visibility

Let’s start with a simple question: Would you use Facebook the same way if you knew others were notified when you viewed their page? Certainly, Facebook collect this sort of data on your viewing habits, and the decision not to share information about who has visited you profile is an intentional one. In fact, many sites—perhaps, most notably, dating sites like OkCupid—make the ability to track visitors a central part of their site design. OkCupid regularly sends emails to users when a good match views their profiles. The idea is to turn passive lurking into active interaction. Of course, the purpose of a dating site is to connect strangers.

Lurking, however, has become a definitive part of the Facebook experience. As we now know, most Facebook friends are people we have meet in person. Facebook doesn’t need to break the ice. Yet, users rarely interact with many, if not most, of their Facebook friends. So, why be friends at all? Of course, the answer is that we love to stalk the people in our social networks, especially those weak links on the margins whose live we aren’t keyed into through regular interaction. Today, Facebook stalking plays the same role (albeit more efficiently) that gossip chains played in generations past: It keeps us connected through heavily-mediated and indirect forms of interaction. And, both gossip and Facebook share the unique property of making us more visible to each other. more...

Given the recent events in the Middle East (and elsewhere, as protests continue in Wisconsin and ominous rumblings begin to issue from the direction of China) a great deal has been written in the past few weeks on the topic of social media and social movements/revolutions. Some of it has been a bit frothy, while much of it—including this, this, and this commentary on the Cyborgology blog—has been very insightful. However, while commentators have come at this issue from various angles, there hasn’t yet been much in the way of writing that seeks to wed an analysis of these forms of social action with existing theories of social movements and contentious politics.

The speed at which events have moved is a point on which a number of people have remarked. The wave of political anger expressed as protest that spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and points beyond has been likened to dominoes falling—or, and this is more appropriate to the point I want to make, to the spread of a contagious disease. Democracy, it has been said, has “gone viral”. more...

Facebook and other social-networking sites subsist on information, though not just any information. These sites have an insatiable appetite for the intimate details of their users’ lives. In fact, your personal information is a sine qua non for social-networking sites on two levels: 1.) People, primarily, use the Web to learn about the people and things they care about (like you). 2.) The same information that draws people to your profile, is useful in targeting advertisements to both you and your visitors.

Because these sites feed on personal information, they develop strategies to elicit such information from users.  For example, you may have to register and build a profile before accessing content.  The result as a sort of pay-to-play system where information is the common currency.  And, in order for this information economy to grow and intensify, it must continuously solicit new information and make more of the existing content public. more...