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.
Tags: activation, facebook, politics
Another great post – and something that will bear out over time. Transparency will come, but it comes with extreme technical overhead and baggage for the user. We won’t see it until it’s simpler and the defaults are backed by some law with teeth.
Separately…
A note on your analogy… We’re not homeowners – we’re tenants leasing space in someone else’s building.
“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.”
We might deadbolt the apartment door, but the super still has a key and free rein through all our stuff.
Indeed. And we reason we don’t know the super has come to snoop through our stuff is because the super was always there, and he’ll always be there. The new normal.
An exceptionally good piece of writing.
The lock-the-doors metaphor is well crafted: when the Facebook crowd was limited to a small, select group of friends we could leave the doors unlocked and open, but as strangers move in to town we close and deadbolt the doors. Of course this typifies human social dynamics even away from the online world.
…and so, as users the only recourse we have is to deadbolt the doors or to move to another town (or other socialnetwork site in this case) and start again with a small group of acquaintances.
“Among mature users, privacy is skyrocketing as users shut themselves off to the world around them.”
Well, mature users have already gotten what they need out of Facebook – they’ve found their friends and, for the most part, have been found by people by whom they want to be found. They’ve made sense of the space and, among other things, don’t need to spend as much time there. This makes the increased stream of information about Facebook (and not about that already-established network) especially vexing – they log in less often, for not as long, and have to wade through more crap to get anything useful. At a certain point – why bother? It’ll be there when you need it, but why waste time wading through ads.
It’s a fundamental tension of the current SNS model – the bait-and-switch, the demand to always monetize eyeball time. Like if those annoying beer reps were out at every bar you ever went to with your friends, and refused to leave you alone to talk to your buddies until you tried Tequiza Dry – again.
JKD, I agree. Those “mature” users are out of the acquisition phase, and more in a maintenance phase. That’s an important note.
Nathan of Swarming Media had a good post where he responded to me, so I’m linking to it here.
A great post obviously, but I have to disagree on one detail and two important aspects:
- SNS *are* brands, and sometimes coherent foci: a colleague of mine has a MySpace, Flickr & Facebook account, for his musical, family and academic life. No common friends on any —— and he demands it that way. Many people around me agree to that separation model, and see the current concentration wishes as a forced “weddings” where different aspects of who should ignore collide against your will. It’s broader then a brand, maybe, but it is a similar dimension: of course, see danah on that aspect of things.
- You don’t say who are the strangers, while you should: they are not new on-line. University is full of strangers: “Nobodies”, people you can safely ignore, and who won’t blame you for it; someone you want to meet, or not, also have acknowledge roles: targets, freaks. It’s of course over-simplifying, but you have many issues emerging since the opening, and it’s not because the new people are not welcomed, but because they do not fit nicely: you can ignore a dork, not someone you are sympathetic with, but never though about meeting on FaceBook. I don’t really care anyone sees a photo of me with my girlfriend: I just never though such or such would take attention to it — and I have no idea how or what to think about it; my ex? I know she should be kept out, not an issue. I’ve seen the most extremely different groups co-occupy an SNS, safely ignoring themselves. Problem is not people who are different, but ambiguity.
- Your government metaphor is certainly the key piece of the post: a great idea, certainly reflexive of the state of mind behind the recent decisions — all the more nice it fits well into an American “As little government as possible” assumption; not all government need be feeble and transparent: I’m not advocating for socialism (Did that the whole afternoon, I’m starting to hate Econ 101) but some internet communities did great with heavy-handed interventions. More importantly, I really believe this transparency vision is not progressive in the sense that is it the only way to go: it’s not that people want privacy (they want context, actually) but the issues are more about dealing with the complexity of having A takes a picture of B who shouldn’t be with C, D borrow the cam and uploads it by accident while E, unaware of the issue, tags it so that F sees the deed. . . Drama ensues. Who’s responsible?
Complexity demands norms, habits, conventions and those rules (I’m using different words on purpose here) are an odd sauce that demands some government intervention, and some grass-root adoption.
All in all, I’ll keep the metaphor, but try to look at other, local government in order to try to understand the extend of the possible interactions: Local government, University government, Gated community decision process, etc.
Bertil,
On “Brands”, I do agree that there are meaningful brand differences. Those differences are the catalyst for change in cases – i.e. FB differentiates itself from Myspace.
What I’m describing is the mid-cascade phenomenon, where the brand is present, but the motivation for change is the place. For analogy, we go to the bar/restaurant our friends are at; yes, brand features in the decision, but it’s really about where our friends are hanging out.
In the decision, I’d argue that at the mid-cascade, brand contributes little variance.
With regards to governance, it adds complexity to the user/SNS relation. We’re used to the state or pseudo-state entities enforcing punishment in public places. A non-state acting in the state role is most foreign. Perhaps we’ll reconceptualize place based on these governmental boundaries, and we’ll come to see these as places of control, not of discourse.
[...] Der Ansatz, für solche quasi-öffentlichen Räume im Netz eine Art Konstitutionalisierung einzuführen, geht aber auch nach meiner Meinung in die richtige Richtung. Sprachlich und konzeptionell ist das alles nämlich ein interessanter Sprung in Richtung einer “Verfassung” für soziale Netzwerke. Es gibt eine Grundrechte-Charta, es gibt bindende Abstimmungen, es gibt den ordentlichen Rechtsweg. Das sind einige der zentralen Elemente moderner Verfassungen. Diese Sicht wird auch von Facebook selber bestätigt. Chris Kelley, der Chief Privacy Officer von Facebook, nennt die neuen Nutzungsbedingungen explizit “constitutional documents”, also “Verfassungsdokumente”. Auf die Tatsache, dass die Firma Facebook quasi eine Regierungsfunktion im Verhältnis zu ihren Nutzern hat, haben Online-Forscher wie Fred Stutzman schon vor einiger Zeit hingewiesen. [...]