I’m not going to comment directly on the Twitter controversy (because I’m not now, and never have been a user), but I think the much complained of “Twitterisation of Facebook” is worth a look. For those of you who haven’t noticed, Facebook has made a number of changes to its front page and some of its functionality (and to the fonts and framing of photos). The stated purpose – supposedly aligned with the site’s ambition to build a growing “social graph” – is to enable users:
to find out everything that is going on in the world around you at any given moment, or shape the stream of information most relevant to you.
The changes haven’t exactly been popular, and have led to a lot more noise on the site than the “terms of service” controversy, which was perhaps largely of interest to net privacy activists. There’s an obvious tension here between Facebook’s own goals and its users’ comfort levels with the existing interface. While it might be the case that users can customise how they interact with the new front page, that takes work – and that’s not necessarily something people want to have to do.
Facebook may be kicking another own goal by disrupting some of the conventions which had developed and which were instantly understood among users – for instance, the syntax of the status update and the distinction between status updates and other forms of publishing. The first has changed, and the distinction has been blurred. It goes against the grain of the way people have grown to understand how to use the site, and that’s been obvious from the very many hostile reactions.
…As has this point:
i use facebook and not twitter for a reason
That suggests another source of tension for Facebook. Users may not care much for the grand narrative of creating a “social graph” for the world, and indeed many of the brouhahas that have erupted are traceable to a difference in understanding between the site owners and its users as to its purposes. Similarly, competitive tensions aren’t always best resolved by imitation or co-optation of the features of other social networks – Twitter, in this instance.
While there are a number of aspects of the new new Facebook which could be highlighted, one that I think is crucial in this context is the notion of a “real time” feed (which it is not). Writing in Hypertext 3.0, George P. Landow asks:
What advantages and what disadvantages… does such an information technology based on presence have? This question turns out to be an especially crucial one, because many info-pundits automatically assume that presence has more importance than all other qualities and effects of any particular information technology.
Landow goes on:
…the advocates of all new information technologies always claim theirs possess immediacy, and this claim derives from “the desire to get pasts the limits of representation and to achieve the real”. Such assumptions, which ignore the very different strengths of speech and writing, demonstrate that many people believe that being in the presence of someone trumps all the advantages, including reflection, abstraction, organisation, and concision, that writing enables. Moreover, presence itself is not always a desirable, much less the most important, quality when communicating with another person. We can all think of situations in which we feel more comfortable talking on a telephone than speaking to someone face to face… Absence, in other words, also has great value in certain communicative situations, a crucial factor to take into account when considering the gains and losses involved in writing.
A “Live stream” mitigates against the benefits that can accrue from diachronous as opposed to synchronous communication. Immediacy increases the noise factor, and induces, or requires the user to do more work in either filtering or catching up. So the immediacy of the Facebook “Live stream” may prompt users to do more to organise the flows of information reaching them, by ranking and selecting the content of other users for highlighting or ignoring. Facebook perhaps hopes that this will provide more heft for its “social graph” by encouraging grouping friends into various categories – some closer, some at arms’ length, and with various levels of affective intensity. However, one of the virtues of Facebook, and one of the bases of its “network effect”, is the relative lack of differentiation implied by the catch all term “friend” – it can actually encourage the heightening and intensification of weak ties as people learn more about their contacts. So, Facebook may be working against itself here by trying to make users “organise” flows and network links.
Secondly, the information overload in the “Live stream” may discourage rather than encourage users from returning frequently to the home page. The business and competitive interests of a social networking site privilege time of visits and repeated refreshes, but that doesn’t mean that this big ‘poke’ will motivate the desired response. After all, it often doesn’t on Facebook – you can poke, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get poked back.
I joined FB early this year, after representation from offspring. I was a bit put off by the automatic begging for valentines on 14th Feb. I was also unimpressed with some of the dodgy advertisements being displayed.
When I checked a couple of weeks ago, I had the option of canceling and having all my records removed. When I did cancel last week, that option was no longer available; nasty surprise.
They appear to be switching to monetisation mode.
I’m apt to think that Twitter has jumped the shark.
I don’t like the new Facebook changes principally because they’re hideously ugly, and it’s now quite difficult to find stuff. I’ve never cared about advertising — I’m good at tuning stuff out — but Facebook’s main appeal for me was its aesthetics. Now it’s turning into this hideous amalgam of mySpace and twitter, I’m tempted to do without. The fact that I can’t simply delete my account is very irritating, however.
In Soviet Union, account can’t delete *you*! …wait, wait, I think that line has to be fine-tuned.
Isn’t it a sort of basic law of the relation between humans and a system or systems, that people will tend to keep on tinkering with a system until they break it? (e.g. Vista). Think of the pressure in the FB HQ to keep improving and tweaking and updating: wrecking it is approaching inevitable.
It’s amazing to me that Google still works, though even there I do find the constant plethora of new features and offers baffling.
Cannot see the point of FB. Joined up using fake information..and really months later..what is the point of it? It is inane.
It’s safe to assume that for any free-to-use transmissive medium, you are not the customer, merely the product to be on-sold. Complaining to Facebook will be as futile as a Quaker oats box asking for a new mascot.
Great post, Mark – you put into words a lot of my half-formed thoughts about it. I don’t even know what “real time feed” is supposed to mean; I thought it must be that the homepage would refresh itself automatically at intervals, but it doesn’t (not that I want it to – it’d just chew up more bandwidth), so I can’t even tell what they’re trying to convey. Whatever it is, it’s not something I want.
I also have a Facebook account. It started a year or so ago, when a friend sent me an email with a link, inviting me to be a friend, which was rather puzzling considering we’re already friends.
I have since had requests from acquaintances, my kids, their friends and other relatives to confirm that I’m their friend. I obligingly agree, but am impervious to Facebook bleating because the only information adorning my account is my name.
I find the obsession for spilling your guts about every trivial incident in your life to the world rather weird and somewhat disturbing.
Basically FaceBook just reminds you of how many fleshy friends you used to have.
On the other hand though, thanks to FaceBook, I’m now going next year to a tropical island for the 50th anniversary of my grammar school. Perfecto excuse for commissioning a nicely pre-crumpled bespoke cream linen suit.
See you under the mango tree, mainboy.
well, I like facebook as it means I don’t have to actually consort with you malodorous humans any further.
My friends, just as like them: static, impresent; a pic with a daily witticism, and a game of scrabble via satellite.
@7 – Cheers, Charles! I think it’s worth pointing out that I’m not writing yet another post about “whether Facebook is a good thing”. It’s a thing, and it’s a thing a lot of us have come to use for a variety of largely satisfying purposes. Otherwise, we’d have stopped. They don’t really have evil mystical ways of making people stay.
The question is – what prompts the site owners to disrupt the pattern of use that has developed?
It’s not as simple as *commercial mendacity*. It’s also got to do a lot with not letting good enough alone and allowing people to use your site as they wish. To me, all this “social graph” nonsense is silly internet utopianism.
If they were doing all this from a pure business basis, they could sack a lot of the site tweakers they pay big salaries to, and let go of their directive “we will map your network” stuff. As I’m trying to show, they’re cannibalising the leverage they’ve had from their own network effect by taking themselves far too seriously.
Let Facebookers be Facebook!
@1
Did Peter just scream ‘Get off my lawn!’ at FB? =)
Dunno – too hard to keep up with the “Live Stream” now
I get the impression that many of our thoughtful blog posts might be considered by the youth the way we rear-view the old media. Texting on cell-phones – microblogging – is all the go now, and so we are starting to look like dinosaurs to the next generation. We’re old, they’re young and that’s life.
The critics miss the point of social media ‘presence’ assuming that it means the same as virtual presence. For Facebook, and perhaps more importantly for twitter, it’s richer than that. See more here: http://joannejacobs.net/?p=855
Now Joanne Jacobs is just total upmarket spam. Another marketing graduate frantically trying to parley a few buzz words and a spin around the block with the latest web 2.o v2.1.3 tech into at least a three month consultancy with some equally doomed start up or flagging bricks ‘n’ clicks operation. It’s like watching remoras glom onto eachother.
Any why is she trying to glom on here? Not because anyone here would engage her services but rather because she could then say to potential clients, I have a presence on a leading Oz blog. Let me show you social media marketing in action.
And it never ever works. Pack it in Joan. It’s all so sloppy, messy, juicy, dynamic and all too human for your crap.
You want to flog us as endorsers/early adopters/tasters of anything to your clients, then you better become a serious player among us.
And after this comment, that’s just not gonna happen is it?
****
Mark and co, sorry about the strong language above but I really hate it when marketing dickheads try to co-opt these kinda places. And I’m sure most commentators here, across the political spectrum, would agree with me.
Plus I’ve spent four years embedding myself here.
Incidentally Mark, do you have erectile problems? Nothing to be ashamed of. So do I. However a friend told me about this treatment…
Bit harsh, Nabs!
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/07/11/guest-post-by-joanne-jacobs-the-root-of-all-evil
A few weeks or so ago, I put a long message on the FB Wall to a friend of mine in America. (At least, I think that’s what I did), but had to do it in two messages as they cut me off mid sentence. I did, and still do prefer FBs old format but (sigh) I’m getting used to the new one. (It might implode, but it probably won’t, and if it does some-one will probably start up a new version.)
Seems to me that some of the highly cultivated distaste for Facebook registered above (Hi Thomas Paine!) is structurally very similar to me to the highly gendered distaste for so-called “feminine” modes of discourse: gossip and all that.
Wow, top thread. I’ve already lost track of everybody I wanted to say ‘Yes yes, excellent point’ to. I think Nabs’ “It’s like watching remoras glom onto each other” transcends the immediate (sorry) discussion though, as Nabs’ throwaways so often do.
Mark, thanks so much for writing this post. I’ve been thinking along some of the same lines about this stuff, but it’s been ten years since I was required to use this kind of analytic language on a daily basis and I had forgotten how useful it can be for ordering one’s thoughts clearly (contrary to what most people say about academic language!). The other really refreshing thing about this post is (as you’ve amplified in the comments) the fact that it’s neutral and analytic rather than getting bogged down in sides-taking, so the discussion actually gets somewhere.
That quotation from Landow about the way people value immediacy is an absolute cracker, isn’t it — I think that’s exactly right. And your post speaks to the arguments I have constantly with the close friends of my age (dinosaurs indeed) who even still scorn blogging, much less Facebook, much much less Twitter. The irony is that the technology appears to be trying to replicate exactly the kind of immediacy/presence that my scornful friends valorise over using the internuts to communicate at all.
The synchronic/diachronic distinction is particularly useful to me when thinking about this, because the reason that I value electronic comms forms so highly is precisely their flexibility about time, which makes (potentially, at least) for thoughtful and civilised contact. One can email, text, blog, Facebook and tweet knowing that while the communication is potentially immediate, you’re also not interrupting, disturbing or distracting people. You can think about what you write before you send it, and they can think about what and when they reply, so there are none of the distractions and minefields of misheard, misunderstood or foot-in-mouth conversation and physical presence.
David Rubie at #6 is right about Facebook, of course: we’re product to be on-sold. But no marketing tool in the world is ever going to be able to second-guess the kinds of subcultures of usage and assumption that grow up around tools like Facebook, or the speed with which they grow and mutate.
It seems that people are dressing up the need to use new technology and adhere to it’s social conventions as a whole new paradigm for interacting with people and organizations. Interacting with customers or business partners and treating them like human beings instead of numbers or resources has always been the way to establish a quality business.
I watched an interesting talk by Barry Schawrtz on TED last night, on how modern management techniques really fall short of the mark in understanding how to deal with humans.
Pavlov’s cat wrote:
This is right, but then again you have to remember exactly who Facebook is being marketed to. It isn’t necessarily advertisers.
Most (perhaps all) high profile, privately owned internet sites are built around the concept of a massive single payday – back in the tech boom it was an IPO they were all aiming for in which the angel/venture investors took their $1 and made $100 in a single day based on hype.
Now that doesn’t happen so much, and tech companies have reverted to the more traditional big payday, which is getting bought by a bigger fish. Myspace getting purchased by Murdoch, or Google buying Youtube. Phil is right to be a little cynical when he says “switching to monetarisation mode”. I have a feeling that Mark is overthinking the problem a little when he says Facebook are starting to annoy their own members too much. It isn’t really about high concepts and internet utopias, it’s about being in the news, being the news itself, generating lots of internet traffic for a relatively short period (say 3 months) to inflate the stats while some bigger fish is looking over the books.
More simply, it’s the old Underpants Gnomes joke, solved:
1. Steal underwear
2. ???
3. Profit.
Step 2 is convincing somebody else that stealing underwear, while not currently profitable, will be the biggest thing ever and you better not miss out. Getting bought by Microsoft or IBM has always been paved with riches for the lucky sods who’ve done it.
Sorry – Ute Man was me. Or I’m him. Or I’m something that Ute Man dreams.
Dave, are you Ute Man dreaming he’s David Rubie, or David Rubie dreaming he’s Ute Man? Or perhaps the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon …
I dunno Mr Irving, if Ute Man had a twitter account he’d be all a-twitter I suppose. How do you do “presence” with a fictional character?
On a more meta level, aren’t Pavlov Cat’s remarks about the timeliness of communication via the internet just sort of creating a fictional, always witty and erudite version of yourself? How many times have you walked away from a meat space conversation then 5 minutes later suddenly remembered the perfect riposte?
That’s the reason why presence in electronic communication is a myth, as Mark pointed out. You can’t just turn away from a person while your brain churns through responses, but any text based conversation requires a little thoughtfulness and sometimes even research. Otherwise, as Mark said, it just becomes noise. When I looked at my wifes Facebook page the other day, it was indistinguishable from those Matrix screen savers for somebody with my limited attention span.
Well of course, but that presupposes a stable essence of ‘self’ that never changes and is somehow indisputably authentic, which many of us would dispute. I mean, isn’t turning up IRL in your best clobber with sexed-up hair and perfect makeup and staying on your best behaviour creating a fictional, always “attractive” and charming version of yourself?* There’s lots of interesting theoretical stuff around the place on the subject of self-construction as an ongoing performance (without the connotations of inauthenticity that that might suggest). Which I would argue extends to electronic communications.
Ah yes, l’esprit de l’escalier. The first time anyone ever said that to me I translated it as ‘the spirit of the ladder’ and had no clue what he was talking about. ‘The wit of the staircase, you dickhead,’ he said.
*Or insert gender-specific alternative here
Are our slow rational thinking selfs any less real than our reactive instinctive selfs?
Pavlov’s cat wrote:
I don’t know whether you can intertwine appearance and communication so closely – although I suppose people don’t even strike up conversations if you look like a hobo and fart inappropriately. However, I would assume there is a kind of minimum threshold where meat space communication becomes problematic.
However, once you’re past the initial impression, doesn’t the content of your communication count for more than your personal appearance?
Actually, I’m confused myself now, since textual communication has PERSONAL APPEARANCE ATTRIBUTES TOO 1111!!!ELEVENTY1111!!!!!!! and on Facebook, everybody posts that one great picture when they were 22 and before they got fat on the dubious premise that their old school mates won’t recognize the 40 year old version.
Ute Man/DR,
Ahhgh, now that takes a bit of the fun out of it. I suspected it a little while ago, Dave, but I didn’t want to ask you. Ah, well.
Sorry Paul – I thought it was obvious! The original, and best online fake personality was Kibo – long before blogs were invented the he got the idea of popping up whenever his name was mentioned.
David @ 28 – hm. I was using appearance as just one aspect of the argument, the most obvious one. Self-fashioning is also conversational and behavioural, obvs.
Posting old or flattering pics on Facebook is a particularly shortsighted method of cruising for a bruising. Sooner or later you meet the people you’ve been fooling and you can see ZOMG!!!1111! in thought bubbles above their heads. It’s much cannier to post unflattering ones to ensure that people will be pleasantly surprised when they meet you. But then, that again valorises ‘real life’ (sorry, hate the expression ‘meatspace’) over virtual communication.
Maybe the people who say the sense of smell is far more important than we think in our relations with other people are onto something. That would certainly fit your ‘inappropriate farting’ thesis.
Grapple, grapple.
Maybe there’s something in that Nick Caldwell, but how to make sense of the fact that I can’t figure out how to get the new FB to do what I want, which is pretty modest – send my friends a Shite Gift for Academics. Gah, SO frustrating.
Sorry to hear that your witty and erudite interlocutor called you a dickhead, PC. What a dickhead!
No sooner said than it happens. Just checked my emails and sure enough 2 requests to be someone’s friend. They’re lucky, (or not, as the case may be) that I actually remembered the password. I now apparently have 11 friends. Yay.
And a message from someone whom I’ve never heard of, asking if I’m some other person’s or persons’ (whom I’ve also never heard of), daughter. Weird.
Pavlov’s Cat wrote:
Here’s why I like meatspace but I can understand why it’s an objectionable term.
I have to be honest here and say that I hadn’t really thought about the implications of valorising real life over textual communications. I remain fascinated by the way a lot of real life practices turn up in twisted ways on the net though and the inventive ways in which people turn inappropriate communication technologies to their own ends.
The farting thing though is serious, not so much for the smell but as a measure of how comfortable you might feel in front of somebody else. It displays a level of intimacy and trust that doesn’t really have an analog on the net.
Besides which, if in vito veritas perhaps Ute Man really is me, and this is just the sober version waiting to hoist a couple so he can be Ute man again.
@Laura
I was taking the negative Facebook commentary on its face, which seemed to be in opposition to it per se, rather than any one permutation of its interface design.
Hah, and apologies for using Twitter response conventions!
I hate meatspace too.
I find FB most useful for keeping in touch with people with whom I have loose ties. Good friends, I’m going to email or phone and then see face to face. But it’s also handy for group announcements. For example, a friend had a baby last week and put a message out using the wall facility. It’s nice to check back and read what others have said in a case like that and it’s the easiest way for her to get the news out.
I threatened my 17yo nephew with becoming his FB friend. He made it clear that it would be very inappropriate. Certainly doesn’t want his aged aunty to know what he and his friends have been up to.
I think the opposition to the new look in facebook has come mainly from those who use the site once a day or once a week rather than those who are always connected. And the application developers must very annoyed given how their applications have such a low profile now. They’ve optimised the site for a very specific group of users to the detriment of all the others.
You can’t please everyone at once and I think they would be better off offering 2-3 different presentations of the data which people would select based on how they use the site. Or even better just open the data to 3rd party developers like twitter has done (which is I think at the core of their popularity) and there will be a pretty good choice for everyone.
You just need to know how to read the stream
The FB stream and twitter stream can be seen a bit like sitting in a big cubicle farm at the office. You see and hear bits of information that people have put up and snippets of conversation. Sometimes its interesting and you join in. But if you just look at a recording of the whole thing once a day it looks a whole lot less useful.
Perhaps the term “face to face” is better than “real life”. The communication is just as real and sometimes better.
Why is the Never-ending book quiz on We read on FB almost entirely questions on Harry Potter or Star Wars at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong. I love both Star Wars movies and Harry Potter movies (I haven’t read the HP books yet, but I might one day). But really just HP and SWs is very very boring.
Paul, the answer is probably that most people are happy to stick with what’s popular as it requires little effort and is easy to research without having to actually open a book.
I wouldn’t bother with the Harry Potter books – it’s always the “dark arts” teacher who dunnit (sorry, spoiler). The Enid Blyton “Magic Faraway Tree” books were more inventive, although I suspect calling your characters Fannie and Dick just doesn’t work any more.
@20 – thanks, Dr Cat!
Landow’s book is highly recommended by the way. I’ve been looking at some stuff on writing, information theory and social media/web use and there is some exemplary and really high quality literature by literary theorists! Which I think is a spiffy thing!
DR @ 41,
Think I’d be more likely to read this latest set of novels about teenage vampires first. Hear they’re amazing (though that critique does come from the thirteen year old daughter of a friens of mine. They’re certainly thick. Last I heard she was halfway through, I think, the third book. At least its turning kids onto Wuthering Heights, I hear tell.
Paul – might be a generational thing, the 12 YO here made us all watch “Twilight” the other day and she needed no fancy internet facebookin’ or twitterin’ to find out about it (merely her peers). I often think the popularity of Facebook long term may well be narrowed to those whose social networks are curtailed by the demands of adulthood, but I’ve got no evidence for it.
For a vampire movie it was quite good – none of the boring subtextual silliness of Buffy but still managed to twist the tropes around in an interesting way. Not as entertaining as “The Lost Boys”, which I might watch with her on the weekend as I reckon she might enjoy it. The books are very cheap down at Big W at the moment due to the film if you can’t borrow one.
Thanks for that, Dave. A bit of light relief from all the history perhaps.(I did enjoy most of the Ann Rice Chronicles of a Vampire years ago (which I discovered all by myself in a bookshop) but I didn’t get through all of them.Hear she’s turned born-again Catholic.
A great many of the new young first-years have read Twilight and mention it as their favourite book. Less interest in HP now, is my impression.
Face to Face is what the teaching & learning specialists call tutorials & lectures, as distinct from online teaching. In terms of education the competition between f2f / online is kind of bitter, often heavily factionalised, and there’s a lot riding on it.
I feel this is a bit tangential to Mark’s post, but offer it anyway: my unscientific impression is that the saturation of Facebook is what has really made the difference in terms of getting all students, not just the few early adopters, to work as comfortably online as they do in the classroom. Contrary to the myth, the young people aren’t all internet savvy. But they’re getting much better than they used to be a couple of years ago.
Also related to education: I had some sad discussions last year with an academic who loudly & proudly identified as internet sceptic. My position was that a mix of f2f & online is the best of both worlds and specially good for students who feel unable to talk in class – this person had no issue with saying that they felt we shouldn’t ‘pander’ to those students but we should force them to talk in class, because that’s how it is in the Real World. I started to point out that apart from the equity & access benefits of the internet, in the Real World of Today it also helps to be a good communicator online. Then I remembered who I was talking to…
Laura, that’s right, I think.
One of the first year courses I’m teaching in had assumed that students would be familiar with blogging, wikis and social bookmarking but that’s only the case for a smallish minority. Though they’re almost all on Facebook.
I don’t think the study is published yet, but I’m told some Sydney Uni academics are completing some research which will show that the “Digital Natives” claims are quite overblown.
Having said that, in the writing course I’m teaching @ Griffith, I’m finding students’ facility with the composition of Facebook and text messages quite helpful for discussing writing. It’s also notable that most write in “standard English” when composing an sms, for instance. I’m coming to suspect that lolspeak etc. are a residue of a particular era of ICT use and digital culture, and also learning something about the political agenda inherent in the claims made about young people and the net/ICTs.
just sort of creating a fictional, always witty and erudite version of yourself?
Sheesh, I thought Teh Internets Was Bad because we’re all supposed to take advantage of our anonymity to be uncouth, abusive bullies. Now you’re saying the opposite. Could people make up their minds in just what way we fail and be consistent about it!
Facebook is run by brilliant idiots.
and inhabited by…. ?
Geez Helen, maybe my erudite and witty is your abusive bully, you cloth-eared daughter of a syphilitic camel!
Ambigables, it is inhabited by genius as it awaits perfection of the networking ideal.
Well of course I only like to speak for myself.
I might just say that if anyone had a really spiffy social network site ready to launch to the world, they might have had a very good opportunity to grow very quickly!
LULZ to DR