Yesterday, I wrote about the Freakonomics blog post that asked if social network sites are good for society. I’ve had a little time to parse the responses; I don’t really have an answer to the question, but I thought I might add some observations.
The first respondent, Nicole Ellison, addresses a main issue concerning these sites and their actual affect on society. While social network sites eat up plenty of news cycles, they’re used by a relatively homogeneous 20% of our population. These numbers are nothing to scoff at, but for every one American that uses these sites, there are four that don’t. Of Facebook’s users, 25.6 million of them live in the United States; of those, approximately 14 million are college adopters, leaving about 12 million “other” American users of Facebook. It only seems like everyone is on Facebook. These networks have hardly gone society-wide yet, and Ellison rightly states that “as they continue to be adopted by more diverse populations, we will see an increase in their utility.”
Of course, the question posed by the Times is forward-looking, so perhaps we should assume that one day we’ll all be social networkers. Taking Wellman’s personal networks, or Castells’ network society literally, it’s possible that we’ll eventually outsource social and economic transactions to the network. However, I think this gives online social networks a little too much credit; what if online social networks were nothing more than the new email? I think we should temper expectations of just how much of our lives we expect to send to the network.
Further written into the Wellman/Castells assumption is a notion of permanence/persistence; that society might decide on the one great network and outsource interaction to it, creating great masses of active social capital. Even though social networks are still nascent, we certainly haven’t seen any evidence that leads us to believe we institutionally value our accumulated SNS social capital. Need proof? Look at all your friends jumping from Myspace to Facebook. If we can’t all agree on a society-wide space, and we are drawn to new social networks like moths to a flame, doesn’t this nullify the persistence hypothesis?
Perhaps the fact a network can’t go society-wide is the critical turn. Online social networks thrive in real-world networks, and real-world social networks thrive on tight, local clusters. Media, celebrities and national ideologies write a society into being; our networks enact our lived realities. If your network agrees on a social network for mediation, you’ll find yourself satisfied by the network, and it doesn’t matter if 290 million other Americans take part. The disparate clusters that make up our society can have their needs met by multiple, diverse networks. In the end, its all about how the network answers your situationally relevant needs.
If our lived experience in online social networks is going to be nomadic and temporal, than what societal value is derived? Just as college students get social utility from Facebook, perhaps other networks will rise to answer other needs – relocation, new parenthood, and so on. Social networks might just provide the relatively short-term support one seeks when information and social capital deprived. That’s not a bad thing in my book.
Any notion of a global, persistent, overarching online social network that exists in the mainstream for more than a few years, however, is fantasy. Young people already know that Facebook is passe. They use it, but they’re ready for the next thing. We naturally want to migrate; on top of that, the authoritarian nature of these spaces prevents us from embracing them as “real” and vibrant. We use the sites, the sites use us, and we move on.
Of course, our online movement mirrors society. We’re constantly negotiating and renegotiating social networks, rearranging importance based on personal or economic need. This complex dance is exactly what we see in online social networks. Therefore, it might be useful to theorize new types of social capital that reflect the spatial intersection of physical and virtual networks. Just as we’re not going to take part in one physical network for life, the ability to exploit the temporal reality of online social network may reflect new skill sets and forms of ties. This sociotechnical capital, sets of ties that bridge the physical and virtual in temporal sync, may be the new relation afforded by online social networks. Rather than forcing offline models to fit the virtual, perhaps its time to think of new models.
Further reading:
Barry Wellman’s Personal Networks
Manuel Castells’ Network Society
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities
Paul Resnick’s SocioTechnical Capital
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.
