Facebook me is better than actual me. Smarter, wittier, funner, prettier. But does Facebook, as a platform, reduce the richness of my personhood? Strip me of my messiness, neuroses, fears and freak-outs? Absolutely. You can't be smarter, wittier, funner, prettier without cutting out some fat.
In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith skewers Facebook as "the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul." Stuff White People Like slammed Facebook in similar terms two years ago, circa the Great Migration from Myspace, calling its advanced privacy settings and tidy graphics "analogous to an apartment or house with a security system/doorman, an alumni dinner, and a homeowners association that protects the aesthetics of the neighborhood."
There are in fact stark class and racial divisions between the two social networking sites, a deepening segregation that's been documented by Dana Boyd, a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Originating at Harvard, Facebook initially expanded only into other closed networks for cherry-picked .edus. Once the gates opened wide, the first newcomers to Facebook's hallowed halls were ambitious high-schoolers with friends or siblings at the chosen colleges. On Myspace, "only minorities and indie bands remain" scoffs SWPL -- in academic terms, the subaltern. The flashy visuals that the achieving (hegemonic) teens rejected as "gaudy" like hip hop bling remained the preferred networking interface for Latino/Hispanic and immigrant teens, geeks, freaks, punks and queers.
When Smith made her suburbia stab, she wasn't referring to the politics of online socializing, but simply the artifice of it all. Instead of grooming our flowerbeds, we manicure our Walls. Instead of the perfect Christmas lights and the appropriate lawn signs, we write the cleverest updates and list the right books, films, and music, getting our reward centers tickled by the comments and likes of our neighbors. Neighbors, in this case, being our 500 plus "friends."
To Smith, Facebook is social life filtered through the Sorkin-scripted psyche of founder Mark Zuckerberg: The alienated kid-prodigy who builds a new world where he is finally accepted, one that is manufactured, sterile, and seamless, and then crowns himself king.
The laws of the land are right there on Zuckerberg's profile. He lists "Minimalism," "Revolutions" and "Eliminating desire" among his interests. Minimalism we see in Facebook's clean interfaces, the chaotic personalizing of Myspace scrubbed up and out. 25% of Internet users are on Facebook? Liberté, égalité, fraternité! And eliminating desire? In that little nugget, Smith sees her chilling suburban dystopia: no desire, no guilt, no disappointment. Just raspberry red shutters and a basketball hoop.
So many digital immigrants, like Smith, make the same complaints about Facebook. 1000 friends? What kind of phony universe is this? In my day, friendship was a metaphysical union of two teeming interiors! Not splashing hundreds of minifeeds with a photo of your weird shaped bruise.
Digital natives know "friends" is a symbolic term in a symbolic universe. We have real friends. Metaphysical union friends. They're probably also our Facebook friends. But our network as a whole is simply a database of anyone we've ever minimally interacted with, the same "weak ties" we greet chirpily at a party and then maneuver away from after twenty minutes. These networks aren't just shallow time-killers. It's through contact with people outside our closest friends that we get new information and perspectives, find potential life-partners and better jobs. Facebook is a playground for upward mobility.
Floating online, we reembody ourselves according to the architecture of the software we're using. Like Smith, I believe the structures and norms of the platform can leak into real life, become invisible and, ultimately, reshape our world. But unlike Smith, I don't think Facebook is making us blander or more insincere.
Facebook reduces our humanity as much as a cocktail party does. Do cocktail parties strip me of my messiness, neuroses, fears and freak-outs? Absolutely, unless something very wrong happens. Do I still go home a messy, neurotic, fearful person who occasionally freaks-out? You bet. But even though I had to shower and put on my best dress, I'm sure glad I was invited.
The real dangerous reshaping work of Facebook, and other sites that reproduce race, class and ideological divides, is that it reinforces the real world's inequality and distrust. Peeling back the myth of the Internet as Ultimate Equalizer, we see discrete digital worlds where people from different backgrounds are separated by brick walls of code. The problem isn't that Facebook makes us white-washed, disingenuous, self-promoting nodes. It's that white-washed, disingenuous self-promotion translates, in our society, to success.
Follow Claire Gordon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/clairedon
In that sense, Facebook isn't any different from the world portrayed in "Surrogates" (the film), where I can leave my humdrum reality and plug into an alternate universe of my own making, entirely devoid of inhibitions that hold me back in real life. However, it boils down to the same principles that govern accumulation of wealth, taking alcohol or piling up educational achievements.
None of those will ever be a substitute for personal insecurities or character flaws. What actually saddens and sometimes disturbs me is there is a group of people who cannot distinguish between realities, leading to enormous personal frustrations and social misfits.
I'm more a fan of Twitter, but use Facebook to share my love of sports with fellow fans. I'm not sure what profile that makes me fit but I long gave up on the tedium of excessive socialising, FB-style.
It would be interesting to see a sociologist/social anthropologist to do a study of the habits and behavior of Facebook users. The results could be surprising, but anyone could observe their own circle of FB friends and note the types of messages and interactions that occur. I may in the future remove some friends and just keep those that I really want to associate with to reduce the "spam-like" nature of wall posting and reduce seeing the broadcasting of every event that happens is everyone else's life.
Unless FB adds some differentiation or refinement features for friends and activity streams, I think it will eventually lose its appeal. For me it is starting to resemble electronic grafitti where you have lots of individuals clamoring for attention, showing off every detail of their life and thinking it is important for others as it is for themselves. Again, I think improvements in FB could reduce some of these things that detract from its utility.
Says alot about us that Facebook and cocktail parties are so sucsessful.Facebook giving the digital shield does make it "harmful." I do like your analogy and think we should all be careful and realize more fully the dangers.
Facebook on the other hand lets everyone go to the party and be unreal all the time without any real at all required.
Thanks for this great analysis and warning about how the defaults of Facebook are recreating social patterns that most people remain unaware of. I especially appreciate that you've added a sociological critique to the psychological critiques of Facebook that have been raised elsewhere.
Facebook encourages us to participate in its social world by the what it permits us to do and what it prevents us from doing on its platform. Like any software, the functionality expresses and 'builds in' certain values that users then replicate over and over.
You might be interested in a recent critique of Facebook from a feminist/social justice perspective:
"Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary" and "If Women Had Designed Facebook" at http://AuthenticOrganizations.com