so, get ready for the social browser wars – facebook versus myspace!

this is stuff i’d observed before, and it mimics the findings of the survey fono and i did for our livejournal friending paper a few years ago. but something clicked when i read rhiannon’s email. before, i was obsessed the kinds of social consequences result from the design of social software (ie LJ DRAMA) but now i’m realising what’s really fascinating about social software might actually be obfuscated by the use of the “social” descriptor. is social software really social before it is anything else? we all go to the movies together and share an experience with everyone else in the theatre, but does that make it a social experience? do we just use the term social because the technology involves interacting with other people, but really, we’re moving towards something else?

danah boyd and others have written about autistic or socially-inept social software, referring to the fact that social networking sites force users to interact with each other in ways that would seem socially inept in any other situation. for example, forcing binaries on your relationships with others – are we friends, yes or no? in her 2004 piece on the subject, boyd argued that this sort of design was problematic for users (forcing people to act as if they had mental disorders, even!) and needed to be overcome by listening to users and trying to mimic the fluid and multiple way in which people actually interact.

im beginning to think that what we’re doing on these sites isnt really about replicating offline relationships and interactions as the original designers of social networks had in mind. i mean, if thats just what it was, why do we need to do it both online and off? i’m thinking that social networking sites are scratching another itch of ours. i’m not sure what, but i think it has something more to do with communication flows and distribution channels and less with other things we associate with socializing, such as building trust or providing support. think about twitter, for example. one would assume people would use it to say where they are so their friends could join them. but it seems that people are using it more like a microblog, to tell the world what theyre doing for the sake of it, rather than with the purpose of meeting up. think, too, about how much of the literature about social networking is about identity management, construction and articulation, especially for teens on myspace. sure, identity construction is an element of socializing in the conventional sense, but is it the defining element or activity? i’d say no, and i think that indicates that social networks are really about something other than, or beyond, what we understand as social. and i dont think we know what that something is yet.

all this leads me to wonder:

are friending and networking just metaphors we used so we could use an existing and familiar concept to explain this new and unfamiliar way of interacting and communicating?

do we finally understand what it is that we are actually doing on social networks enough now that we can go beyond an old metaphor?

basically, bigge argues that use of social networking sites can actually be seen as unpaid work. in using such facebook et al, we’re essentially producing a stream of self-surveillance that can be monitored, repackaged and sold. for example, taken collectively, we’re voluntarily producing huge databases of our preferences that are a marketers dream (think recommendations on amazon.com – customers who bought this also liked…) its the darker side of web 2.0′s utopian wisdom of crowds that created wikipedia. but also more broadly, the entire value of facebook is entirely in its users and the networks they’ve created, without any financial compensation. writing in the same vein as bigge, fred scharmen notes that even on flickr, the users are creating all the content that drives visits to the site, which in turn provides the eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. did you know myspace also claims ownership of its user’s profiles? so even your online identity is commodifiable content.

the big takeaway for me though was the realization that this could be why we all resent facebook, but still use it. we’re aware on some level that something isn’t right, that we’re giving away something we shouldn’t be. but if we opt out and refuse to use facebook, we’re essentially a nobody. as bigge puts it: “In this environment [Facebook et al.], the digital enclosure generates increasingly polarized options: either the constant, self-generated surveillance of the type described by Stites or the self-negation (‘You don’t exist’) that social network avoidance entails.”

bigge also points out the gaming-elements in social networks that make them similar to WoW which i mentioned earlier, and brings this into his analysis of the political economy of social networking:

But digital gardening, like its soil-based equivalent, requires commitment and effort. The
question becomes: are MySpace users at all aware of the political economy of the space in
which they operate? As Kline, et al. (2003) demonstrate, the line between work and play in
the video game arena grows increasingly fuzzy. Wittel (2001), meanwhile, argues that “The
assimilation of work and play corresponds with the blurring of boundaries between work
and private life, between colleagues and friends.”

One can draw parallels between the effort required to invite friends into your MySpace
network and the repetitive work involved in collecting gold in online gaming environments
like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Cassidy (2006) quotes different Facebook users:
‘I remember people competing to see how many friends’ they could
accumulate and how quickly, and tracking how many friends’ they shared in
common with other ‘friends’ [Olivia Ma] said.

Hilary Thorndike, a schoolteacher who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and
still uses Facebook, has more than eight hundred friends on the site. ‚I always
find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number, she wrote in an
e-mail.

Williams (2005) underscores this narrative of accumulation:

Seabron Ward, 19, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that many students consider it a status symbol to build a big friend list. “This one guy on my list has a thousand” she said, a bit enviously. “I only have 79.”

so while the gaming element explains why we’re all addicted, the problematic political economy of facebook is what makes us hate it.