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.
Comments 4
Rachael — May 12, 2011
Lois McNay (in her book Foucault and Feminism) has some interesting things to say about the function of examining and confessing our inner selves (see pages 86-87, or chp3 in general). She considers how the urge to self-obsess and the urge to confess are instilled in us by our culture as, supposedly, an "act of self-liberation"; however, these tendencies actually just create "self-policing subjects" (87). (Self-policing because our over-sharing creates a "more efficient regulation and normalization of sexuality," among other things - she is writing from a feminist perspective but the argument holds for any identity our culture wants to reinforce, generally for reasons of power relations).
So, one might argue that the cathartic feeling we get from revelation is aimed to produce a certain (undesirable) end - not even necessarily marketing power, although marketing itself often serves the same identity-shaping purpose (in your case, you could focus on political identity, although McNay and Foucault focus on private and public both). If you are working on a manuscript about possible ends to Facebook's structure, you might want to check out her book. (My copy is ISBN13 9781555531539, or for ISBN10 remove the 978).
Kenneth M. Kambara — May 13, 2011
I believe Facebook is in a bind and trying to figure things out, as it slouches towards Web 3.0. The idea of using one's real identity and treating social networking as a "one stop shop" in the name of Facebook is appealing from a marketing/business model/data aggregation point of view, but I don't think this is what many users want. I think many users want to compartmentalize their lives and control the granularity of their social networking experiences. While I get the idea that younger users are more prone to "oversharing" and Failbook is full of cautionary tales of social media faux pas from all age brackets, there's a theme of messages going out to crossed audiences.
Here in Canada, Conservative leader Stephen Harper's campaign was caught doing social media background checks on participants at events where he was making an appearance. A student who had a photo with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was bounced out. Another student was bounced allegedly for her environmental activism. There were apologies and attempts to mend fences, but it further illustrated that privacy is dead and that shared information can and will be used for whatever purposes—the architecture of surveillance and panopticons potentially popping out from behind every bush.
I see more and more disincentives for political engagement on Facebook, at least with respect to real identities. There's an inability to dialogue with those with differing opinions and I feel that in the US and Canada that political opinions are going to diverge further. This sets up increased consequences for the transparency of self. The driving factor is the confluence of identity and the psychological construct of involvement. {I think it's dangerous to speak of generalities, as this is situated in the context of technologies and users' specific small worlds. Nevertheless, I see more reasons for users not to share political identity beyond certain subsets of ties.} I see in Web 3.0 the opportunity for increases in fragmentation in certain areas of the web, increasing user value by moving away from a single, "real" identity. I think politics is one of those arenas. Hooking up is another, but that's a topic for another blog.
jose — May 16, 2011
Great points Ken!