As I’ve written about elsewhere, Facebook and other social network sites structurally and architecturally facilitate the amassment of large, diverse, and publicly displayed networks. Because of this, Facebook is sometimes charged with weakening social ties, threatening authenticity, and imploding the meaning of friendship. This is highlighted in Jimmy Kimmel’s recent promotion of “National UnFriend Day”— a day in which Facebook users are asked to clean out their Friends lists because, as Kimmel explains:

Half of the people in the country are on Facebook, and many of those people have hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends’ – and I find this unacceptable. No one has thousands of friends.

As is the case here, humor often acts as a safe medium through which serious social anxieties can be addressed.  As such, Kimmel’s comedic call reflects real cultural sentiments about the meaning of friendship and the relational changes facilitated by an increasingly connected population.

The fear is that strong ties will be displaced by weak ties. That friendship will lose its meaning. We can think of this as a fear of social disconnection via over-connection. Like a dense drop of paint whose molecules spread when mixed with water, we fear that our relationships will bleed out into something paler and less vibrant.

The fear of social disconnection due to technological development is not new. Georg Simmel theorizes about the social isolation of city dwellers; David Reisman warns that we are lonely because of the crowd; and Robert Putnam sadly proclaims that we are now “Bowling Alone.” Today, it seems that the exponential growth of interactive technologies and social media platforms are working to bring this fear to a head.

Contemporary anxieties are reflected in my own and others’ social media research. For example, participants in a 2004 study on Friendster refer to those with large networks as “Friendster whores.” And in a more recent study, participants report negative evaluations of those with more than 302 Facebook Friends. In my own work, I’ve looked at the extensive and complex strategies that people use to limit network size and access to the self on social network sites.

How well founded are these  anxieties?

According to Facebook, the average member has 130 “Friends.” This numbers is far below the “thousands” purported by Kimmel, safely below the 302 mark (the number beyond which the Facebook user is rated as less socially attractive), and within the hypothesized range of Dunbar’s number (the purported size of a network that any person can maintain). Overall, our online networks are not as massive as they seem to be. As shown in my research linked above, Facebook users actively tweak their networks to more accurately reflect their offline connections.

Moreover, recent non-social media based research shows that close networks are actually getting smaller and tighter. Using longitudinal data from the General Social Survey (1985-2010), Cornell Sociologist Matthew Brashears reports that the average American has “discussed important matters” with only 2 people in the past 6 months. Surprisingly, this number has decreased in the last decade—down from almost 3. In contrast to the fears discussed above, he argues that our strong ties are tightening— perhaps in response the growth of weak ties.

In sum, we can say that these fears of social disconnection are somewhat overstated.  Our online connections are relatively modest (130 on average) and our offline networks remain tightly knit. Why then, does the social anxiety persist?

Locating disconnection fears

I argue that fears of social disconnection, cast upon digital technologies, are partially rooted in linguistic technology. Specifically, these fears are rooted in the use of the term “friendship” to denote a social network site connection.

Language shapes how we think about the social world and the subjects and objects within it. Friendship, as traditionally used, signifies a sacred relationship. Friendship is the strong tie against which weaker ties—like acquaintances—are compared. Social network sites, however, complicate the meaning of friendship.

On Facebook (and other social network sites), “Friend” is a highly polysemic word. We use the word “Friend” to describe a broad range of relationships—ranging from very strong to very weak ties. We publicly classify our grandparents, childhood best friends, and that guy from chemistry last semester, under the same heading. This puts us in the precarious position of verbally and mentally qualifying these varied relationships, which hold different meanings despite their identical public designation.

In short, we are experiencing a cultural lag, or more specifically, a linguistic gap, in which cultural relationships, facilitated by quickly developing technologies, do not yet have adequate linguistic representation. We know, implicitly, that a Facebook connection means something different than a “real” friendship, but have not yet developed a vocabulary with which to describe this more varied relationship. As such, we wrangle uncomfortably with the two disparate meanings signified by a single word, and express anxiety over the now unclear connotation of the once sacred “Friend.”

The recently released film In Time, staring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, depicts a dystopian future where time, rather than money, acts as the currency. This film gives a Marxist critique of capitalism with a technological twist. In doing so, it reflects the cultural fear associated with life-prolonging technologies. At the same time, the film falls victim to the overly structural depictions common in popular Marxist tropes, and overly individualist claims about human nature—failing to make a connection between the two.

I begin here with a (mostly spoiler-free) synopsis of the film: As noted above, the film is premised on a social system that uses time as its currency. All citizens are genetically engineered to live to 25 years of age, at which time they stop aging and their clock starts running. Workers earn time for their wages, and pay for goods and services with time. If/when a person’s time runs out, that person dies. Citizens are separated into time zones, organized by an abundance or lack of time. The protagonist Will Salas lives in the ghetto. He and his fellow ghetto-dwellers live literally day-to-day and work in factories that produce units of time. In an unusual turn of events, a very wealthy and very old man gives Salas over 100 years. Salas then travels across time zones, ending up in New Greenwich, the wealthiest time zone. This elite enclave houses those who have enough time to buy immortality. Those who live in New Greenwich own the houses, stores, and factories in the ghetto. Salas attempts to steal time from the citizens of New Greenwich and disperse it among the ghetto-dwellers—redistributing the wealth more evenly

Here we can see a very basic Marxist critique of capitalism. Those who own the means of production (citizens from the New Greenwich time zone) control and exploit the ghetto-dwellers, who have only their labor to sell. In the factories, workers produce units of time that they cannot afford, and must increasingly meet rising quotas. Simultaneously, they struggle to afford life-sustaining goods (food and shelter) due to strategically imposed increases in living costs. Regularly, ghetto-dwellers can be found dead on the street, having “clocked out” (i.e. run out of time).  Literally then, the capitalist class sucks the life out of the proletariat.

The twist, of course, is that wealth disparities are measured in time, and humans are genetically engineered for this market system. Here, the film reflects two interrelated cultural fears about life-prolonging technologies: 1) unequal distribution of resources, leading to a literal dying out of the lower social classes and 2) overpopulation.

Cultural debates rage over the development of life-prolonging technologies. Although the potential to extend life considerably is close at hand (and some, like Ray Kurzweil, believe that this ability to prolong life is already here), many fear that these technologies will lead inevitably (and ironically) to the death and destruction of the human race.

One such fear is based in the unequal distribution of resources. The fear is that these technologies will be extremely expensive and available only to the elite, literally privileging the lives of the wealthy over those of the poor. This fear is realized in the film, as wealth (i.e. time) is distributed strictly across class lines. Although all citizens have the potential to live forever, very few actually do. Instead, those with the greatest amount of wealth (i.e. those who own the means of production) live long and youthful lives, while ghetto-dwellers die in the streets at very young ages.

A second (but related) fear is that of overpopulation. The earth can support a finite amount of life, and widespread immortality will result in more life than the earth can sustain. This of course circles back to the first fear, in that immortality can only be available if it is limited to a small number of recipients, and balanced by a decreased life-span among the majority. This is reflected in the film, as Salas is let in on the insider secret that “for a few to be immortal, many must die.” This is the rationale given by New Greenwich citizens for cutting wages, increasing quotas, and raising the cost of living—resulting inevitably and purposefully in the deaths of ghetto-dwellers. In short, the simultaneous preservation of the earth and maintenance of personal wealth for those in the upper echelons comes at the highest cost for those in the under classes.

Interestingly, the film roots the realization of these fears in the evils of human nature. The system is shown to prevail due simultaneously to insatiable greed on the part of the capitalists (i.e. New Greenwich citizens), and the greedy hopes of the underclass. For the former, this is rooted in the desire for infinite growth, while for the latter, it is rooted in the drive for upward mobility and the (allusive) potential to achieve immortality. In a poignant monologue, an elite New Greenwich capitalist deflates Salas by telling him that a re-distribution of wealth will be inevitably undermined, as there will always be those who desire immortality, and they will reproduce the system to achieve it.

These assumptions about human greed are in direct opposition to works of Max Weber, who demonstrates in his famous work on the Protestant Ethic that when left to their own devices, humans do the absolute minimum to acquire exactly (but no more than) they need. The Protestant Ethic and related Spirit of Capitalism, are therefore cultural and structural productions. In other words, the drive for personal maximization at any cost is in direct contradiction to human nature.

With that said, I would be remiss to argue that assumptions of human greed are without base. We are in the midst of an international revolution (or at least a lot of really really big movements) based upon the exploitation of the many for the extreme benefit of a few. Indeed, individuals have, do, and will likely continue, to take self-interested actions for purposes of personal gain—even as these gains come at very high costs to many.

The connection then, that this film and that many Marxist tropes fail to make, is between structure, culture, and individual social actors. Cultures and structures impact not only institutions and social systems, but also how we relate to each other, how we are in the world, and what it means to be human. Greed then, is a socially produced and socially reinforced way of being human in the world. As such, dystopian fears about life-prolonging technologies are not un-contextualized fears about the technologies themselves, but about the ways in which these technologies will fit and work within the structural and cultural realities of the time.

A short psychological thriller titled “Take This Lollipop” has been circulating The Net just in time for Halloween. This video depicts a presumably psychotic man (pictured above) hacking into and becoming irate about, YOUR Facebook page. Not only does the video literally embody fears about digital security, but captures numerous aspects of the web 2.0 culture. The experience is personalized and interactive, as the video incorporates actual content from each viewer’s Facebook page. The experience is augmented, as the viewer’s heavily digital experience (watching an online video, about digital insecurity, incorporating the viewer’s own digital persona) elicits corporeal fear. Finally, the experience is broadcast and re-documented, as people tape themselves watching the video and share their reactions on YouTube (see one after the jump).

Siri on iPhone 4S lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back. Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it.

The paragraph above is taken directly from the Apple iPhone homepage. It is a description of Siri, one of the most talked about features of the new iPhone 4S. I argue here that Siri is rich with cultural meanings, and that these cultural meanings reside at the intersection of gender, market economy, and technology.

The first thing to note is that Siri (in the U.S.) has a female voice, but more than this, Siri is a “she.” Siri and her voice are first personified by the designation of this feature as your “personal assistant.” This personification has been quickly and widely accepted, with references to “her” rather than “it” on the interwebz.

From a marketing standpoint, this is brilliant. To personify the technology is to facilitate an affective attachment between Siri and its human user. This creates a “stickiness” between the customer and the product. We not only love the iPhone for what it does, but for who she is.

From a feminist standpoint, however, this alludes to a darker component to Siri.

Just as quickly as siri has been personified and feminized, she has been sexualized. It is nearly impossible read a review, news story, or informal discussion of this iPhone feature without reference to Siri’s sexuality. This often manifests as discussions about her responses to sexual inquiries (see image below), or her general sexual demeanor. This is evidenced in the widespread use of the adjective “sassy” to describe Siri in the titles of numerous blog and news articles (Like this article on MacDailyNews for example).

Importantly, this rampant sexualization is far less prevalent in France and the U.K. where Siri has a masculine voice. Rather, sexuality seems mainly to come in to play when these European users complain that they do not have access to the female version.

The personification, feminization, and sexualization of Siri become especially problematic when coupled with the subservient role that Siri plays. As noted in the official description copied above, Siri knows what you say, knows what you mean, and is ready to be used in “more and more ways.” This is blatant in its sexism, objectification, and overall misogyny.

But before we run at Apple with flaming sticks of feminist anger, we have to remember that Apple is first and foremost, a business. They want to make money. They want their products to be appealing. As such, they likely selected the female voice and marketing campaign based on extensive research. In other words, Siri, and the way that it (she?) is presented, reflects not the misogynistic attitudes of fat-cat business and advertising executives, but the desires, gendered norms, and cultural realities of the general U.S. population at this historical moment.

In line with the notion that Siri reflects contemporary U.S. culture, it is interesting that Siri’s voice is not fully human, but clearly part machine. This was an intentional choice on the part of Apple, and it signifies high technology. It signifies that your assistant/companion is beyond human. Moreover,  it signifies the increasing comfort with which we embrace human/machine hybridity.

Most interesting, however, is how we can advance beyond the human/machine dichotomy, and yet maintain gender binaries and their hierarchical distinctions. Siri stands as strong empirical evidence against Haraway’s utopian thesis of the cyborg as a mechanism of liberation. This particular example is especially poignant because, as with Haraway’s cyborg, the technology for Siri comes out of the military industrial complex (the development of Siri was funded by the military agency DARPA).  In short, Siri, as with other cyborg technologies, does not break down categorical boundaries and human biases, but embodies the cultural realities of human creators and users.

Scientists in London  are working on an oral (rather than topical) form of sunscreen. Specifically, they are synthesizing sun-propelling properties from coral to work in the body as a  defense for the human skin against the sun’s damaging rays. This truly is a cyborg technology in Donna Haraway’s use of the term. It is a melding of human, animal, and machine. By ingesting the pill, the human biology is altered. This biological alteration in the human body is caused by its interaction and so enmeshment with the body and biology of the coral–an animal that was altered and synthesized using machine technology in a lab. Beyond a nice illustration of Haraway, the coral-based, human altering, technology reminds us that “nature” and “technology” are not mutually exclusive.

During my short time in Vegas I listened to and partook, in many formal, informal, academic and recreational conversations about technology and social media. This often resulted in debates over the digital/actual split (or lack thereof).  Those who espoused the digital/actual split did so with a clear privileging of the “actual” (i.e. physical).  This debate is in line with much of the work done on this blog, and in particular with a few recent comment threads (especially here, but also here). In response to this, I’ve devised a list of reasons why this split is so vehemently maintained by some, and why the digital is de-valued.

This de-valuing is rooted, I believe, in a series of fears. These fears include:

1. Social isolation
2. Loss of communication and interpersonal skills
3. Loss of attention span
4. Loss of emotional connection
5. A contrived sense of self
6. Loss of authenticity
7. Narcissism
8. Voyeurism
9. Loss of privacy
10. Loss of intimacy
11. Decreased tactile stimulation
12. Dishonesty
13. Delusion
14. Uncertainty

I point out these fears not necessarily to dispel them, but to better understand the meanings and implications of a particular cultural moment characterized by vast technological growth and mediated forms of interaction.  To fully understand a cultural moment, we have to understand the resistance to it. We can look at the cultural values from which these fears stem. We can look at the conditions under which these fears are valid, and the conditions under which these fears are overstated.

Finally, I should point out that this list is no way exhaustive. I would therefore like to ask the Cyborgology readers: What other fears drive digital dualism and a privileging of the physical?

A group of volunteers are raising awareness about the lost art of letter writing by handwriting and snail mailing messages that people send them via e-mail. Those who request a snail mail letter can even request that the volunteer letter-writer includes a doodle along with the text. Volunteers and those who utilize the service talk about how hand written letters are more meaningful than messages sent through e-mail. They claim that hand written letters are more personal and represent time, care, and effort.

There are several interesting and related going on here. I will talk about each one in turn:

First, we can think of this as augmented letter writing. The messages are constructed in both digital and material form, and sent both electronically and physically across space to the receiver. The messages, constructed and received, are equally digital and physical.

Second, we see an inversion and augmentation of the mediation process. We often juxtapose non-electronic forms of communication against computer-mediated-communication. Here, we see computer based communications being mediated through human beings. The electronic form of the message is primary, mediated secondarily by human hands. Perhaps we can think of this as human-mediated-electronic-communication.

Third, we see in this Baudrillard’s simulacra, where the hand written letter, which signifies the time, care and effort of the sender, embodies instead only the symbol of this time care and effort. Actual time, care and effort on the part of the sender are subverted by human-mediated-electronic communication. The sender’s effort, time and care are displaced by the electronic media and the mediating human (i.e. the volunteer).

Finally, we might think of human-mediated-electronic communication (such as that seen in the “Snail Mail my Email” campaign) as a form of romanticized nostalgia for a more “authentic” past, facilitated (ironically) through contemporary technologies. It is hyperreal, as the romance and authenticity of the hand written letter is accomplished not by an unmediated effort of the mind, heart and hand, but through an extra step in the mediation process.

I recently met with the marketing department of a local organization. They asked to speak with me about social media, and how they could incorporate it into their “branding.” I know nothing about branding (or marketing) but I love to talk about social media, and I wanted to support my community, so I agreed.

The meeting attendants included: two marketing executives, their 21 year old intern, and me. We sat down at a table in a coffee shop. The three of them looked at me expectantly with blank yellow note pads and poised pens.

We began with the two (middle aged) marketing executives asking about the isolation caused by social media, and wondering if we should be “weeping” over the demise of our culture. Specifically, one of the executives described a “sad” situation, in which a group of students were waiting for the bus, engrossed with their phones and oblivious to each other.

I gently calmed their dystopian fears and explained the fallacy of digital dualism. The 21 year old intern immediately relaxed and chimed in. “We are being social” she said in reference to the bus stop phone incident.

The second marketing executive was unconvinced. She referenced a recent family trip, where her two teenage sons were on their iphones, missing the historic landmarks that the family had traveled to see. This time, I did not need to say a thing. The intern informed us all that looking at their phones in no way means that they missed the historic landmarks. “We are used to a lot of things going on around us at the same time, it’s how we do things” she said. The executives looked at me questioningly. I backed up the intern, explaining that the re-articulation of an experience is part of the experience for many youth today (although this is debatable).

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Instagram is one of the most preferred social media used for sharing images while offering a great platform for businesses to share their products’ images, ideas and interacting with people all over the world. With this website, bloggers can share their opinions with alluring images and business owners get the opportunity to advertise the services and products that they offer. Instagram helps you market your business effectively in a cost effective manner. Key market players of different niches also use this platform to showcase their services and products to reach maximum target customers instantly. Search engine optimization, or SEO, allows you to promote your product by increasing traffic to your website via Internet marketing. By implementing SEO Adelaide techniques on your product website, you can gain better visibility in search engine results. Increasing the search engine results ranking can bring in higher quantities of traffic to the site, which advertises your product to a greater number of potential customers. This can be done at no cost to yourself, but you can enhance your efforts by paying for some services.

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As you might imagine, the remainder of the meeting followed this trend. The executives asked questions, the intern answered the questions, they all looked at me for confirmation, I affirmed the intern’s statements and cited the CMC research to make it more official.

This interaction makes two things salient: 1) the decline of the expert 2) the need for theory in social media scholarship.

Generally, the Internet grants us access to knowledge and information that was previously exclusive. We get medical information on WebMD;

learn to do our own plumbing with a YouTube video; and get news from alternative sources—including blogs and our “friends” Facebook statuses. Moreover, recent research shows that we trust advice from peers more than we trust advice from experts. As such, the “expert” is in social decline. Nowhere is the more evident than in our very own field: social media research.

In social media research, we often study digital natives, a group now entering colleges and/or the work force. They know the findings of our meticulously gathered and presented research. Our descriptive studies have little to tell them. Their expertise is equivalent, if not superior, to ours.

This brings me to my second point, that social media scholars must not only incorporate, but maintain a strong focus, on theory. Our work has little value if we cannot use it to say something about identity, community, economy, or culture. This is not to say that there is no place for descriptive analysis. On the contrary, we cannot theorize about that which we do not understand empirically. However, descriptive analysis, at this point, should be preliminary and intermittent, rather than predominant and pervasive as is the current case. Without theory, we do no more than replicate and legitimate the extant knowledge of digital natives—and we already know the direction that legitimate knowledge is taking. Without theory, make ourselves obsolete.

At the end of the meeting, the marketing executives asked me for some general advice. “Listen to your intern” I said. “She’s an expert.”