facebook

Stephen Tippins in the American Conservative takes the Facebook/social media critique in the direction of “gender performance” in a way I hadn’t ever heard before:

Of particular concern for conservatives in the onslaught of social technology is its effect on masculinity; for modern man is not man in any real sense of the word. He is gender neutral and void of all chivalrous notions, save for vestiges in door-holding and table manners.

Tippins’ main point seems to be that Facebook encourages a weak, banal form of social connection that is characterized by inane gossip and narcissistic examinations of the self and others. He lays this at the feet of the feminist movement:

The feminist movement was consummated at least two generations ago, but the aggression continues. Eventually, the post-feminist woman, believing that she epitomizes equality and choice, will assimilate all men into her collective, until we all resemble either the metrosexual…. or the spineless runts that these women dominate at home.

The problematic feminist critique aside (you can just as easily say that women have been made “masculine” by the feminist movement if you wanted to go down the essentialist road), the implication is that being “networked” on Facebook or other forms of social media is akin to “being assimilated…into her collective.” A “real man” is not able to be captured by the network, but stands apart from it (see John Gault in the Fountainhead).

While I disagree with the author’s reduction of the possible ways of “being a man” to an essentialist choice between either John Wayne or a spineless runt, I’m intrigued by this idea of Facebook as being inherently feminist). Social Bakers has a great run down on gender differences in Facebook use. They find that there are more women than men on Facebook:

but more importantly women post more and disclose more about themselves:

According to feminist standpoint theory, women disclose more on Facebook because of different “cognitive styles” that result from the different “standpoints” of men and women in a patriarchal society.

The masculine cognitive style is abstract, theoretical, disembodied, emotionally detached, analytical, deductive, quantitative, atomistic, and oriented toward values of control or domination. The feminine cognitive style is concrete, practical, embodied, emotionally engaged, synthetic, intuitive, qualitative, relational, and oriented toward values of care.

If Facebook is about disclosure and connection with intimate and semi-intimate others, then it would seem to be more appealing to those who care about and are able to cultivate relationships (e.g. those who can “emotionally engage” and are “embodied” and “oriented towards values of care”). I haven’t thought about it too deeply, but I’d suggest that if the outcome of men joining Facebook is to have them adopt more “feminine qualities” then that’s all the better for society (trust me, there are still plenty of models of hypermasculinity out there for anyone who wants to find them). Personally, I think we’d be better off with more “integrated” men and women that cultivated the virtuous qualities of both the “masculine” and the “feminine.”

I’d really be interested in what others think about this.

I’m 42 and an Internet scholar. I feel like the oldest of fogies when I begin talking to young people about how “the Internet is changing everything.” Yesterday I felt a hind of old timer solidarity listending to a podcast converstaion between two of my favorite comedians. Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show on WFMU (my favorite podcast) was a guest on comedian Mark Maron’s WTF show (my other favorite podcast) and the conversation turned to the Internet. I’m paraphrasing here a bit:

Scharpling: It is a very bad thing to have a 4(?) on your age… you’ve seen three lifetimes worth of changes in 20 years, and it’s the wrong 20 years to grow up in….

Maron: The world was analog and now it’s digital

Scharpling: a kid whose growing up with these things now, it just informs the world and that’s it. You can’t be 20 and writing a letter to somebody and then 20 years later the whole world is turned upside down…

Maron: now there’s 100 letters you have to process every day. Part of your daily routine is like half a year!

The truth is that the information deluge they discuss is the tip of the iceberg. Take the idea of the social graph, or a global mapping of relationships. In Internet terms, a map of relationships is invaluable for targeting advertising. The Pinboard blog has a perfect description of it:

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Here’s how Facebook intends to use the social graph…

Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there.

For a 40 something like me, this is jarring. The amount of data collected on me through my Internet activity gets process through my formative experiences. For for today’s students, this is water to fish. This example creeps me out:

Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do this, requested all the data Facebook had about him. He got back a CD with 1,222 PDF files

I don’t know if it creeps out 20 somethings. I’m not even sure if it should?

I encourage you all to read Evegny Morozov’s brilliant article in the New York Times Sunday Review.  In it, he laments the loss of the cyberflaneur, a brilliant term for one who “strolls” through cyberspace the way a 19th century flaneur would:

leisurely stroll through its (Paris’) streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

The changes to the Web in the last decade have made “strolling” obsolete. To put it in more Weberian terms, the Web has been rationalized.  Here’s is a particularly thoughtful passage:

Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely.

He saves most of his scorn for Facebook.

Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.

A critique I build on in my upcoming book, Facebook Democracy.  In it, I explore the importance of mystery and detachment from the self to democratic civic life.  I’m particularly struck by this passage in Morozov’s essay:

“The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,”

Applied to politics, this translates to a citizen that observes, listens and reads the cacophony of political voices before they jump in.  But Facebook culture, I think, makes that role more difficult to put into practice.  The result is either complete detachment from politics, or a political certainty that equates to having a Jim Rome style “take” of political events.  Neither seems like a good model for democratic citizenship.

This video of a parent unloading a clip in his daughter’s laptop in response to an angry post has gone viral and judging by the comments (on Facebook ironically enough) the video has touched a nerve.

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This performance highlights a nagging sense among many parents that we have lost our way as a culture (and that social media is somehow responsible).  It in essence is tapping into a fantasy we have as parents that if we just practiced “tough love” and didn’t “spare the rod,” all would be fine.  Our children wouldn’t use Facebook and we would have proper, obedient, technology free children.  But the reality is that “tough love” won’t stop teens from wanting to have a separate space from parents.  I agree with the general sentiment many of the commenters posted regarding setting boundaries, but shooting a laptop isn’t teaching a lesson, it’s venting.   In my view, discipline has to come from a position of detached, dispassionate calm.  If discipline comes from anger, its hard to separate out what is in the best interest of your child and what’s just you “blowing off steam.”  If you watch this video, you can’t help but be struck by how much “venting” is going on as he is shooting his daughter’s laptop.  I’ve been angry like that before… there’s a lot of pain and disappointment underneath the bravado.

The main problem is that Facebook creates a “separate space” from parents where their content is recorded for posterity.  If the daughter could have vented without a digital transcript, the parent’s would have been none the wiser and the world would have been spared an ugly viral video.  This is the challenging and frustrating thing about our age — we’re not changing our core emotional make-ups, we’re losing discretion and discernment as to when we should express emotions.

 

 

 

A new Pew study on teens and social media highlights a social media “civility gap” between teens and adults online. While 85% of adults find that people are “mostly nice” on social networking site, only 69% of teens say the same.

What’s interesting is that the social media phenomenon has been so explosive that there hasn’t been a generation that has moved from “teen social media” to “adult social media.” Facebook’s rise to prominence has happened in three years. It would be interesting to know whether social networking sites contribute to “nice” or “mean” interactions through their architecture (for instance, Facebook’s insistence on not having a “hate” button, only a “like” button). Or is it simply the fact that teen life is in many ways inherently overtly “meaner” than adult life whose “meanness” is more subtle?

College professors around the world struggle with Facebook for their students attention (It’s OK, we know). Most of them take care of this by forbidding laptops from the classroom. But doing that removes an essential tool for “note taking” or learning further about the topic (some students I know actually do this).

The Web is a useful supplement for classroom learning, opening students up to the world of ideas and concepts the may be unfamiliar with or, more to the point, uncomfortable with. However, there is the sneaking suspicion on the part of faculty that our students aren’t “taking notes” on their laptops, they are checking Facebook.

How could they not. Facebook is the biggest social networking application in the world. The site is still in its toddler phase, but has achieved an impressive global reach, with 750 million users world wide. But this ubiquitousness happenened in a matter of months. A mere three yeras ago, MySpace had a larger user base than Facebook. To Internet scholars, that seems like a million years ago. Because of Facebook’s rapid rise, we know little about the impact the application has on our experience of the social world?

I’m writing a book for Ashgate Press where I make the case that Facebook produces a preference for “the personal” in ways that make users disdainful of, although not averse to, “the impersonal”. I argue that the emphasis on disclosure and connection on Facebook colors by the nature of our engagement with public (political) life.

To return to the classroom example, the power of disclosure and connection to a network of intimates is difficult for a professor to compete with. I am a stranger to most of my students. They don’t know me. They have no way of knowing whether what I’m saying in the classroom will be useful, or uncomfortable by making them think about things they have little control over.

By contrast, on Facebook, they can build deeper connections with people they have already vetted, people to which they are socially proximate. They can share intimate, subjective, feelings and observations about the world around them. They can talk about people they like, what professors are wearing, or how much fun they had the night before. Each update from a friend is a small burst of oxytocin that is next to impossible for someone talking about macro-economics to compete with.

But what if I am saying something my students need to know? What if I’m talking about impersonal systems and strucutres that do not have Facebook accounts or provide status updates. What if a discussion about addressing the Greek debt crisis isn’t based on how you feel about Greece, but requires the development of reasoning about how one builds institutions in an increasingly complex world. What if global warming is actually a “thing out there” and isn’t subject to how you or your friends “feel” about it. A tsunami caused by radical shifts in temperature that is about to crash over you isn’t interested in whether you “like” it or not.

This is what I suspect Facebook does to us….it engages us with the appealing world of disclosure and connection when many of our large scale problems have little to do with those two things.

Today, Facebook signed up to use Web of Trust (WOT) reputation ratings to help create a safter on-line experience for its users. The effort is intended to avoid phishing scams within Facebook.  Once a Facebook user shares a link:

Facebook automatically scans the links, applying WOT’s information, to determine if the website is known to distribute spam or contain malware. If the link is identified as untrustworthy, then a warning will appear allowing the person to avoid the link, learn more about the rating or continue forward.

Assessments about the trustworthiness of the site are determined by the crowd. I’m not sure exactly how it will work but presumably if enough people flag a site as malicious, a WOT warning appears.

Sounds good so far.But I wonder how this crowdsourcing of malicious links on Facebook simultaneously binds us even more closely to an “architecture of publicness” (a term I’m playing with as I prepare a manuscript on Facebook’s effect on political identity).  What I mean by this term is a on-line design structure that provides social incentives to reveal elements of yourself, whether it be your behavior, your likes and dislikes or pieces of information from your past or present.  All this can of course be aggregated and mined for marketing purposes, even if it won’t necessarily be used in this way.

Theoretically, WOT data would seem to be no different.  As you report which sites are unsavory, Facebook (and/or WOT, I’m not sure how this data is collected) learns more about your tastes and preferences and your browsing habits.

An appropriate retort would be that this is all happening in the name of making Facebook a more secure environment….fair enough.  There is no reason why the relentless revelation of your online self has to be all bad.  In fact revelation is cathartic and desirable in many ways.  However when we start to rationalize revelation by making it mundane, it does something to us (I think).  I’m not sure what that is yet, but I’m afraid there’s a part of it that’s not so savory.  How much sharing is too much sharing on-line?  I’m not entirely sure.

PM Stephen Harper quote on shitharperdid

Canada is in the midst of a federal election and you can read posts covering it by myself on r h i z o m i c o n and Impolitical on our respective blogs. Lorne Gunter in the National Post is mad as hell and he’s not taking it anymore. His beef? All of this social media in politics hoopla::

“Oh, please, spare me. Social media – services such as Twitter and Facebook – are not going to swing the current federal election away from the Tories and in favour of the Liberals, NDP or Green party, no matter how much anti-Harper activists and reporters wish they could.”

While he acknowledges that social media is a useful tool, he’s also making sweeping generalizations about their effects::

“But they don’t win or lose elections on their own (or pull off Middle Eastern revolutions), no matter how much social media devotees in newsrooms and elsewhere claim they do.”

He seems particularly perturbed by the shitharperdid website and this supposedly gushing Vancouver Sun article.

“The Vancouver Sun story claims 2 million web surfers quickly hit on the www.shitharperdid.ca site. Great, so they went to a site run by like-minded lefties and had their prejudices confirmed. Whoopee.”

He drifts into a Malcolm Gladwell argument that social media promotes just “one click activism” and doesn’t really engender any real persuasion. Here on ThickCulture, we have discussed Malcolm Gladwell’s downplaying and concerns about social media in the social activism arena, here, here, and here.

Lorne argues that social media campaigns are largely ineffectual, citing anti-prorogation and strategic voting efforts. Then, he loses it and goes off on Harper Derangement Syndrome as the latest manifestation of a leftist affliction along the lines of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Well, the left has no monopoly on demonizing the other side.

The problem with Lorne’s analysis is his narrow definition of success and assumption that social media merely preaches to the converted. There are three things wrong with what he’s saying:

  1. It assumes a narrow definition of efficacy
  2. It ignores the “mere exposure” effect
  3. It ignores the marketing concept of “segmentation”

Efficacy

Gunter suggests that social media doesn’t win elections on their own, but nobody is really advocating that they are. Naheed Nenshi, the Calgary mayor whose campaign last fall was attributed to the use of social media notes that his campaign was based on ideas. Social media helped to personalize his campaign to make it salient to voters. I don’t think Gunter would quibble with this, but I think he underestimates the effects of content that “preaches to the converted” and the persuasive effects of content that goes viral.

When the March 2007 anti-Hillary Clinton Vote Different video went viral {posted by a designer who worked for the firm that designed Obama’s website}, Obama’s polling numbers didn’t budge. Guess what? That month, his contributions did, quite considerably. My point being is that the effects of social media may not be straightforward and political strategy needs to take account of this. The preaching to the base aspect of social media that Gunter views as a waste of time can help a campaign motivate its loyals and turn them into activists. Social media can also increase the exposure and salience of a party, which segues into the next issue.

The “Mere Exposure” Effect

Decades ago, social psychologist Robert Zajonc found that people can be persuaded to have positive inferences about an object {or brand, party, or candidate} through increased exposure. So, controlling for aesthetics and other source material and content characteristics, Zajonc found that increasing exposure leads to higher favourable attitudes. In effect, a “familiarity breeds contentment” route to persuasion that doesn’t require any real substance to the content. This explains how the ubiquity of Starbucks builds the brand with relatively little advertising. Social media can have the same effect. Anti-Harper sites can persuade by just going viral and entering into voter consciousness. The challenge is cutting through the clutter to get that exposure, i.e., coming up with something that resonates and goes viral.

Segmentation: It’s the Young Voters, Stupid

A big topic this election is the youth vote. The 2008 turnout for those 18-24 was 37%, compared to 58% overall, a historic low. Interestingly, some view this as likely to worsen, as prevailing attitudes deem voting as a choice rather than a duty [Also, see StatCan 2005 pdf youth voting/civic engagement report]. The youth vote is a prime target of sites like shitharperdid.ca and the youth…have more of a tendency to not vote Conservative. Getting the youth mobilized, along the lines of the Rock the Vote campaign in 1992, is tricky business that cannot be easily replicated. Nevertheless, sites targeting the youth aren’t necessarily “one-click activism” that has no effect.

It’s About Engagement

At the end of the day, engagement matters. I think it’s the height of arrogance for Gunter to state that social media cannot swing the federal election. I’m curious what Gunther’s thoughts are on the Conservative Party’s efforts to use the web and social media to scare voters about how there “might” be an iPod tax with false claims that IP expert Michael Geist has debunked.

The A Channel news in Victoria gets it, as does NDP Leader Jack Layton who used the Twitter term “#fail” {hashtag fail} in the English debates last week::

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The idea that social media can increase youth engagement of “square” politics through sites young people use and help to make politics less intimidating are part of the democratizing potential of the web.

Social media have been getting employees in hot water {remember the Cisco Fatty meme and the suspension of a professor for Facebook updates expressing frustration} and even candidates for office cannot escape the wayback machine glimpse into one’s past. I don’t think the “culture of optics” is a good thing and while before the advent of social media it was easier to control content, that is no longer the case without having a chilling effect on free speech.

The National Labor Relations Board has now ruled that a the Connecticut firm, American Medical Response, illegally fired an employee, Dawnmarie Souza, for criticizing her supervisor on Facebook, engaging in online conversations with others workers. Acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon , for the board announced::

“It’s the same as talking at the water cooler…The point is that employees have protection under the law to talk to each other about conditions at work.”

While many of the finger-waggers might think Souza et al. were engaging in a workplace facepalm moment and should expect negative consequences, the fact of the matter is that labour laws protect workers when discussing their jobs and working conditions, whether unionized or not. While Malcolm Gladwell may disagree, social media may provide an avenue for increased activism, including labour activism, which may be an issue if the economy remains in the doldrums and high unemployment creates a “buyers market” for labour.

Social media creates challenges for organizations to maintain their brand in an era of instantaneous and decentralized communications that can foster multiple dialogues outside of the control of the organization. These dialogues make the organization more transparent and can increase goodwill and trust. In fact, I would argue that the challenge of many organizations is to communicate both trust and competence with their stakeholders and social media can foster both.

What I think is going to happen is that organizations are going to continue surveillance of employees and focus on more rigorous screening at hiring. This won’t eliminate the thorny issue of what to do when social media fosters conversations that the organization doesn’t want to have or isn’t prepared for…which is why transparency’s a bitch.

Twitterversion:: [blog] Thoughts on NLRB ruling stating worker complaining about supervisor on Facebook was illegally fired. @ThickCulture @Prof_K

Evolution of Social & Information Connections

José has a great post on privacy, Privacy Schmivacy, which highlighted how algorithms can infer information about you rendering privacy settings in a certain context obsolete. The implication is the public-private divide and as José aptly puts it::

“This poses a paradox…if people freely give this information to a web site in exchange for the pleasures of friendship/connection, then are we obliged to regulate how the information is used by others? Isn’t a central element of connection the fact that you’re ‘putting yourself out there’ in public. Being public poses risks. Can we have the pleasures of the public with the protections of the private?”

I’ve been following developments on the semantic web, Web 3.0, which is all over the personal information and data about us that’s out there and can be used, as in Facebook profiles, and computers talking to computers to anticipate our needs. Ideally, it’s a benign Skynet from the Terminator movies.

While there have been discussions of a privacy ontology, this one from way back in 2002, the sticky wicket is that most users don’t understand the ramifications of using sites as we move towards the semantic web. For example, last July, Facebook’s algorithms were tweaked to be able to scour your contacts in your address book. You can opt out of this, but what about all the address books that you’re in? I’ve noticed that one’s Facebook friends list could construct one’s social graph for quite some time now, so I’m not surprised that social networks and profiling of users under lockdown can be done so readily and relatively accurately. That said, I think that users need to be more aware of the risks of engaging social media and not be lulled into a false sense of privacy. In terms of policy, I think more can and should be done to {a} limit what information is accessible and {b} companies and organizations need to be more up-front about what information is accessible and to whom, along with the ramifications of this. I firmly believe there is a knowledge gap between what users know and the reality of privacy on the web.

Should there be more regulation or more strict privacy policies by companies and organizations? I think that’s an interesting question. The stakes are the benefits of interacting with your identity, but the risks are the use of that information constructing that very identity. My initial reaction is no, but with a twist. I think there needs to be more information presented to users in lay language on the implications of using social media as the contextual web becomes more ubiquitous.

A more interesting issue, to me, isn’t the privacy issue, but how the semantic web can alter the social world and policy, which encompasses privacy and the nature of data in everyday life. One area in particular is what I see as an intrusion of the economic sphere on the personal through the use of data::

  • Should your employer be privy to your credit rating or driving record?
  • Should they be allowed to use public information about you {from databases or on social networking sites} as a condition of employment?
  • Where does one’s role as a employee end and a private citizen begin? In other words, is speech less-than-free if you want to keep your job?

You can pose similar questions regarding the intersections of the personal and the political, the social, etc., with the main point being that these intersections are altering our everyday lives.

The semantic web is the churlish love child of Foucault’s surveillance and Derrida’s deconstruction.

Twitterversion:: Will the semantic web destroy privacy, given current policies & trends? How will it affect everyday life? #ThickCulture

Song:: Camera Obscura, ‘I Don’t Do Crowds’