Social Networking and the Self
Dec. 5th, 2012 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flowerhackA guy asked me on the airplane what I think of Facebook's future prospects. I told him that, while I think Facebook will still be around, it will lose a lot of viability and relevance in the future—possibly within five years, definitely within ten years.
I've held that opinion for a while, but as I was talking with this guy, I managed to get a sharper insight as to why I think this. But for me to properly explain that insight, first I need to provide a short explanation of something that (initially) seems totally unrelated:
* * *
About a year ago, a friend and I were talking two types of online communication: asynchronous (read: delayed things, like e-mail, where both users need not be online at the same time) and synchronous (read: instantaneous things, like IM, where both users need to be online at the same time). We already have solid, popular protocols for asynchronous one-to-one communication (e-mail), synchronous one-to-one (IM), asynchronous one-to-many (mailing lists, message boards) and synchronous one-to-many (Skype group chat, IRC). But his assertion was, the internet hasn't solved synchronous one-to-many communication very well.
"What about Skype?" I asked. "What about IRC?"
His response was, what about when the IRC channel gets too chatty and a hundred people are trying to talk at once? It gets hard to follow the thread of conversation that you're interested when everyone's chatting at once. This isn't a problem in meatspace: if I'm at a crowded party and a hundred people are talking at once, I can "tune out" everyone but the two friends I'm talking to. it's easy to dip in-and-out of a conversation at will, or to "splinter" from a larger group discussion into a smaller discussion (either by going to a separate room, or by just talking more quietly amongst your small group). If you hear someone shout something interesting across the room, you can change your focus.
There's no good, obvious way to emulate this sort of meatspace one-to-many communication via group chat, largely because group chat is concerned with discrete quantities: you're either in the chatroom or you're out; you're either listening or you're not. There's no way to model the fuzzy, continuous boundaries between sub-conversations—at least, not that we've thought of yet.
* * *
Facebook has a similar problem with their "real name" policy (read: the policy that says your Facebook identity must match your legal name, and you only have one account). The real name policy is not the problem itself, per se, but it is a very telling symptom of the problem.
The problem is, real names are a meatspace concept that don't map well to cyberspace.
Yes, in meatspace we generally have one persistent identity we go by all our lives. But at any given point, in different contexts, we can choose to present different facets of that identity. Around my acquaintances, I act like Julie the Generally Nice Computer Science Major. Around my close friends, I act like Julie the Silly Talkative Person Who Won't Shut Up About Her Latest Pet Project. Around my professors, I act like Julie the Eager Student who Really Likes Talking About Distributed Systems. But Facebook offers very little granularity: everyone is your "friend" due to peer pressure, so the people who see your wall posts include your closest friends, vague acquaintances you haven't spoken with since high school, former teachers, random people you met at summer camp, and so on. You're presenting the same wall posts to all of them, even though you may not want to present the same version of yourself to everyone.
Google Plus successfully recognized this drawback, but they failed to present a solid solution. Yeah, sorting all our contacts into little "circles" like "work," "friends," etc, seems good in theory—but we don't do that in meatspace, do we? People move in-and-out of our mental categories all the time, and they often can't even be modeled as desecrate categories: here is guy-friend-who-is-kind-of-cute-so-maybe-we-should-date, here is coworker-who-is-my-friend-just-because-we-see-each-other-daily, and so on. Just like meatspace one-to-many conversations, where the boundaries between sub-conversations are fluid and continuous, the boundaries between our meatspace friend circles are fluid and continuous, and can't be modeled effectively by discrete categories.
And there's another difficulty in here: meatspace one-to-many communication is inherently one-to-known, whereas cyberspace one-to-many is often inherently one-to-unknown.
In meatspace, I generally know who I'm presenting myself to: I'm giving a speech in front of the class, I'm talking to my professor, I'm talking to friends in the dining hall, and so on. It is one-to-known communication. But the internet, by its very nature, is largely one-to-unknown communication: I don't know who will see my blog post today or who might eventually read it. Even if I go the Google Plus route and obsessively categorize all my contacts into different access-controlled categories, it will still be hard for me to keep track of everyone who might see any given post of mine—because I probably have a lot of contacts, some which I may forget about, or whatever.
This is why variable handles are so handy and so widely used. I can't keep track of everyone I'm interacting with online, but I can keep track of what facet of myself I'm presenting at any given moment, and keep those facets isolated from each other—so I may use a different handle for Steam/gaming pursuits than I use for open source projects, and I may use a totally different handle for sharing art, and so on. It's not that I'm particularly embarrassed by or ashamed of any of these things. I just want to have control of what identity I'd prefer to present to people.
So yeah, I think most everyone will have a Facebook five to ten years from now. But it'll be there to present a fairly bland, generic portrait of yourself, and a generic point of contact, much like an e-mail address. People will flock to Tumblr and Pinterest1 and the like for memes and silly in-jokes and goofing with friends; the bulk of the "exciting"/trendy/sexy/whatever communication will happen elsewhere.
Maybe this doesn't matter to Facebook. Maybe they have an endgame planned where it doesn't matter; there's certainly ways to monetize even bland, generic identities. But it won't be as exciting or as relevant as other modes of communication. 2
* * *
Brief caveat: I'm not trying to say real name policies are universally bad. They're a valid design choice; you do gain some benefit from knowing that you are talking to The Real John Smith, or whatever. The problem is neither real names nor pseudonyms are optimal, but real name policies tend toward blandness and professionalism, whereas pseudonyms trend toward zaniness and crudeness/vulgarity/fringe viewpoints/etc.
* * *
1 Completely unrelated aside: I find it rather amusing that so much of the media coverage around Pinterest seems to regard the site as some magical unicorn that unlocked the secret of how to attract females to the internet. There's been female-dominated portions of the internet since its inception—play-by-post RPGs, Livejournal, deviantART, and so on. Yes, they're not as big or trendy as Pinterest or whatever, but they were also doing this first.
2 They've already lost that, to a large extent. Do y'all remember the early days of Facebook, say, five or six years ago? It was much "younger." It had more memes and silly in-jokes. Your groups were listed at the forefront of your profile, so people made silly groups like "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" and "When I figured out the Disney 'D' WAS a 'D', it blew my mind." And yeah, app notifications from Farmville and the like got annoying fast, but even the grouchiest user had a few apps. Where has all that kind of communication gone...? Well, away from Facebook.
* * *
See also "The Social Graph is Neither", a very interesting blog entry from the creator of Pinboard that makes some similar points, but also some very different ones, in a much more eloquent fashion than me.
I've held that opinion for a while, but as I was talking with this guy, I managed to get a sharper insight as to why I think this. But for me to properly explain that insight, first I need to provide a short explanation of something that (initially) seems totally unrelated:
About a year ago, a friend and I were talking two types of online communication: asynchronous (read: delayed things, like e-mail, where both users need not be online at the same time) and synchronous (read: instantaneous things, like IM, where both users need to be online at the same time). We already have solid, popular protocols for asynchronous one-to-one communication (e-mail), synchronous one-to-one (IM), asynchronous one-to-many (mailing lists, message boards) and synchronous one-to-many (Skype group chat, IRC). But his assertion was, the internet hasn't solved synchronous one-to-many communication very well.
"What about Skype?" I asked. "What about IRC?"
His response was, what about when the IRC channel gets too chatty and a hundred people are trying to talk at once? It gets hard to follow the thread of conversation that you're interested when everyone's chatting at once. This isn't a problem in meatspace: if I'm at a crowded party and a hundred people are talking at once, I can "tune out" everyone but the two friends I'm talking to. it's easy to dip in-and-out of a conversation at will, or to "splinter" from a larger group discussion into a smaller discussion (either by going to a separate room, or by just talking more quietly amongst your small group). If you hear someone shout something interesting across the room, you can change your focus.
There's no good, obvious way to emulate this sort of meatspace one-to-many communication via group chat, largely because group chat is concerned with discrete quantities: you're either in the chatroom or you're out; you're either listening or you're not. There's no way to model the fuzzy, continuous boundaries between sub-conversations—at least, not that we've thought of yet.
Facebook has a similar problem with their "real name" policy (read: the policy that says your Facebook identity must match your legal name, and you only have one account). The real name policy is not the problem itself, per se, but it is a very telling symptom of the problem.
The problem is, real names are a meatspace concept that don't map well to cyberspace.
Yes, in meatspace we generally have one persistent identity we go by all our lives. But at any given point, in different contexts, we can choose to present different facets of that identity. Around my acquaintances, I act like Julie the Generally Nice Computer Science Major. Around my close friends, I act like Julie the Silly Talkative Person Who Won't Shut Up About Her Latest Pet Project. Around my professors, I act like Julie the Eager Student who Really Likes Talking About Distributed Systems. But Facebook offers very little granularity: everyone is your "friend" due to peer pressure, so the people who see your wall posts include your closest friends, vague acquaintances you haven't spoken with since high school, former teachers, random people you met at summer camp, and so on. You're presenting the same wall posts to all of them, even though you may not want to present the same version of yourself to everyone.
Google Plus successfully recognized this drawback, but they failed to present a solid solution. Yeah, sorting all our contacts into little "circles" like "work," "friends," etc, seems good in theory—but we don't do that in meatspace, do we? People move in-and-out of our mental categories all the time, and they often can't even be modeled as desecrate categories: here is guy-friend-who-is-kind-of-cute-so-maybe-we-should-date, here is coworker-who-is-my-friend-just-because-we-see-each-other-daily, and so on. Just like meatspace one-to-many conversations, where the boundaries between sub-conversations are fluid and continuous, the boundaries between our meatspace friend circles are fluid and continuous, and can't be modeled effectively by discrete categories.
And there's another difficulty in here: meatspace one-to-many communication is inherently one-to-known, whereas cyberspace one-to-many is often inherently one-to-unknown.
In meatspace, I generally know who I'm presenting myself to: I'm giving a speech in front of the class, I'm talking to my professor, I'm talking to friends in the dining hall, and so on. It is one-to-known communication. But the internet, by its very nature, is largely one-to-unknown communication: I don't know who will see my blog post today or who might eventually read it. Even if I go the Google Plus route and obsessively categorize all my contacts into different access-controlled categories, it will still be hard for me to keep track of everyone who might see any given post of mine—because I probably have a lot of contacts, some which I may forget about, or whatever.
This is why variable handles are so handy and so widely used. I can't keep track of everyone I'm interacting with online, but I can keep track of what facet of myself I'm presenting at any given moment, and keep those facets isolated from each other—so I may use a different handle for Steam/gaming pursuits than I use for open source projects, and I may use a totally different handle for sharing art, and so on. It's not that I'm particularly embarrassed by or ashamed of any of these things. I just want to have control of what identity I'd prefer to present to people.
So yeah, I think most everyone will have a Facebook five to ten years from now. But it'll be there to present a fairly bland, generic portrait of yourself, and a generic point of contact, much like an e-mail address. People will flock to Tumblr and Pinterest1 and the like for memes and silly in-jokes and goofing with friends; the bulk of the "exciting"/trendy/sexy/whatever communication will happen elsewhere.
Maybe this doesn't matter to Facebook. Maybe they have an endgame planned where it doesn't matter; there's certainly ways to monetize even bland, generic identities. But it won't be as exciting or as relevant as other modes of communication. 2
Brief caveat: I'm not trying to say real name policies are universally bad. They're a valid design choice; you do gain some benefit from knowing that you are talking to The Real John Smith, or whatever. The problem is neither real names nor pseudonyms are optimal, but real name policies tend toward blandness and professionalism, whereas pseudonyms trend toward zaniness and crudeness/vulgarity/fringe viewpoints/etc.
1 Completely unrelated aside: I find it rather amusing that so much of the media coverage around Pinterest seems to regard the site as some magical unicorn that unlocked the secret of how to attract females to the internet. There's been female-dominated portions of the internet since its inception—play-by-post RPGs, Livejournal, deviantART, and so on. Yes, they're not as big or trendy as Pinterest or whatever, but they were also doing this first.
2 They've already lost that, to a large extent. Do y'all remember the early days of Facebook, say, five or six years ago? It was much "younger." It had more memes and silly in-jokes. Your groups were listed at the forefront of your profile, so people made silly groups like "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" and "When I figured out the Disney 'D' WAS a 'D', it blew my mind." And yeah, app notifications from Farmville and the like got annoying fast, but even the grouchiest user had a few apps. Where has all that kind of communication gone...? Well, away from Facebook.
See also "The Social Graph is Neither", a very interesting blog entry from the creator of Pinboard that makes some similar points, but also some very different ones, in a much more eloquent fashion than me.
