Following MoveOn’s new Facebook membership-drive/petition, a number of important Web 2.0 bloggers have, on cue, posted about privacy apathy. These bloggers argue that we’re sheep, that we don’t care about privacy, and that like Newsfeed, we don’t care about Beacon and our cross-site privacy. These bloggers look at Facebook’s growing numbers, see the impressive trends, and conclude we don’t care about privacy or anything else Facebook does. This logic is flawed, of course – it’s sort of like saying any American who doesn’t renounce their citizenship and move to Canada agrees with President Bush.
Facebook’s brand represents a place, that place being a virtual community made up of our friends, family and contacts. To put it more bluntly, at the macro level, we’re brand agnostic when it comes to social network sites – we go where our friends are. Over the years, we’ve reified the commodity nature of these networks, migrating every few years.
If we think of the space as a commodity, it becomes apparent that the real value of the site is in connection and communication among ties. Therefore, an optimal design strategy for the site is pure transparency, where the site simply acts as the vector for useful connections. A flawless, perfectly efficient flow of information between individuals should be the goal of any social network site.
So if we really imagine Facebook as a collection of our friends, what does the brand entity of Facebook represent? The brand entity of Facebook is governmental; the only time one interacts with Facebook as entity is when they are being controlled or punished. Facebook as brand represents surveillance and domination.
You might be wondering what the point is, so I’ll get to it. For many users, Facebook does represent a community, with friends, strangers, police and government, and an economy running on social and economic capital. While this community is far from democratic, the users and their government have worked out a balance of power, negotiating and re-negotiating this balance as Facebook and new entrants introduce change.
Of course, Facebook users have little individual agency when it comes to political action. Yes, they can join groups, or add a protest application, but short of committing Facebook suicide, what can they do? The protest action comes in the form of privacy. Over the past three years, privacy has skyrocketed inside of Facebook, with millions of users making the profiles friends-only. If you’re a Web 2.0 blogger who only uses Facebook as a rolodex, this doesn’t appear strange. But to the millions of early adopters who used Facebook as a nexus for social information, this seriously devalues the network.
Think of it this way. A few years ago, Facebook was a city where no one felt the need to put locks on their front doors. Nowadays, we’ve got strangers, a police force that will kill us if we don’t use our “real names”, and surveillance bots that track us across the web and report what we do to our friends. Of course we’re going to deadbolt the house.
But here’s where things get tricky. As we’ve discussed, a social network should be transparent, connecting friends and sharing useful information. Friends should be the main feature, not the network (Facebook) itself. As people shutter themselves and share less information, Facebook is using Beacons, Applications, etc to create a pseudo-information market, hoping that I won’t notice this information is useless.
When I joined Facebook, I cared that I could find my friend’s address and see his or her pictures. However, I don’t care when my friend buys something or superpokes someone else. Since I’m getting less of that good information, Facebook is trying to stave off the what’s next problem by flooding me with “constructed” information. In making Facebook’s useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases.
The Web 2.0 bloggers look at Facebook’s adoption numbers and conclude that we’re not responding to the service’s continued intrusions. We’re just sheep, they say. But when you stand back a bit, things get a little bit more clear. Among mature users, privacy is skyrocketing as users shut themselves off to the world around them. And as millions of individuals join Facebook, and the useless-information-production apparatus of Beacon and Applications flood us, the site becomes less about one’s friends, and more about Facebook itself.
As Facebook becomes more about Facebook and less about our friends, we should consider what prompted these changes. We should also consider where these changes will take us. If Facebook becomes less about our friends and more about the brands we support, can we rationally make an argument that the site will stay relevant? Of course not. We’re not sheep. In fact, the users who have reacted to Facebook’s transgressions are shaping the site in powerful ways. Next time you log into Facebook, ask yourself just how much of the information spam you encounter is actually useful. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
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.
