a not-informed enough, but a point-of-view I do not control, that would deter me.
If you have to find a urban comparison with that new control we own over our information revelation, I’d go with a city where you can always wear something appropriate. Maybe look for the dream lives depicted in Woman magazines, with unlimited shopping, amazing social role with little burden: that would be more a reason to make new friends then having short blocks induce you into having few.
Fred … nicely written will read this again and hopefully get back with more thoughts.
From my personal experience … I see myself making more friends either in the offline or real world and enriching the boards in social networking sites like playing a game of scrabble or doing fun stuff.
However, I make more chance exploration kind of encounters in communities like Flickr and Flickr communities and special niche communities for like minded topics. When we have meetups – I like the interaction and then choose to go online hoping to find them online.
However, I have never come across party like behaviour in the online space. And yes, I haven’t tried second life – as the bandwidth is very less in India. Feel frustrated about that once I moved back from the Bay Area.
However, there is one thing you should consider – the influence of the mobile and information convergence it bring on! It was also very interesting to see Steve Jobs showcasing facebook’s beta iPhone site :-)
What happens as a next step as your social internet sphere moves with you on the go. What happens in countries like India and other where majority of population in a year or two is going to experience SNS primarily through the mobile??
Thank you for the very interesting and informative comments everyone…I’ll update with a final copy of my essay in a little bit!
I this is an excellent essay Fred. I am constantly impressed by your amazing writing ability, that can take very complicated topics and lay them out so clearly. Wow :)
My one suggestion is to be a bit more direct in the use of Jacobs’ framework when talking about the online space. Since there are four characteristics to a vibrant city, it would be great if you explicitly mapped those to the online space. Although you do this in a subtle manner, the framework gets a bit lost and its not clear if all the four points were addressed. Just a thought :)
Great job though! Am looking forward to seeing you in Seattle :)
What about this one:
“This suggests that students use Facebook primarily to maintain existing offline relationships or to solidify what would otherwise be ephemeral, temporary acquaintanceships. There was a slight tendency for newer students to use Facebook to meet new people more than for juniors and seniors to do so (see Figure 3) . . . “
From here:
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html
They can only commit to “slight”, but I think it’s growing rapidly (long tail of exponential curves and what not). They believe, like you, that the dominance of maintenance interactions was built into the network design of facebook. Which makes sense to me, but the new classes of freshmen are jumping the fence, so to speak.
It’s not much researched yet (that I’ve seen) but anecdotally, I heard non-stop conversations at the 10 or so orientations I was around about students who have been chatting for months before school starts.
Maybe those friends stay or not – certainly the offline clique seems to overpower the Facebook group clique, but they are still meeting folks. I just think that trend has been building since the Michigan study.
I put up a post about one of the funny ramifications on the Student Activites blog:
http://swiftkick.typepad.com/activities_affairs/2007/09/the-strange-pow.html
I agree, interesting. As a brand planner who is currently working on a major community planning project, I’m particularly sensitive to the uses and abuses of theories about real spaces being reapplied to virtual spaces. As you suggest, Paul, the metaphors stretch and inform but only so far. Real space is limited, demanding tough choices about resources and access. E.g, do we make this parcel of land a park or dry-cleaner? How much expensive housing vs. more accessible housing? Virtual spaces are, relatively costless in these terms.
If we were to follow Jacobs model, we’d have to ask ourselves, what are we giving up in these virtual cities? What is being lost? You begin to suggest what these costs might be: e.g., the ease of these relationships making them relatively trivial. I’d be curious to see you explore these costs.
On another note, one of the potentially negative aspects of web cities is their sheer size. They are so big, in fact, that they transcend human scale. Unlike a real neighborhood, you never quite get around them entirely. It struck me that Kohlhass’s “Largeness” essay might be another instructive viewpoint.
In any case, very thought-provoking. Keep up the good work.
sk
“The social network allows the work friends to intermingle with grade school friends in an odd, often awkward dance.”
But do they? They’re simultaneously present in equivalent form (that is, both being equally “friends” in the context of the SNS) to you, but I think the equivalence ends there. Friends you have from the same social context consider themselves (more or less) equally your friends, but I don’t think they consider your friends from other social contexts particularly much – unless there are multiple bridge figures between the contexts.
You do address an aspect of this in saying that online connections reinforce existing bonds, but I think it’s also worth noting more explicitly the non-equivalence of seemingly equivalent relationships.
Nice read Fred. After the sentence “The social cost of relationship maintenance decreases; the birthday card is replaced with a wall post” I was hoping to read a “, but the social value of … is…”
As in, do the changes in social cost affect or correspond to changes in value of the the wall post (or taking the time to actually send a bday card, instead of the wall post, or in addition to it)?
In Jane Jacobs’ book she also talks about the idea that a street is safer when more eyes are watching it. That is why constant foot traffic is so important in big cities (even though most people would think the opposite in relation to safety).
In March I wrote a blog about this in relation to the safety of Facebook verses Myspace. Here is a blurb:
“I was playing with this “eyes on the street” idea and the Facebook news feed. This feed continuously updates you on every activity of your friends on Facebook. I wonder if the same principles of “eyes on the street” applies to behavior on Facebook and the news feed.
If everyone can see a negative comment you post on someone else’s site, then would that person think twice about actually posting? If more eyes are watching our every move on Facebook, would we behave more inline with social norms?”