[download full annotated bibliography]

citation: Raynes-Goldie, K. (2011) Annotated bibliography: Digitally mediated surveillance, privacy and social network sites. Cybersurveillance and Everyday Life: An International Workshop. University of Toronto, Canada. Retrieved from http://www.digitallymediatedsurveillance.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Raynes-Goldie-Digitally_mediated_surveillance_privacy_and_social_network_sites.pdf

Included citations:

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. Proceedings from Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop, Cambridge, UK.

Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949

Andrejevic, M. (2005). The work of watching one another: Lateral surveillance, risk, and governance. Surveillance & Society, 2(4), 479-497. Retrieved from http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(4)/lateral.pdf

Barnes, S. B. (2006). A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday, 11(9). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1394/1312

Beer, D. D. (2008). Social network (ing) sites… revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(2), 516-529.

Bigge, R. (2006). The cost of (anti-)social networks: Identity, agency and neo-luddites. First Monday, 11(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1421/1339

boyd, d., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Brandtzæg, P. B., Lüders, M., & Skjetne, J. H. (2010). Too Many Facebook “Friends”? Content Sharing and Sociability Versus the Need for Privacy in Social Network Sites. Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 26(11-12), 1006-1030.

Dourish, P., & Anderson, K. (2006). Collective information practice: exploring privacy and security as social and cultural phenomena. Human-computer interaction, 21(3), 319-342. Retrieved from http://www.dourish.com/publications/2006/DourishAnderson-InfoPractices-HCIJ.pdf

Krishnamurthy, B., & Wills, C. E. (2008). Characterizing privacy in online social networks. Proceedings from Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks.

Lenhart, A. (2009). Adults and Social Network Websites. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Adults-and-Social-Network-Websites.aspx

Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Palen, L., & Dourish, P. (2003). Unpacking “privacy” for a Networked World. Proceedings from CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook. First Monday, 15(1-4). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2775/2432

Solove, D. J. (2007). Privacy in an Overexposed World. In The Future of Reputation. Yale University Press. Retrieved from http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Future-of-Reputation/text/futureofreputation-ch7.pdf

Stumpel, M. (2010). The Politics of Social Media: Facebook: Control and Resistance. Master’s thesis. University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Tufekci, Z. (2008). Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 28(1), 20-36.

Utz, S., & Krämer, N. (2009). The privacy paradox on social network sites revisited: the role of individual characteristics and group norms. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 3(2). Retrieved from http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2009111001&article=1

Zimmer, M. (2008). The externalities of Search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3), 2008. Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2136/1944

Additional Resources
danah boyd’s Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites

Alice Marwick’s Online Identity Bibliography

While it may seem that they are one and the same, there is an important distinction between an ethnography of users versus an ethnography of a social media site. The latter is an ethnography of a system (or culture, or space, or context) which can be deployed to expose and examine the ideologies and philosophies embedded in a system, such as Facebook (as is the case in my research). I would argue that this type of ethnography is the most useful for internet researchers. As Christine Hine argues in her Virtual Ethnography, one of the strengths of ethnography is rendering problematic the things we take for granted (again, like Facebook), thus opening them up for enquiry.

From an educational perspective, we can say that an ethnography of a system can expose the hidden curriculum (thanks to Jason Nolan and Melanie McBride for this connection). Or, from semiotics, it exposes hidden codes of behavior (as one of my undergraduate profs, Bart Testa noted, drawing on Barthes, we all know not to go into a restaurant and order just sauce. Why? Because we all implicitly know the code and syntax of food.)

Indeed, my reason for choosing this ethnographic mode stemmed from my frustration with the majority of social media research implicitly treating sites like Facebook as neutral and free of ideology (as you can see in my previous post on the Philosophy of Facebook, this just isn’t the case). As an ethnography of Facebook, my research aim is not to create an exhaustive list the specific and different ways in which people use and understand Facebook with respect to privacy, or to make general statements about how most people behave on Facebook, but rather to push it further and look at the meanings behind those behaviours. In other words, I’m using those specifics to see and understand context/culture/hidden curriculum (or philosophy) of Facebook and what that does to privacy. The generality, then, is not in behaviours, but in what those behaviours reveal about the design of Facebook, the ideologies within that design, and privacy. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in The Sociological Imagination, personal problems can often reflect on larger public issues and help us to understand them. Put simply, the personal is the political.

In Phil Moore’s eloquent phrasing: Words are not culture. They are manifestations of culture. But we can only get to the culture through the words. The important question is ‘What sort of world (or system) makes these words possible?’ Like the code and syntax of the restaurant, the hidden curriculum is not written down (hence the term hidden).

So, the point and power of an ethnography of a system is to bring out the hidden world. It allows us to see how meaning is embedded, how ideologies run through systems like Facebook and how meaning plays out. It acknowledges that the world is not found in our words, it is found in between our words and within our practice. It recognizes the human disposition towards knowing, without knowing we know it. But most of all, it provides a holistic and excellent way for poking (at) the why, how and what of Facebook and privacy.

To say that Facebook does not care about privacy is really only half the story. Maybe even less than half.

Since the very beginning of Facebook, the company has consistently pushed the privacy envelope, but few people seem to be really asking why. The common conception seems to be that Facebook is simply making poor, ill informed privacy choices (frequent use of the word ‘blunder’ or ‘misstep’ in stories describing the latest Facebook privacy issue, for example). The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin’s cinematic account of Facebook’s founding and early days, portray site creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a somewhat socially and emotionally inept genius, motivated to create the site by a desire for women and entry into one of the prestigious Harvard final clubs. This account is perhaps unsurprising, given that the film was adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which was based on evidence from many parties, except from anyone actually at Facebook, including Zuckerberg himself.

Nick Bilton, a New York Times tech writer says that when he asked a Facebook employee what Zuckerberg thinks about privacy, the employee laughed and said “He doesn’t believe in it.” This gets us a bit closer to what is really going on: Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in privacy because he believes in radical transparency instead. As Anil Dash put it: “Facebook is philosophically run by people who are extremists about information sharing.” Time and time again, Zuckerberg has said that Facebook’s goal is to make the world more open, connected and transparent. He truly believes that improving communication by making it more efficient will make the world a better place. In 2008 at the Facebook Developer Conference, Zuckerberg stated: “In the world we’re building where the world is more transparent, it becomes good for people to be good to each other. That’s really important as we try to solve some of the world’s problems.” Earlier this year, Zuckerberg inadvertently revealed a (secret?) Facebook insignia, hidden inside his hoodie, which doesn’t appear anywhere on the site or in any official Facebook communications. Among other things, the insignia reads “Making the world open and connected.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. What no one seems to have asked is why are Zuckerberg and everyone at Facebook so into transparency or why he thinks being transparent and communicating efficiently will save the world. This sort way of thinking about the world long pre-dates Facebook, indeed, it runs throughout the philosophies embedded in the modern internet. It is the culture of the Californian Bay Area that has codeveloped along with the technologies it has created. Described most simply, it is a form of technological utopianism whose rhetorical roots lie in Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s American counterculture fused with the computing and digital networking technologies of the 1980s and 1990s. One of the core tenants of this mode of thinking was the belief that flattened hierarchies and the blurring of traditional boundaries — enabled by computing and networking technologies — would bring about a more equal and democratic world where individuals could be themselves and would be free to determine their own destinies. The 1990s saw the infusion of the New Right‘s celebration of free markets and economic liberalism into the mix, which further blurred hierarchies and the boundaries between work/play, personal/professional and producer/consumer. This evolution and merging of philosophies and ideas gave us The Californian Ideology in the 1990s, which spawned Web 2.0 in the mid 2000s.* But the most important aspect for our discussion of privacy, which draws on Wiener’s cybernetics, is the notion that most world problems are problems of inefficient, closed communication, disorder or poor information sharing. Computers, as systems, can be seen as sources of ‘moral good’ as they can solve these problems (see “The Human Use of Human Beings” for more on this). If the entire universe is code (a favourite notion of Kevin Kelly), then the conversion or merging of the analog with the digital would turn the physical world into a manageable system, one that can be indexed, managed, sorted and redistributed (and of course aggregated and datamined as well), thus making the world ordered, open, efficient and transparent. In other words, better. Sound familiar?

Speaking to journalist Jose Vargas in 2010, Zuckerberg said the following: “Most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?” Think about what we’re doing when we use Facebook. We’re creating digital versions of our relationships, activities, even our identities. We’re turning parts of our lives into code. And it’s not just Facebook. Consider Kevin Kelly’s predictions from his 2007 talk at EG:

“There’s like a billion social sites on the web. Each time you go into there, you have to tell it again who you are and [who] all your friends are. Why should you be doing that? You should just do that once, and it should know who all your friends are. So that’s what you want, all your friends are identified, and you should just carry these relationships around. All this data about you should just be conveyed, and you should do it once and that’s all that should happen. And you should have all the networks of all the relationships between those pieces of data. That’s what we’re moving into – where [the internet] sort of knows these things down to that level… what it’s doing is sharing data, so you have to be open to having your data shared, which is a much better step than just sharing your webpage or your computer. And all of these things that are going to be on this are not just pages, they are things. Everything we’ve described, every artifact or place, will be a specific representation, will have a specific character that can be linked to directly…[the internet of things where a] physical thing becomes part of the web so that we are in the middle of this thing that’s completely linked, down to every object in the little sliver of a connection that it has.” (italics mine)

Note here that Kelly, too, is advocating that for this better world of openness through the merging of atomic and digital. All we have to do is be ‘open to it.’

Indeed, the atomic and the digital can be seen as blurred boundaries, which brings us back again to to the legacy of cybernetics in Facebook. The cybernetic belief that flattened hierarchies and blurred boundaries are a social good can be seen in what has been called context collapse on Facebook, where everyone from various contexts of our lives (friends, ex-lovers, acquaintances, employers and so on) are treated as essentially the same, and we have to present ourselves accordingly. This is not how things usually work in the physical world. We can go drinking with friends and not get in trouble at work, until someone posts drinking photos that your boss sees on Facebook. When I spoke to Zuckerberg at SXSWi in 2008, he told me that he had concluded (based on research he had read) that people were happiest when they were the same in all contexts of their lives, and that was why he had designed Facebook the way he had, with only one profile for all life contexts.

Overall, when this set of philosophies is applied practically in Facebook, this has meant the (further) blurring of boundaries of time and space, public and private, online and offline. Users are now faced with flattened social hierarchies; context collisions; confused relationships and identity management issues. All of which, are essentially, issues of privacy. But, in Zuckerberg’s conception, these are not problems nor threats to privacy. They are simply the growing pains as we get used to a more transparent, more open, more connected, more efficient, and thus improved world. In Zuckerberg’s better world of the future, privacy is obsolete.

—

*I should note here there is a lot more nuance to this story that I’m glossing over here for simplicity’s sake (see Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture for an a meticulous and fascinating historical account, or Pim van Bree’s nice summation here.)

I just came back from seeing The Social Network on opening night, in a packed theatre complete with a Tweetup filling the first two rows. I was impressed (especially after reading the rather disappointing ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ the book the film was based on). But you can go read another much more excellent blog post about its cinematic, narrative or artistic merits. Instead, I’d like to offer my take on The Social Network as a Facebook researcher.

Gone Hollywood
In 1997, when I was a nerdy teenage girl sitting in my basement talking to my nerdy internet friends on IRC and ICQ, I never ever would have thought one day I would be seeing a Hollywood movie about the creation of anything to do with the internet (and written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher, scored by Trent Reznor and starring Justin Timberlake, no less!) Back then, the internet was like my private, secret thing. I got a weird twinge the first time I overheard the ‘cool girls’ in the hallway whispering about how they were talking to boys they liked on ICQ. I realise it wasn’t just mine anymore. I still get this twinge whenever I’m reminded just how mainstream socializing online has become (even that phrase seems so outdated) – like today, when I went to see The Social Network on opening night.

The thing that most interested me was how the film would portray Zuckerberg, his motivations and the events that lead up to the Facebook we know today. As Aaron Sorkin admitted on the Colbert Report last night, no one other than those directly involved really know what happened. In some places, the film was very true to the available evidence. In the scene where Zuckerberg is creating the original Facebook site, the blog posts he makes are pretty much taken directly from his actual online diary which was used as a court document and later put online by 02138 magazine (and then, taken down because of legal battle with Facebook). As a wonderful nerd reference, Zuckerberg is shown to be blogging on LiveJournal under the account zuckonit. As awesome as it would be, I don’t think Zuckerberg used LiveJournal to host his blog from back then (anyone know? the source code shown in the court documents seem to indicate no).

Zuckerberg’s motivations
Like the LiveJournal reference, more often than not the film takes a lot of artistic license, especially with Zuckerberg’s motivations. The film’s plot revolves around Zuckerberg two supposed motivations for creating Facebook: women and getting into a final club. The scene where Zuckerberg creates Facemash (a pre-Facebook site like Hot or Not) right after being broken up by Erica Albright (Zuckerberg’s blog reveals this isn’t her real name) supports this notion because in the movie version, Facemash only compares female students. This assertion is also found in ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ which is supposed to be non-fiction. However, the original Crimson story on Facemash (Harvard’s student paper) seems to indicate that both genders are comared, which makes Zuckerberg seem much more interested in creating something interesting rather than just wanting revenge on the general population of women for rejecting him. His preoccupation with Erica’s rejection runs throughout the film, which (spoilers!) closes on Zuckerberg looking lonely and deciding whether to Friend her or not. Again, the film leaves out an important detail – Zuckerberg had a girlfriend (Priscilla Chan, who is is still dating and will probably marry) throughout most of the events depicted in the film. The inaccuracies are not a surprise given that the film (and the book it was based on) are entirely based on everyone else’s accounts of what happened, with no input from any actual Facebook employee or Zuckerberg himself.

What the film does get totally right is that Zuckerberg is not motivated by money. Clearly, something else drives him, otherwise he would have sold Facebook to the hiddest bidder (and there have been many offers in the billions). But this something else probably isn’t as simple as women or getting into a final club. As Karel Baloun, an early Facebook engineer, reports in his book ‘Inside Facebook,’ Zuckerberg really believes he’s making the world a better place.

Anti-social networks
Like Temple Grandin‘s unique outsider perspective that enabled her to create more humane slaughterhouses (terrible analogy, I know) The Social Network ingeniously picks up Zuckerberg’s outsider-enabled ability to pick out the core social motivations and structures of humans that lead to the success of Facebook. Zuckerberg can only do this because he is on the outside looking in. This, on one hand gives him the critical distance to see what others can’t, but on the other leads, ironically, to the creation of a social network site that is actually profoundly anti-social.

All in all, The Social Network ‘underscores a cultural phenomenon‘ (duh). Go see it.

More? In time with the release of The Social Network, I was on MTV News this week to talk about Facebook and what it all means. Check it out (it’s clip 4).

But, as a woman, I am very aware of the safety issues inherent in sharing where you are and the places you frequent. When I was teen, I received death threats from some dick on IRC by who had managed to find my home address. I’ve spoken to other women who are Foursquare users and they, too, were concerned about stalking and were surprised how many guys check in to their homes on Foursquare. But, regardless of your gender, there are of course all sorts of potentials for misuse of this information by governments, law enforcement, businesses, marketing agencies and so on. This is why I used a fake name and profile photo on Foursquare (By default, a user’s profile URL is a number with a dash in front of it. The name used on the site is a user’s first name and last initial.)

The other day, I decided I wanted to twiddle with my settings and link my Foursquare account with my Twitter account. There were clear (or so I thought) options for deciding what this would mean. I could check or uncheck boxes saying what information I wanted to be shared on Twitter. What I did not realise was that linking my Twitter account would also mean that Twitter username would get pulled to Foursquare and become my new profile url. Sure, at first glance this seems totally harmless. But like may other internet users, I’ve consistently used the same nick for years, across many services. So, it’s pretty easy to link my ‘real’ identity with my online self through my nick. So, to put it simply, this was a pretty big privacy violation which comes with all the issues associated with outing. I no longer feel comfortable checking in as my activity is no longer anonymous. I’m not the only one with this issue.

But there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s no option to undo it (just like there was option to do it in the first place, it was just done without my permission. Foursquare hasn’t replied to any of my Twitter messages to them or my post on Get Satisfaction. What is so infuriating to me is that Foursquare provides no way to contact them about this sort of issue, except by posting on Get Satisfaction. Which is ridiculous, given 1.) the sensitive nature of the information gathered and shared on the site and the potential safety issues that could result and 2.) how much value I, like most users, have added to the site.

The situation also calls to mind a recent privacy issue with Google Buzz, where ‘feature’ aimed at making the service more intuitive resulted in a woman’s information being automatically shared with her abusive ex-husband. I think the same thing is going on here. The designers at Foursquare probably thought everyone would want to have the same username on Twitter as they did on Foursquare, so, of course, there was no reason to give the user a choice in the matter. A the Google Buzz incident shows, design choices online have real life implications, which is why designers need to start thinking beyond their own life experience and situations. They need to start designing for the rest of us.

But for now, if I don’t hear back from Foursquare soon, I’m going to cancel my account.

Update March 15, 2010: Finally heard back from a Foursquare employee named Chrysanthe on Get Satisfaction who contributed this nugget: “If you link your foursquare account to twitter, then your foursquare user URL will correspond to your twitter handle.” Really? You don’t say. Now how about warning people AND telling me how to undo it, like I was asking (pretty please)? And, not leaving it for three days would also be nice (timeliness is kinda important when privacy is an issue).

Update April 12, 2010: Still nothing back from Foursquare. But David Fono had the smart idea of unlinking my Twitter and Foursquare accounts, which worked like a charm. This was counter intuitive to me – usually moving from a random number to a nice username is seen as ‘upgrading.’ Plus the person designing it obviously thought it having a nice username was feature users would want, so why would they want it to go back to the ugly random number again? But Fono’s a coder (so he has better insight into that kind of thinking than I), and he said it made sense that it would work from his perspective. This again speaks to my observation that the people making social media think differently than most of the people using it, which is why we get ourselves in such situations.

So, what’s the big takeaway? If someone at Foursquare had just TOLD me this solution (like I had requested) none of this would be a problem! You gotta be responsive to privacy concerns when you’re playing with such sensitive data, guys.

PS if you’re in Toronto on June 19th, this incident was a big motivator in my decision to put together a Privacy Unconference on these very issues – PrivacyCampTO: Privacy for everyone!

• 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?

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).

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.

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?

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.