Nicole Ellison highlights a new Facebook controversy – whether the site is a social networking site (a place to connect with and make new friends) or a social utility (a site designed to reinforce real world contacts). This is a particularly strange and circular distinction; the idea that one can draw a boundary between types of friendships is particularly useless in our increasingly-mediated social milieu.
The reading of this particular controversy may be misguided – it appears that Facebook users were creating accounts to play a new game that encourages rampant friending. While articulated poorly, it seems the problem is actually fake account creation, not rampant friending (though rampant friending certainly sets off spam alerts). Anyone who has ever run a consumer internet company is going to side with Facebook on this issue.
The wording of Facebook’s response is interesting:
Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”.
I find Facebook’s contestation of definition and purpose to be somewhat superfluous, largely due to the extremely limited agency on both Facebook’s and the individual user’s perspective. Facebook was not shaped by a corporate mantra of utility; it was a simple stroke of luck that Facebook geographically bounded its networks to create “close” networks. Abstracting up a level, the idea that 100 million users can be shepherded into a way of acting through policy is particularly ridiculous. Jonathan Grudin’s (1998) classic CSCW piece would be the first place to stop for those who wish to understand the social shaping of technology. At this scale, programmatic barriers enforce a simple framework, but norms of use are purely shaped in-network – not by edict, not by techno-utopian marketing language.
Grudin, J. (1988). Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organization of organizational interfaces. In 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, New York, NY, USA, 1988 (pp. 85-93). ACM Press.
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.
I’ve always found Facebook’s over-precious insistence on their self-definition much more interesting than the definition itself. As you say, “norms of use are purely shaped in-network – not by edict, not by techno-utopian marketing language” but again and again, through words and actions, Facebook’s management seems to actually believe that they will be the ones who figure out how to ride the tiger where everyone else has failed. And maybe they will! Strange things happen all the time.
I was with you until you said “And maybe they will.” No matter how loosely you define it, Facebook is not in control. Though they will insist otherwise. Over-precious is spot on, BTW.
Hey Fred,
I probably should have spent a bit longer on my post, but let me clarify and probe a bit:
For me what is interesting about this issue doesn’t stem from a desire to put people into particular friendship categories, but rather to be able to describe what kinds of connection practices users are engaging in on the site.
It’s a very hard thing to measure, but I think it’s worthwhile (at least for me!) to try to learn how people are using the site in order to better understand the link between practices and outcomes (such as social capital). Because of the way online and offline practices blend, I agree that may be misguided to see these two contexts as dichotomous.
And yes, Facebook’s attempt to control user behavior may be futile, but a social shaping perspective articulates the ways in which the technology/medium and the users/society shape one another. Thus while policy edicts per se might not make much of a difference, other acts (shutting down these accounts, capping network size) will shape user behavior in some ways, no?
Nicole – Looking over my post, I see how you might have thought it was a response to yours – which it really wasn’t. I was taking on Techcrunch and Facebook over their silly definitions. Apologies if you thought I was calling you out.
To your point, I agree with the social informatics perspective, which I was more-or-less espousing. Facebook is a contested place, but I think it is sill for FB to think they can direct a specific use and users will hop to. I doubt that anyone high up in the company actually thinks that, regardless of the marketing copy. Facebook’s power lies exactly where you describe – in the use of programmatic controls to shape the network.
I’ll be interested to see where this goes. There’s something important here – Facebook’s rejection of the moniker. The question is – can they?
“I was with you until you said “And maybe they will.””
and still with me after! as I was kidding.
there is not way that they will rewrite Internet history/practice.
er, *no* way.
Slight edit to clarify the object of my analysis.
danah’s thoughts on the topic – worth reading.
I think that the real issue is not semantics or control but the loss of context on facebook.
In our offline social relations there are natural, inherent order, priorities and hierarchy that are predicated on our common and shared perceptions of acquaintance, closeness, intimacy and friendship. These formed over time and are always context based.
college friend that became a close friend as the year progresssed. People I’ve met while traveling and now IMing occasionally. Blog buddies. Ex colleagues that used to be fairly close but now have faded out. Friends of friends, gym buddies, the women who does my hair, family, bosses, neighbours, my thesis supervisor, high school mates I haven’t heard from in years….
These people used to have a clear place and role in my life. My relationships with them are defined by context. There are (or were) time and place and form for these relationships, or simply put, there was a clear context to all of my strong and weak, close and remote relationships and these contexts are now somewhat gone.
All of these people are now my ‘friends’ on facebook. All in one flat, context-blind place – in addition to 25 people I don’t even know. At all.
Now that our online and offline lives are fully intertwined we need more and better tools to organise the online. These tools must better reflect the dynamics and contexts of our offline social lives. As much as there are natural organisation, contexts, priorities and various degrees of friendships offline, we should be able to have these online as well.
In my opinion, there are some important facts about social networking.
They keep collecting information in every detail they can.Privacy is beeing harrassed and damaged, and in the near future people can face with really serious problems… (not just simple spams, more serious than that)
Check out this article what I mean is really clear :
http://www.buraak.com/2008/09/16/is-your-information-safe-with-social-networks/