I’m currently working on a project exploring Facebook and public deliberation. In this project, I’m asking questions like: What does Facebook portend for deliberative democracy? When, where, and how do Facebook and its users invite or obstruct the development of public argument/s? How does Facebook’s very form and content promote or impede opportunities for argumentation? Rosen (2007) asks some parallel questions:
What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world? (p. 23)
We know very little about the potential for social networking sites to help or hinder public deliberation, and what kinds of norms are involved in these processes. As the site draws an increasingly large user base, this would appear to be a critical subject for argument studies. Overall, I’m exploring the idea that Facebook has created civic spaces for a new kind of networked argumentation, which leverages the trust of anchored online identity and offline friendship toward social issues. Subsequently, I’m wondering if some of the communication that occurs on Facebook could be viewed within the framework of what I term diasporic-virtual publics. Users create a diasporic-virtual public on Facebook by threading together central and peripheral friendships from the past and present. Despite the wide geographical dispersion of these friends/acquaintances, each is moored in a past/present relationship that carries implications for arguments and arguing online. At the same time, my current analysis is trying to figure out whether various facets of Facebook are anti-deliberative, in both content and form. I invite your critiques or extensions on this subject. . . . – Don
Comments 5
Ron Lubensky — June 20, 2009
I'll be interested in your analysis. As a PhD candidate involved in designing and studying deliberative processes, I think what's missing is exactly that: process. Regardless of the network medium, whether around the pub table or on FB, we can engage unpredictably with different people in conversation. And each medium offers its social or environmental affordances for dialogue, learning, critical thinking or posturing. But deliberation is about addressing particular problems and having a commitment to reciprocally find common ground, even if our political or ethical orientations are at odds. And that's a process. So I think you'd need to ask the question, "what does FB offer to support a deliberative process?"
Don Waisanen — June 20, 2009
Thanks for your input, Ron. That is indeed a central question here. Over the next few weeks I'm going to try to look at both the macro and micro features of Facebook to try to see what kind of deliberative processes are available to advocates--everything from the news feed to status updates, etc. At the same time, I'm thinking that honing in on a particular issue will help focus this a bit. I've noticed a lot of people deliberating about California's Proposition 8 on Facebook since last November. I'll probably analyze many of the pages/groups on the site already devoted to this issue. If you have any other thoughts, please do share. I'll be blogging about what I find over the next month. -- Don
Kenneth M. Kambara — June 20, 2009
Thought provoking stuff, Don & Ron. I did a post today about how global Facebook usage is, so this post made me think of democratic processes, globally. This Mashable post on Moussavi & Facebook might be of interest
What I've seen, which is by no means an exhaustive examination, is that official Facebook "pages" for parties in Canada {Liberal, Conservative, NDP}, for example, aren't about deliberative processes, but about confirming beliefs. The convos. in discussion groups often suffer from a vocal few dominating the total number of posts. It seems to me like there's a lot of people shouting, but how to go from there to creating purposeful interactive and engaged dialogue. Does this naturally go beyond just Facebook and spill over into other social media tools? I look forward to future posts.
Raquel Hummel — August 18, 2010
I just got the CLU Magazine today and I am a stay at home mother and very interested in your article and I decided to respond. I am both a Lutheran Pastor, Teacher and presently a stay at home mother which I have come to call myself the traveling mother. I have also been living in two different States, managing our AZ. properties and traveling back and forth since my husband got a job transfer in 2008. I discovered facebook was a way for me to feel connected as I was trying to make new friends and develop a new network. I have discovered that facebook is an amazing tool to feel connected but it is also a tool where you need to be very careful what you share. One may be using it to build a network, others may use it for other reasons and so as you network, build relationships, chat and share pictures think before you share...What is on your mind? I have found that what is on one's mind can really piss people off!! I guess that is why some teachers have a professional facebook and others have a personal facebook. I am not teaching presently so I am not sure if I will create two different facebooks!? What do others think about boundaries with Facebook?
Raquel
Don Waisanen — August 18, 2010
Hi Raquel--thanks for writing, you're bringing up some great issues. I really like how Marshall McLuhan addressed this kind of topic. He said that any time a new technology is dropped into a culture, that we will always both gain and lose from it. For instance, when we started using the automobile, we were able to get around much faster, but our poor legs were no longer getting the exercise they had in times past. I think the Internet and sites like FB are similar in that we're gaining more connections and new ways of relating to one another, but there's all kinds of new issues coming up like the one you're raising--unintended audiences interpreting messages in the wrong way, etc. As far as I'm aware, users of FB are becoming much more attuned to the privacy issues of the site. I think we'll see that trend continue. But it's also hard not to feel like we're all a part of this great big social experiment right now, where one's use of a social network informs their offline life perhaps as much as their offline life informs what they put on the social network.
The issue about expressing one's mind may have something to do with the fact that the very structure of Facebook encourages users to write quick messages (e.g. the "status update"), which has the potential to make one's messages much more open to interpretation than a lengthier piece of writing where the author can clarify in more detail "what they mean."
I should also mention that while the media continue to focus on privacy on Facebook, and we are all trying to figure out the "netiquette" of the site, there is an even larger concern looming about the degree of measurement and surveillance sites like FB are employing on their users. One of our other bloggers on this site, Jose, just wrote a great post talking about this issue: http://thesocietypages.org/thickculture/2010/08/10/from-the-very-cool-slightly-creepy-future-files/
I welcome your further thoughts, these are important discussions for all of us to be having--particularly as the offline world keeps evolving, the need for new ideas and the amending of prior ideas will continue to remain critical.