March 19, 2009
Another strategy I’m noticing to avoid Friending angst/rudeness - you receive a request from someone you don’t want to Friend, but don’t want to offend. So, you add them with the intention to delete them after a short while, that way they see they’ve been accepted and everyone is happy. Then, after a few weeks when they won’t notice (since you aren’t really close anyway), you defriend them. They feel validated that you’re friends or you trust them or whatever they’re looking for, but you don’t have to share your ongoing life with them.
This tactic suggests the act of Friending is sometimes more important than the ongoing lifestream access.
I think this may be a more recent thing too (it’s only in the past 6 months or I’ve started hearing a few people say they’ve done it)
Anyone use this as a strategy? How frequently? What type of person do you do it with? How long have you been doing it?
Tags: academic, facebook, thesis
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March 13, 2009
A few years ago Fono and I wrote a paper that was basically about LJ drama, even though we gussied it up with a fancy academic title and invoked Baudrillard. The main thing we found was that people had all these different ideas about what being Friends on LiveJournal meant. The main reasons people Friended each other were:
- to add journals to their reading list.
- to facilitate relationships (both offline and exclusively online).
- to indicate trust.
- as a courtesy.
- as a declaration of some sort of relationship.
- for entertainment, friend collecting, as a game etc.
As a result of all these differing meanings for different people, the act of Friending or defriending could mean a lot to someone, while another person wouldn’t even give it a second thought. One person could defriend a friend because they were bored of reading their journal, while their now defriended friend might take the action as a commentary about their relationship. Throw in the fact that LJ Friending is essentially a way of controlling privacy (so it’s functional AND meaningful) and you have a recipe for DRAMA!
Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different.Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different. On LiveJournal, people acted on the angst caused by the Friending feature by writing angry posts or comments about when they were defriended, for example, to which the defriender would usually angrily reply, and then all the friends of both parties would reply and everyone else could watch and be amused. This dynamic gave birth to the very hilarious ljdrama.org, which sarcastically chronicled the latest disputes over who defriended who and why. (There’s still an awesome archive of everyone’s favourite LJ drama moments here.)
Yet there isn’t an fbdrama.org. How often do you actually see serious flamewar style drama playing out on someone’s wall? Hardly ever, right? So even though Friending on Facebook and Livejournal both cause angst because of the differing meanings it has for different people - we’ve all wondered why a certain person has added or removed us, or if we should accept a Friend request from someone we don’t really like - on Facebook, no one really seems to act on that angst so it never evolves into drama. Most of the angsty situations I’ve seen involve people telling their close friends that they’re unsure about adding someone, but I’ve never seen anyone actually confront a sketchy Friend requester or someone who has defriended them.
So, I wanna throw this out to everyone, especially people who are participating in my ethnography (you know who you are;) ). Do you think my observations are correct? If so, why do you think it’s the case? Your answers will influence what I write in my thesis, but do let me know if you don’t want me to quote you.
My initial hypothesis is that engaging in drama on Facebook would have social repercussions that wouldn’t happen to the same degree on LiveJournal. The stakes are higher on Facebook because you use your real name and personal info, and usually have most of the people you know from all aspects of your life as Friends. Messing with the people you only know online on Livejournal is a much lower risk than messing with someone who you work with or shares mutual friends. What do you think?
Tags: angst, drama, academic, livejournal, facebook, thesis
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February 20, 2009
There’s been a lot of discussion recently on one of the mailing lists I subscribe (the one run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity for anyone keeping track) to about the corruption in Wikipedia’s governance structure, sparked by a recent art project called Wikipedia Art. The “art” (if that’s what it really is… but that question is a whole other post) consisted of the group creating an article about Wikipedia art, then publishing articles about that article, then using those articles as sources to prove the article was indeed notable, according to Wikipedia’s standards. And of course lots of drama ensured, and they got mega-deletz0red by Wikipedia’s admins. Hilarious, but pretty wanky (to use some good academic terminology). So the point of this “art” (I think, it’s kinda unclear what exactly the goal was… but again, that’s a whole other post) was some sort of commentary on Wikipedia’s governance and rules about what should be included in the encyclopedia. As a fan of Wikipedia and all things wiki (I used to have a job where all I did all day was edit a wiki), I took the side of Wikipedia and was glad they took a hard line with the art vandals. This mentality caused me to dismiss all the negative things people were posting to the list about how Wikipedia governance was corrupt and the gatekeepers were all non-academics under 30 (of course, anyone younger than 30 is an ignorant troublemaker!) who only cared about making sure Wikipedia was filled with articles about Dungeons & Dragons but not the “important” stuff. But then the following happened, and I realised that actually, Wikipedia’s governance probably is bankrupt, although probably not because of the age of the admins or their love of D&D.
An American teen posted videos of himself brutally abusing his cat Dusty on YouTube over the weekend (I found the video so, so sad… it will haunt you). This enraged everyone’s favourite band of internet trolls, Anonymous, who decided to track him down and get him arrested. An unnamed person set up kenny-glenn.com with the personal contact details of the abuser and his family. After a flurry of activity all over the internets, which can be chronicled on Encyclopedia Dramatica (yes, as we will soon see, we have to use them as a reference because Wikipedia doesn’t have any information about what happened. How sad is that?), it was reported that Kenny Glenn has been arrested.
This case is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that it could also be the first time a loosely organized group of people on the internet initiated a campaign to identify a suspect and then notify the police… in the least no case before has been so high profile or had so many people involved.
Anyway, Wikipedia admins deleted the Kenny Glenn article and then blocked the creation of a new one, despite it being all over the news and the internet. I asked that the protection be removed, and I was told if I was to create a passable draft it might be used as an article since all the other edits had been vandalism. At the same time, a group of people from the Facebook group about the story created a page called “Timmy_(animal_abuse_suspect)” which was factual and backed up all its claims with journalistic sources, as required by Wikipedia. I followed up with the admin and asked if he/she could use the Timmy page as a draft. In response he deleted the Timmy article, saying it was a deliberate attempt to circumvent the protection placed on the Kenny Glenn article. I asked the admin again if the page could be used as a draft in the way he/she first proposed, to which the admin replied that he/she wanted to take “a step back” and another admin should deal with it. The admin then posted on some special Wikipedia notice board basically saying that his reason for blocking the article was about the questionable ethics of posting information about a minor. You can see our exchange here.
What stuck out for me was that this seemed to be more of an issue of following rules rather than making Wikipedia a better information source. We didn’t follow them perfectly, so the admins are upset that we challenged their authority (how dare we!) and then that becomes the reason to continue the protection on the page. From the time I spend wading through all the different rules and pages and guidelines made it very clear to me the system is a mess. After going through this, it is even more unclear to me as to what the process and rules actually are. I mean, the reason the admin gave me for the block switched from a lack of a neutral well sourced article to being an issue of ethics (if you look at the deleted Kenny Glenn page, even, the original reason for its deletion was listed as “Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject” - no mention of the issue being one of ethics.) I do agree there are issues with the suspect being a minor, but I think there is a lot more going on here. It also begs the question as to why information about this kid and the case itself can be all over the internet (in “credible” sources and otherwise) but that it is being blocked from being reproduced on Wikipedia. Isn’t one of the goals of Wikipedia to provide an open and valuable source of information that acts as an alternative to conventional sources of knowledge which are protected by gatekeepers? I mean how messed up is it that the mainstream news is covering it, but Wikipedia is censoring it?
As my friend Luke said so aptly: “Wikipedia started out as this great if somewhat unreliable source of information, but now there’s all these admins who think they’re holier-than-thou and if they haven’t heard about or don’t like something, it can’t possibly go. And what they don’t realize is that they’re just turning Wikipedia into a normal, old-school encyclopedia.” There’s also a great post on all these issues on the P2P foundation blog: Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia governance processes?
This all makes me very, very sad. I was so excited about the potential of the internet, especially Wikipedia which I have heartily defended until this point. I believed Wikipedia was doing something truly collaborative, open, free and democratic. It was a sign that maybe, we could one day accomplish all of the things we haven’t been able to before - giving everyone a voice and getting rid of the gatekeepers that control knowledge and information. But this just shows that eventually, our hunger for power - and all those other terrible features of human nature - win out. I hope I can be proven wrong.
Welcome to Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
… right.
Tags: kenny glenn, wikipedia, timmy, dusty, academic
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October 3, 2008
Ah, Facebook gets a mention in my new favourite, Peep Show, when Mark makes a deal with an Australian to have her pretend she’s his girlfriend in exchange for letting her stay with him:
Mark: So, I could tell people you were my girlfriend?
Saz: Well, we might… take things slow, to start with, yeah?
Mark: Sure, but we could still have fun, and y’know, watch Morse, and people could see us out together, like at my birthday party on Friday. And I could put a photo of us on Facebook?
Saz: …Sure… All that stuff.
[Episode 3, Season 5]
So there you go, if you weren’t already convinced that Facebook is now just a normal part of everyday life in places like London and Toronto (and that the performativity and rituals of of dating now include Facebook photos).
Tags: peep show, academic, facebook, thesis
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September 29, 2008
One fascinating thing about Facebook is how much it has changed since it was first launched in 2004. Like the other early social networking sites such as Friendster, Facebook started out with very simple features (check out their early FAQ to see what I mean). But, unlike Friendster and a lot of other sites,* Facebook kept adding features that not only drastically changed how the site works, but increasingly made it insanely addictive. In writing my first chapter for my thesis which summarizes the history of Facebook’s development, I’m realising how important these changes are in understanding not only the culture of Facebook today (especially in Toronto, where many people adopted it earlier there then elsewhere, and thus were witness to a lot of the changes), but also in understanding the state and meaning of social networking sites more broadly.
As I mentioned, early Facebook was like any other social networking site, except that it was aimed at the niche market of university students. It was the functionality of these sites that gave rise to the term online social networking - you add your friends and in essence make tangible your offline social network. (Something I’m investigating is the development of that term - did the sites actually ever use it themselves, or did the academics/bloggers come up with it?) Anyway, on Friendster back in the day (2003) I remember my friends and I all got excited and spent hours adding everyone we knew. Then we had added everyone, and got bored, and thought “now what?” There was really nothing to do with that meticulously created list of friends. So we all forgot about it. But Facebook went beyond that, and gave us something to do with that list. They’ve made that list your audience, your contact list, your source of information and your entertainment. I think its fair to say that Facebook has gone beyond what we first called a social networking site.
danah boyd and Nicole Ellison recently proposed that the term should be social network, rather than social networking sites because the latter implies that active searching for and engagement with new people. Facebook and other sites aren’t really about meeting new people, they’re about growing and maintaining existing relationships with people we already know. As we all know, adding someone you don’t know on Facebook has become a total faux pas. For them, the primary characteristic of social network sites, or whatever you want to call them, is that they allow you to create and show your social network. But I think that’s only the beginning of what Facebook is today. That social network is definitely the foundation for all of the other activities on the site, but I don’t think that it’s still the defining characteristic.
I think the best way to understand how Facebook has gone beyond being just a social networking site is to see how it has evolved from what we meant by social networking site in 2004. Facebook’s three big axes of change can be summarized in terms of access, audience and information the first two of which are closely intertwined. The first Facebook, which was actually officially called thefacebook at the time (pictured courtesy archive.org) was essentially just your profile and a list of your friends, like all good social networks of the time (and still some today).
Access-wise, early Facebook was closed - you needed a valid email address from an approved school to join, which was just Harvard at first. The audience was students exclusively, and had features specifically for that purpose, such as being able to see who was in your classes. Or helping you get laid, as Karel Baloun, one of the first Facebook engineers, suggests in his book on the subject: “Facebook gives users what they want, which for college students is information about their friends and schoolmates for the purpose of… well … sex. And fun social events, which lead to sex” (Inside Facebook, p 91). And lastly, the information on thefacebook was ephemeral. You could change stuff on your profile, and no one would know unless they went looking and could remember what you had there before. As danah boyd puts it, there was security in obscurity. Closed doors, ephemeral information and a student-only audience made people feel safe sharing their real and personal details about themselves. If only other students will see, and only those I want, it’s okay for me to post my dorm room and mobile number on Facebook. In fact, people felt encouraged to do so. There was a pay off - it made socializing easier. People will give up their privacy if they get something in exchange, like free air travel (Air Miles cards) or convenience (putting your thumb and iris on file to cross the border faster, as with the Nexxus card in North America). It was this closed, student only phase in Facebook’s history that created Facebook’s continuing culture of sharing lots of accurate personal information that gives Facebook its tremendous value. I suspect things would not be the same if Facebook had opened up to everyone right away, since it was still unusual to so closely tie one’s offline life and identity with their online one.
Anyway, as we all know, Facebook opened it’s doors to everyone. Slowly at first, with high school kids first being allowed on (September 2005). Then select companies, such as Apple and Microsoft (May 2006), then everyone (September 2006).** This fateful day in September was also the day that Facebook added the News and Mini-Feeds. It was a double whammy. No longer could you feel projected from the rest of the world by Facebook’s walls of valid-email-requirements and that feel relatively assured that those drunken party photos from last night’s kegger would probably not grace the eyes of your boss.*** In fact, now, your boss would probably get notified that the pictures were posted, via her shiny new News Feed. All at once, everything was different.
First, the information on Facebook that had once been ephemeral was now not only artifactual, but was also being actively pushed to your friends. The formerly invisible act of updating your profile was now visible. Activities change when we know people are watching. They become performative. Now, not only was your profile performative, but the act of maintaining it was also a performance. The addition of feeds made it possible to watch snippets of our friends lives, without having to interact with them or even having them know we watching. It’s the replacement of reciprocal interaction with information flows. The recent redesign has reinforced this informational shift. The default thing you see when you view someone’s profile is no longer their personal and contact information, but the activity from their wall and mini-feeds combined. In fact, you could probably say this is an emerging axis of change on Facebook that is strongly related to the informational shift - a shift in focus from personal information to a focus on one’s activity and interactions with others.
Secondly, Facebook had moved from being closed to open access, and in so doing had changed from catering to students to catering to everyone. This change in audience not only meant changes in Facebook’s affordances to make it more appealing to a mainstream audience (for example, getting rid of the courses feature), but a change in every users’ potential audience. Now all the early adopters had to rethink if that profile they had created when Facebook was students-only was appropriate for everyone in their lives to potentially see.
I had a bit of an interesting experience with this shift in audience. I had been on Facebook since 2004, but didn’t really use it in the university context since I had already graduated earlier that year. I did, however, use it primarily with people from my personal rather than professional life. But, when Facebook took off in Toronto in late 2006 (pictured in action on the right), I was working at a place that blended the personal and the professional, as I think a lot of young high tech firms do these days. Anyway, it took me a while after Facebook opened up to everyone to realise that my vague feeling of discomfort when using Facebook stemmed from the fact that Facebook had essentially mashed up all my contexts into one big context, yet out of habit, I was still using and thinking about the site as if I was just interacting with close friends in terms of sharing more and different things that I probably would’ve otherwise. From talking to other people about this, I think this experience is common for a lot of early adopters, but I think it may have been even more subtle for me given the culture of where I was working at the time.
So what is Facebook now? I’m still working on it, but it’s more than a social networking site since creating and articulating our networks is definitely only the foundation of what we’re actually doing on Facebook these days. The front page of Facebook (the one you see when you’re logged out) says it’s a “social utility” that can be used to “keep up with friends and family; share photos and videos; control privacy online; and reconnect with old classmates.” But overall, it “connects you with the people around you.” Baloun (remember that Facebook engineer?) says that “everything social can be transacted inside [Facebook]” (Inside Facebook, p 71). While not yet a reality, it’s certainly Zuckerberg’s fantasy of how he wants Facebook to be, and says a lot about what I think is an inherent believe at Facebook: that everything can be reduced to 1s and 0s. Today, Facebook is social networking, but its also life streaming, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, event organizing and a bunch of other stuff we haven’t got proper names for yet. But take that thought and add this: some would say that like MySpace, Facebook is “the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion, exquisitely disguised as social networking.” A little scary, no?
—
* Even my favorite, LiveJournal, has remained basically the same since 1999, but it looks like that might be changing since SUP bought them. I haven’t decided if this is good or bad yet, but Facebook has shown that even relatively minor-ish changes like Feeds can change the whole culture, meaning and use of a site.
** Of course, it is important to point out that a lot of the safety in Facebook’s student-only access was psychological. Stuff still leaked out, and school admins and other unwelcome people still got in. But the power of that sort of belief, and the culture of accurate personal information sharing that came from it, cannot be ignored. However, when Facebook opens its doors, the reality of the situation hits you right in the face. Its not easy to go on believing that what you put on Facebook will stay there.
*** Note that both the opening to high school kids and everyone were in September, the start of the school year in North America.
Tags: facebook history, academic, facebook, thesis
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September 11, 2008
I’ve started writing the first chapter of my thesis (if you can believe it, because I can’t!). It’s basically all you ever wanted to know about Facebook’s history (especially with respect to its use in Toronto), features and business end. And I’m calling it “Opening Facebook” (har har).
Anyway, I was digging through my old emails to try and figure out when the University of Toronto network was added to Facebook (as far as I can tell, it was late November 2004, according to good old Archive.org), as well as when I first joined and found this:
From: “thefacebook.com” <confirm@thefacebook.com>
Date: 20 December 2004 9:40:32 AM
To: raynes.goldie@*******
Subject: elvedin t******* has listed you as a friend…
Elvedin T******* has requested to add you as a friend, but before we can
do that, you must confirm that you are in fact friends with Elvedin.
To confirm this request, go to:
http://utoronto.thefacebook.com/confirminvite.php
Thanks,
thefacebook team.
The funny thing is, I’ve never actually met the guy. In fact, in the beginning almost all my Facebook friends were people I only knew from other sites, like LiveJournal. Did that happen to anyone else? It’s almost like we all hadn’t worked out how we were “supposed” to use it yet, and we were still in that phase where we could be somewhat anonymous online, with identities that were unconnected and undetermined by our “real” lives.
Also funny that it used to be called thefacebook, especially since now they seem to have a strong aversion to the word. At SXSW this year all the devs at the developer garage talked about “Platform,” and all descriptions of features on the Facebook blog talk about “Feed” or “Mini-Feed.” Weird. And kinda cult like.
Extra bonus: does anyone remember what used to be written at the bottom of Facebook? It said “a Mark Zuckerberg production” and “I’ll find something to put here” but I also remember something about guns… Anyone?
Tags: thefacebook, academic, facebook, thesis
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August 7, 2008
It has started. Last year it was all MySpace in Perth, but I’ve started overhearing conversations about Facebook on the street and seeing kids using it on the computers at school. Then this morning, while looking for info on their super gross breakfasts for a top secret project, I found out that Hungry Jack’s (the Australian name for Burger King) is advertising it’s Facebook page on its website.
It’s still not as crazy as Toronto, but my gut feeling is that it won’t ever be. The way people use the internet here and the way people socialize just isn’t as compatible with the Facebook way of doing things. I have to think about the specifics more, but I think it has a lot to do with using mobiles (Perth) over the internet on a desktop computer and having lots and of cheap internet access in every home (Toronto). And, as Alex Leitch brilliantly pointed out, Toronto is already divided up in a networky way - with a bunch of very distinct neighbourhood nodes linked together by an excellent transit system. Torontonians are already thinking in a Facebooky way.
Tags: academic, facebook, thesis, australia, perth
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July 8, 2008
an e-card from someecards. [thanks daniel reda and stef carmichael!]
Tags: sns, funny, academic, thesis
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May 22, 2008
The other day, I was biking up the Bathurst hill and I passed the Telus billboard advertising Facebook mobile on their phones for the upteenth time. Fun fact: Rogers was the first to advertise their Facebook mobile service, followed by Bell and Telus. 
The billboard reminded me of sign I saw on the window of the women’s clothing store Smart Set at the Eaton Centre earlier in the week. It had a Facebook logo and was advertising some new fashion cubes application, where you can compete with your friends about who has the best fashion, or something equally ridiculous. I was taken by the “Add Smart Set Fashion Cubes to your applications!” that was under the Facebook logo. I think that was the first time I’ve seen such technical language on the outside of a women’s clothing store. It’s still super gendered (compete with your friends to see who is the hottest), but really, is anyone surprised? I looked out for more Facebook logos as I walked through the mall, and not surprisingly there where two more at the Bell World and Rogers stores.
But that’s not all! At the end of April, I saw a presentation at CaseCamp about the success of TD Canada Trust’s Facebook app. That same night, Bryan Segal, VP at Comscore did a presentation about the insane popularity of social media in Canada. According to Comscore, Canada is the “most penetrated country” and “we view the most content and spend the most time interacting with social media.” In this context, its not really a surprise that Toronto is madly in love with Facebook.
So, this all got me thinking. A clothing store advertising it’s Facebook app, and a bank has one too? And there are so many extra Facebook shirts in Toronto that random bike riding junk collectors are wearing them? What I’m witnessing here in Toronto is so obvious that it’s invisible to me. It’s the first time a social web service, or anything from the internet really (besides when the web itself became big and we started seeing URLs all over the place… but that’s more a protocol and less a commercial service), has become so tightly integrated into so many aspects of mainstream life. For Torontonians, Facebook is becoming the mediator for so many everyday interactions, between people and between people and companies, and its being done at level of penetration we’ve never seen before.
Moar!
Rogers TV ad for Facebook mobile
My growing collection of photos of Facebook appearing in real life around Toronto
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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May 21, 2008
There was a rather ratty looking guy with crazy dirty hair carrying a desktop computer, three rods of something, a half exploded tv-like electronic device of some sort and two bags of miscellaneous parts, all while trying to ride a bike… and he was wearing a blue FACEBOOK SWEATSHIRT.
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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