Posts Tagged: culture

Noticed — 12 Comments
15
Sep 08

When is a Social Network not a Social Network

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.

Noticed / Research / Thoughts — 13 Comments
2
Jul 07

On Class and Social Network Transitions

Last week, danah boyd generated significant discussion with her piece Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace (comments here). After reading it this morning (I was offline last week), and then exploring some of the controversy surrounding the piece, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.

In the essay, danah draws on her ongoing ethnography to explore class distinctions between Facebook and Myspace. Using frank language, she divides the representative “classes” of users – Facebook’s users are more systematically mainstream, whereas Myspace has become the catch-all for the second-class and minority cliques oft thought of as non-elite. As one might imagine, this argument created uproar, especially after it was grossly genericized in the press. While I think dichotomizing an audience as large as Facebook’s or Myspace’s is inherently problematic, danah’s essay was a meditation, meant to be thought-provoking and controversial.

danah’s work often draws the parallels between physical spaces and so-called “networked” or “digital” publics. As young people spend more of their lives interacting socially online, the expectations, norms and cultural baggage of our offline existences often show up in these online places. As a result, our online spaces become political and value-laden, and certainly the press and public-opinion treatment of Myspace is a prime exemplar.

How Myspace became a “scary” place is beyond the scope of this article; however, I’ve cataloged enough press clippings about social networks to clearly see an editorial slant. This is no surprise, as the “social networks as dangerous spaces” narrative has been a dominant theme for years now. But as we pull the layers back, I think danah brings up an interesting point for analysis – was Myspace easier to stigmatize because its userbase wasn’t the elite? Certainly, if we look at a Myspace/Facebook split in coverage, you’ll see differences in the volume and tone.

As we go down this path, one could argue that the systematic bias that pervades coverage of Myspace is a artifact of how the audience/userbase is generally covered; and if you buy danah’s characterization, this makes sense. I mean, when is the last time you read a positive mainstream press article about goths? And while I certainly don’t trust the press enough to throw away any of these possibilities, I think the larger effect we see in differences of coverage is due to access. That is, reporters/parents/schoolteachers have always had access to Myspace, whereas open access to Facebook is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Social networks as scary places is a media narrative that lasted longer than it should have. It played on parent’s worst fears (sexual exploitation) and turned teenage technical sophistication into a bad thing (i.e. savvy teens vs. clueless parents). I think the only reason the narrative is burning out is because the stories have been written so many times. Now, Facebook is emerging as an alternative – and it is being cast in the light of the “good alternative.” It is the anti-Myspace, which is a sentiment echoed up and down the food chain. Of course, in being the anti-Mypsace, we see a good/bad dichotomy between the two services. Those who use Facebook are good, advanced, self-respecting – while those who continue to populate Myspace – ouch.

As with anything boiled down into headline or paragraph, the nuance and complexity of the issue often overlooked. If Facebook is “good”, why doesn’t everyone just switch? And are those who don’t switch “bad” or second class? Of course not. I believe a good deal of this confusion can be explained by social network switching, or transition, costs.

If you’re reading my blog, it is likely you’ve heard of the network effect. In a nutshell, network effect means that as more people join a network, the network becomes more valuable. Imagine if you have 125 friends on Myspace, but you only know 10 people on Facebook; since you can get more social information from your 125 friends on Myspace, that network is much more valuable to you. Make no mistake, social network sites are social information hubs – the value of these hubs are directly related to the relevance of the network to the consumer. If you get more value out of your Myspace network, are you going to switch? Of course not – at least for now.

For the past three years, however, Facebook’s network has been growing amongst college and high-school students. Even though hundreds of thousands of people are joining Facebook each week, the strong ties and large networks in Facebook are generally populated by the students – they are the first-class network in Facebook, without a question. Because those who attend college can be grouped into secioeconomic classes, there’s certainly an effect for this self-selection. However, the reason one class can leave Myspace easier than the other is simply because switching costs are lower. If you’re of a “class” where many of your peers attend or have attended college, it is likely that you’ll have a rich network to join once you make the leap to Facebook. If you don’t, well – you’re a first adopter, and we know what that portion of the curve looks like. Does this mean that these “second-class” users can’t or won’t join – absolutely not – they will simply wait until Facebook’s network becomes valuable enough for them to join. In this sense, rational economic judgement (value of information networks) is keeping some users in situ, while others depart.

Of course, this analysis neglects a reality that some Facebook users do look down on Myspace (just as some Myspace users look down at Facebook). Are the Facebook users the kids with the new sneakers? Can we make this argument about digital publics? And perhaps having the social capital to be able to make the leap from Myspace to Facebook is a class statement. I think the problem here is that we’re overvaluing the tastemakers.

In 2004, students joined Facebook just because – not because it was the anti-Mypsace. Facebook grew from this point, and became the college social network. Yes – we consider this bloc to be the tastemakers (largely a function of their lifetime spending potential), but simply because they’re on Facebook – does that make it better? I think that’s the question we have to ask ourselves – because there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy on Myspace. Will the transition? Sure, I think transition is inevitable. Just as bars and restaurants go in and out of popularity, so will online social places. And just when those places become popular, the tastemakers will depart for new opportunities. But those who are left behind – do we need to worry about them? Honestly, I can’t really say – but my gut tells me they’ll fend for themselves just fine. There’s just too many parallels between this and everything else in life for me to believe that’s not the case.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
18
Oct 06

The Colonialist Perspective in Social Software

When one designs social software, they are forced to make pseudo-governmental decisions about how the contained ecosystem will behave. Examples of these decisions include limits on friending behavior, limits on how information in a profile can be displayed, and how access to information is restricted in the ecosystem. These rules create and inform the structural aspects of the ecosystem, causing participants in the ecosystem to behave a specific way.

The practice of software development, and particularly design considerations in software development, have changed drastically over the last decade. Whereas the imperative in software design used to be task-solving and efficiency, we now design software that amuses, entertains, and connects people – all the while wasting as much time as possible. Indeed, the paradigm has shifted – but have the assumptions we take into the design process changed?

To further this point, lets explore how social software has changed over the last decade. A core assumption in the early social literature was that an individual would take on a persona when they used social software. For example, one was supposed to create a new identity when they joined a MUD or MOO – there was a discrete line between the person and the persona. However, today’s social software is about continuous identity – the idea that my online persona effectively and willingly enmeshes with my offline persona. Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIN – all of these extremely popular service deal in real identity, not constructed identity.

In that sense, the social software that we use becomes an augmentative part of our lives. We use Facebook to connect with classmates and find out about events. We go see a band because we’ve experienced their work previously on their Myspace page. Our real social worlds are mediated through social software – and in doing so, they are picking up the structural rules that the designers of social software have built into the system.

Let’s look at an illustrative example. In the Facebook, users can enforce strict rules on who can see their information. For example, if a user has high privacy settings and announces a party on the Facebook, only those in her privacy network will be able to see the party invitation. This is quite different from if she announced her party to the class, or posted a flyer in her department, where friends and non-friends could get the information. In this context, there is a very clear interaction between the enforced rules in the social technology and our societal context.

We can look at this situation in two ways. The first viewpoint is that the social network delivered social value to the party-thrower because it denied access to information to non-friends. Rather than having to risk embarrassment by selectively not inviting people to her party, the user displaced the social context onto the social network, and relied on the structural aspects of the social networks to enforce her will. The second viewpoint is that the social network reduced social value to the party-thrower because it excluded access to non-participants and prevented invitation of non-friends who might better the party. Indeed, the social network has enforced her will, but it has also limited her opportunity.

As we use social software more, and social software more neatly integrates with our lives, a greater portion of our social rules will come to be enforced by the will of software designers. Of course, this isn’t new – when we elected to use email, we agree to buy into the social consequences of email. Perhaps because we are so used to making tradeoffs when we adopt social technology, we don’t notice them anymore. However, as social technology adopts a greater role in mediating our social experience, it will become very important to take a critical perspective in analyzing how the will of designers change us.

Two things got me thinking about this. First was a post on the O’Reilly Radar blog about homophily in social software. Homophily is the phenomenon where we associate with like individuals because we share like experience. As homophily is largely a social construct associated with mobility, the web can “break” homophily because there are very few barriers to mobility on the net. The author proposes that designers must think as homophily as either a feature or a bug – something to be destroyed.

Second is a recent discussion I was part of. In the discussion, I asked two senior executives at social networking websites how they incorporate feedback from their users. The first executive outlined a number of careful steps regarding how they used and integrated user feedback. The second executive stated that they didn’t pay attention to feedback because users don’t know what they want. Obviously, there isn’t a right or wrong here, but there is a mentality that causes these types of judgments.

The dichotomy of the responses illustrated two perspectives on social software design. The first is the cultural adaptive process, one in while designers of the social system design to their ecosystem. danah boyd covers this process in an article about Glocation and Web 2.0. The second perspective is none less than colonialist – users don’t know better, therefore the social system must enforce a strict and top-down perspective. Therefore, the decision to break or retain homophily is colonialist – and illustrative of the many like decisions designers make each day when constructing social software.

It might be simple to rationalize that designers of social software adopt a colonialist perspective because they do feel “better” than their users. Software developers are an interesting set of the technical population – and often times they do have a “know better” mentality. This mentality informs the perspective, but I don’t feel it is the prime reason for the mentality. The simple fact is it is easier to adopt the colonialist mentality. When social software is designed, it is much easier to take the internal logic that informs the designers perspective and operationalize that in the software. It isn’t so much that users don’t know what they need, it is that designers don’t know what users don’t know they need. Therefore, it is much simpler to hope that the community conforms to the structure the designers have put in place.

It is this process that leads to breaches of community like the Facebook Feeds. This is a particularly telling example, as the designers of the software enforced the will of their CEO onto the general population. This will is Mark Zuckerberg’s libertarian view of the world (that information flow is a societal equalizer). However, this will was not shared by the population of the Facebook, who reacted strongly to having new social rules enforced from the de-facto oligarch of the society.

As social technology becomes a larger augmentative part of our social experience, we must look critically at how the will of the designers are shaping our lives. We will take social expectations from our experience in social software – social software will change us just like any other change agent. That social software has tremendous potential to affect our experience makes this all the more important.

As we are connected by this new technology, there are new rules, contexts and structures that will inform our social experience. It is important, therefore, that designers realize this – that they realize the role their technology plays in mediating real social relationships.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
25
Sep 06

Pew: Will transparency make the world a better place?

The Pew Internet and American Life project released Part II of its Future of the Internet report. Run by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, the content aggregated in this report is simply worth its weight in gold. In the study, Pew brought together a number of highly respected experts and asked them to respond to some possible scenarios. While the report as a whole is very useful, I felt that section 4 of the report would be of interest to readers.

Pew posed the following question:

As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.

The respondents split, with 46% agreeing and 49% disagreeing. Personally, I’m blown away that half of Pew’s expert panel seems to accept the underlying assumption of the question – that privacy won’t really be an option in 2020. Pew, explaining the current status of surveillance issues, states:

Your life is being recorded in various ways today. Your cell phone is a tracking device. Your personal life and financial status are recorded in various databases. Anyone in the world can find out the tax-assessed value of your home with a 10-second internet search. And, with the further development of “IP on everything,” the concept that people and goods will be tagged and trackable on the network through the use of sensors, things are becoming more complex and more transparent simultaneously.

Billions of radio frequency ID (RFID) tags are already in use due to their growing adoption by retailers (such as Wal-Mart) and government agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Defense). The fairly inexpensive, nearly invisible devices are used as a means to improve efficiency. They can be used to track inventory, equipment and personnel; they may replace bar codes. One estimate finds that corporations making RFID devices will make more than $24 billion a year by 2016.

In a sense, we’re already living in this world. As I type this note, my computer is attached to an internet connection that records my presence; when I present a credit card at the store, I am further recorded – and who knows how many surveillance cameras record my every move. What we lack – what gives us this notion of privacy, is the fact the mesh network that would bring all of this information together doesn’t yet exist (outside of the NSA). How reminiscent of the Facebook feeds fiasco – yes, all my information is out there – but when it is in one place, I am no longer comfortable with it.

In the report, Cory Doctorow and Hal Varian weigh in on a social contract for privacy.

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow, an EFF Fellow, wrote, “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical. We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows. We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.” And Hal Varian of Google and the UC-Berkeley wrote, “Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.”

Barry Wellman explores the nature of power and privacy:

Barry Wellman, a researcher on virtual communities and workplaces and the director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, responded, “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”

A fascinating report. You can download a free copy at the Pew site, and you can view the complete remarks of the experts at this site. Note: Cross-blogged to the claimID blog.

Thoughts — 8 Comments
7
Sep 06

How Facebook Broke its Culture

In talking this Facebook controversy through with a number of reporters, I came upon a few insights about feeds, which I thought I’d share.

  • Facebook’s shaky standpoint. Facebook takes the stand that feeds introduce nothing “new”. Unfortunately, this logic fails because information disclosure is both quantitative and qualitative. Facebook (sort of) gets to claim there is quantitatively no more information being shared (more on this later). Qualitatively, the difference is huge. Information disclosure is multidimensional. Each day, when you put on your clothes, you have assumptions that a certain audience will see you in these clothes. Imagine if every day when you got dressed, everyone saw what you were wearing – wouldn’t you agree that is vastly different? And wouldn’t it make you feel a little weird? Now multiply this by every information facet shared in the Facebook. Perhaps now the problem makes more sense.
  • On the nature of friendship in the Facebook. My research has shown that facebook users average hundreds of friends. This means that the nature of friendship is different and culturally unique in the Facebook. Friendship in the Facebook is cultural currency – I link to you and you link to me. Implicit in this is a one-time exchange of social capital, nothing more. However, friendship is an absolutely core element of the service – and with this change, the nature of friendship in the service, and everything that goes along with it, changes. From now on, when you friend someone, you’re agreeing to let them have a feed of everything you do – this is a huge difference from the previous notion of friendship, which users were quite comfortable with.
  • On how users explore each other. The common argument for feeds is that “the information is out there anyway.” So it stands, if you wanted to, you could replicate the functionality of feeds by checking your friend’s profiles every day. This argument fails because this is not how Facebook users use the service. Facebook users log in to check their messages, respond to pokes, use profiles as “white pages”, coordinate events – they aren’t logging in to surf profiles endlessly (sure, they do this when they have an exam the next day, but it isn’t the normal activity). Why is this? Well, put simply, you know your friends. And the people you’ve friended that aren’t really your friends – sure, you’ll check them out from time to time, but that’s not how the site is used. In essence, profiles are just a small part of the site.Users understand this. When they update their profile, they are updating it for a micro-audience of a subset of their friends. They aren’t expecting everyone they know to see (or care) about every last minute change in their life. People have a mental model of disclosure, and this change breaks that mental model. Even though “nothing is different”, it is clear that something absolutely is different. The privacy of being average is gone.
  • On updates. Previously, the Facebook would let you know if people updated their profiles, if they changed certain key elements of their profile. With the feeds feature, everything everyone does is shared. Yes, perhaps its fair to say you’ve updated your profile when you’ve added new favorite movies and the like – but a chronicle of every friend you add and every wall message you write? Whatsmore, every friend you add and wall message you write broadcast to your entire friend group? This makes people seriously uncomfortable.
  • Chilling effects. Facebook feeds are the ultimate chilling effect. If you knew everything you did was going to be broadcast to everyone you know, wouldn’t you second-guess yourself more? Nuff said.
  • The falsity of the pageview argument. Apparently (according to the A-list), feeds are a move that undermines Facebook’s quest for pageviews. In that sense, we’re supposed to feel all fuzzy about how they’ve introduced this “useful” service against their best interests. False. Facebook users don’t check all of their friends profiles – they keep up with a small number of close friends and people they have crushes on. They don’t surf to all of their friends profiles every day, nor do they care to. By placing “feeds” in front of users, they are incentivized to check the profiles of people they see in their feeds – thereby increasing page views. That this move isn’t self serving is completely false – again, it shows how the A-List, Arrington on down, absolutely don’t understand the nuance of Facebook culture.
  • On a broken culture. What if, one day, you woke up and found that the rules that governed the society you lived in have been dramatically changed? Facebook has a very strong culture, and its users are deeply invested in the service. This strong blow to the core component of the site – friendship – coupled with this complete lack of privacy means the culture of the Facebook has changed. Its users are stunned, reeling – the same way you’d behave if you found out that you had to share every minute detail of your life with everyone you know. In my opinion, this blow to the core culture of the service is the most dangerous thing. Damaged cultures often never fully repair themselves – just ask Friendster.

As a researcher and analyst, I like to stay above being prescriptive. However, the more I analyze this, the more I am becoming convinced that Facebook is wandering into very dangerous territory. So I guess you could stay I’m stepping out of my analyst role, and trying to be a user advocate. Facebook employees – if you read this – know that what you have on your hands is serious as a heart attack.

I like the Facebook. I like what is has brought to campus. I like(d) the way it treated its users. I’ve invested a lot of time in the Facebook :). But more than I like the Facebook I like my fellow students, my cohort – and I like seeing them comfortable with their online identity. It amazes me that, if this thing was rolled out differently – opt in, with the users being able to select what parts of their profiles could be sent into the feeds – they wouldn’t have this mess on their hands. Instead of revolt we’d be talking about an edgy new feature that lots of users would like. But we don’t have that – and I’m starting to worry that it might not be possible to put this cat back in the bag.