Potato Chipping

Front-Staging the Internet

Facebook is playing a dangerous game with sociological theory.

It was a busy week for Facebook. First they integrated into thirty major websites—such as CNN, Pandora, and Yelp. Now it seems they’re making still more profile content public.

This was evidently what Mark Zuckerberg meant when he declared back in January that “the age of privacy is over.” Facebook anticipates that the default Internet interaction of the future will be social and traceable to identities, and is positioning itself at the head of this movement.

I’ll leave the hyperbolic claims that their activity amounts to “a deal with the devil” or “winning the Internet” to other (usually less hysterical) commentators. My take is that Facebook is trying to turn the Internet into a front stage, and it’s a pretty risky move to bet the pocketbook on being able to control or anticipate the consequences of such a major change.

While the Internet has always been a front stage in theory, most users haven’t treated it that way. To the extent that Internet behavior is anonymous (e.g., YouTube comments), it’s been a way to act publicly from offstage. Even when Internet behavior has been traceable to identity, it’s been a back stage in the sense that the major social audience (parents, employers, etc.) was unlikely to ever find out about it, especially if one was aware of the risk and taken steps to prevent the wrong public from finding out.

Social network sites, until now, have been one of those back stages—if not the back stage to the age demographics that made them famous: teens and young adults. To these groups, the definition of the situation is that they should be spaces with relaxed social norms and little pressure to conform to the behavioral demands of the more powerful (i.e., older adults). These users didn’t join Facebook to watch their language or repress the more controversial aspects of their lives.

As older adults have increasingly accounted for more and more of Facebook’s exponential growth, Facebook has increasingly become a front stage for its base of younger users. The new integrations, combined with the success of Facebook Connect, will likely start a stampede as nearly every website seeks to hitch a ride on Facebook’s influence for fear of missing out. For Facebook users, the spotlight of the front stage will increasingly shine on previously back stage and offstage spaces.

The dilemma for Facebook is that it has to choose whether it wants to be “the” front stage destination of the Internet, or “the” back stage destination. It can’t be both. If you’re performing for your boss, you can’t be performing for your friends.

Both are necessary. We need to perform publicly to succeed socially and financially, but we also need to form bonds by commiserating back stage with our inner circle. Facebook was initially a back stage and could’ve continued to be “the” back stage. But since it’s abandoned its previous privacy stance in the race to attract more users and believes it can’t go back now, the only way is forward, and encouraging the front stage is going to keep it rich for the next few years. But if it doesn’t compensate for the loss of the back stage space that fueled its rise, it’s going to be in trouble.

I don’t mean to suggest that Facebook will become irrelevant anytime soon. Far from it. But I think it will start to resemble a more successful LinkedIn—a place to perform on the front stage in front of parents, teachers, bosses, and acquaintances and make bland status updates about the weather. There’s no doubt that this front stage positioning will be lucrative for Facebook financially, at least in the short term.

But users will miss the privacy of the back stage, and unless Facebook overhauls its byzantine privacy options and/or builds in an easier way to safely post pictures of keg stands, it will leave itself vulnerable in the rear. A social network site will adopt Facebook’s old policy of making profiles visible only to friends or come up with an easier, quicker, safer way to disseminate information to back stage partners, and start capturing market share as Facebook interactions become increasingly artificial.

If trendsetting young adults find and coalesce around a more private social network site, college and high school students will follow, and soon that site will catch up with Facebook in terms of user engagement. At that point, it would be very hard for Facebook to resist the “next big thing” narrative sure to spring up around the other site. Once all the meaningful interactions are happening elsewhere, it will either survive as the site for functional and superficial interactions or fade into irrelevance after a mass exodus to the sexy new site.

It will be interesting to see who exploits the vacuum left by the loss of a safe online back stage. Facebook could avert the above scenario by making changes in its platform to enable back stage interactions. MySpace could try to stop its free fall by making its profiles private by default and turning the MySpace-versus-Facebook narrative into a public-versus-private debate (though I doubt they’d risk alienating their remaining faithful users by going private). A middling startup with an embryonic base may find an appealing siren’s song to distinguish it from other middling startups to disgruntled Facebook users. But the winner will be the one who creates the best, safest way to post embarrassing pictures of your friends.

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Oh Dear.

From the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-The-Onion department:

It appears the most eminent tribunal in the land–which is currently hearing a case on privacy and pagers and will no doubt hear many more regarding the political consequences of new technologies–hasn’t used anything more advanced than a rotary.

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. – who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer – asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

I sincerely hope Jon Stewart is all over this. (More here.)

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Sexual Norms. Wink Wink.

I was strolling through the old Google Reader this morning and found an article on CNN about “hooking up.” How’s this for a first sentence?

When Jennifer Nicholas sees television shows or movies where characters “hook up” or have sex with “friends with benefits,” she cringes, because that’s how she got herpes.

Subtext, anyone?

I don’t really have anything to add, except what South Park has already said.

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Learning to Like Facebook?

My conference paper written in collaboration with James Witte about adult social network site user characteristics, preferences, and motives is now available for download. Link and abstract below.

Lynn, Randy and James C. Witte. 2010. “Learning to Like Facebook? Social Categories, Social Network Site Selection, and Social Network Site Uses.” Annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society and North Central Sociological Association, March 31-April 3, Chicago, IL. (PDF, 192 KB)

Previous studies seeking to identify the characteristics, uses, and motives of social network website behaviors have identified several social structural and social psychological correlates, yet methodological limitations and rapidly changing user populations have prevented a comprehensive evaluation of who uses social network sites, how, and why. This paper presents preliminary results from a broad study of social network site use, suggesting that expressive Internet use, educational attainment, and social capital are all significant indicators of social network site behavior among adult users.

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Millennial Fever

I like the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Their surveys are reliable and well-constructed, and they’ve collected tons of publicly available data over the past 10 years.

Their public relations, though, doesn’t approach the quality of their methods. Exhibit A: thorough takedowns of last month’s “just-this-side-of-moral-crusading…soft ball pitch to those who will turn it into media hoo-ha” report on sexting by Dan at Sociology of Information and Jay at Montclair SocioBlog. In my experience this isn’t an isolated incident–Pew seems to want to position themselves as a reliable source for academics but also to frame their reports in such a way that misleading sound bites can be grabbed by moral-panicking journalists.

Now their latest report is about the Millennial Generation, complete with a cute little quiz to find out how Millennial you are.

Observations:

• Generations are tricky academic constructs. If you really want to distinguish between cohorts (people occupying same or similar age positions at a particular point in time) and young people in general, you have to have longitudinal data. For example, Pew notes that Millennials are the most liberal age group today. Are Millennials more liberal than young people were in the 1960s or 1980s? They don’t say.
• Social actors shape society and are shaped by society in turn. Generational constructs tend to emphasize one of those relationships over the other. “Find out how today’s teens and twentysomethings are reshaping the nation,” the Pew tagline reads. How are they being shaped, besides by technology? Again, no real answer.
• Generational constructs also tend to define generations relative to one another. By far the most salient quality of Millennials, adultcentric observers argue, is their technological literacy. (My mom, who until recently was a technology coordinator at a high school, had nearly double the score of Boomers’ average on Pew’s Millennial quiz, despite tech proficiency being her only real commonality with us young’uns.) I consider myself to have above average tech proficiency even among other Millennials, but today’s 12 year olds are likely to be far more wired in 15 years than I am today. How will we define Millennials then?
• The “wired generation” angle is especially prone to an unbalanced perspective, since technological determinism is so prevalent. For Millennials, technological determinism combines with the common narrative of youths dominated by “raging hormones” to produce a doubly deterministic perspective. Kids today can’t control themselves, the story goes, and technology is the great enabler for all those dirty behaviors. If those kids would just put down their iPods, maybe this country wouldn’t be heading down the crapper.
• Society fears youths (especially lower-class or minority youths), but we also fear for them (especially when they’re white and middle- to upper-class). Because middle- to upper-class youths are the ones using the technology, their indiscretions involving technology have to be explained away without disparaging their race or class identities. So the blame is affixed to their age (i.e., raging hormones), to the technology itself (in its enabling capacity), and/or to the corrupting influence on the other side of the technologically mediated interaction (the predator, the exploiter of private information, the voyeur). The manifestations of these three things then become the most important artifacts of the contemporary youth experience, as seen through the eyes of the adults who fear for them.

Do the Pew study and others ultimately say anything useful about Millennials, then? Or do they say more about the generation(s) authoring them?

[Edit: Ezster Hargattai has a new article addressing the assumption that Millennials are universally tech savvy, showing significant differences by race, gender, education, and SES.]

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Facebook Data Fun

No real commentary here, just a fun visualization tool I found on Pete Warden’s blog using the 210 million public Facebook profiles he’s harvested. Hover or click on each country or city to see the most frequent friend locations, most popular fan pages, and most common names.

In another post, he divides the U.S. into 7 regions based on commonalities among its Facebook users:

• Stayathomia: The northeast from Minnesota to New England
• Dixie: The mid-Atlantic seaboard and Deep South
• Greater Texas: The namesake state, western Gulf coast, and lower Midwest
• Mormonia: Parts of Utah and Idaho
• Socalistan: The west coast from San Francisco to Mexico
• Pacifica: Seattle and orbiting communities
• Nomadic West: The rest of the west

Very interesting exploratory observations. Check it out.

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For the 31,882nd Time

[h/t phdcomics]

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Payments, Programs, and Elbow Grease

Susan Engel, psychologist and educational administrator, has her take on the cesspool of American education in yesterday’s NYT:

If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.

Her argument–which, to be fair, includes some good ideas–is typical of the public discourse regarding education. Economics, pedagogy, and commitment are all that matter. If we attack those deficiencies with our American can-do spirit, by golly, our kids will actually start to learn something.

There are few public debates in which I wish sociologists had a more prominent voice than education. Yes, we all know the American system is failing. But the public discourse completely neglects several important questions that critical sociology has addressed in detail over the past thirty years.

• Why do we continue to embrace a nineteenth century assembly-line method of education that has been completely belied by research into individual learning styles?
• If part of the function of education is to create well-adjusted adults, why do we segregate youths from the adult world by curtailing civil liberties and property rights? Why do we warehouse them in separate institutions in which they are forced to spend far more time with their peers (hardly a model of competent adulthood) than adults?
• Why do we not acknowledge that the hidden curriculum of norms and values is just as consequential as the pedagogical curriculum? Why do we not acknowledge that schools are a site in which many of society’s most troubling features–racism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, and the disparity of cultural capital–are formed and institutionally sanctioned?

I’m all for more competent and better compensated teachers. But the public discourse has only identified part of the problem. Until the conclusions of sociologists attain wider public knowledge, education reform will be doomed to ineffective conversations about where to put the money, where to put the accountability, and who needs the most elbow grease.

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Class and SNS Revisited

CNN takes a look at the MySpace/Facebook class divide:

A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

Although it was published the day after Jon Stewart hilariously destroyed CNN’s fact-checking standards, I thought it was pretty solid overall.

I wonder, though, if Facebook’s astronomical growth during this calendar year is going to reduce or even eradicate the class gap. As Facebook zooms past MySpace faster than anyone expected, even data collected six months ago is already obsolete. A plausible hypothesis would be that MySpace will see a mass exodus similar to the Friendster emigration of 2004, and all classes will gravitate toward Facebook (until the privileged classes find another site to flock to and escape the commoners…)

Cross-sectional studies are limited no matter what the context, but the pace of change in SNS behavior means cross-sectional studies of SNSs have a frighteningly small window of relevance. What if the massive growth of Facebook in the past 6 months has closed the class gap? We can’t know.

Eszter Hargattai recently repeated her 2006 study, finding that although Facebook had surpassed MySpace in popularity, the class differences remained. (Note: As of this post, Eszter’s website is down.) So her data and the Nielsen data suggest that the class gap remained as of earlier this year. But it’ll be interesting to see whether data collected now continue to replicate these findings.

I’ll be doing some cross-sectional SNS data collection in January and February of next year. And I guarantee I’ll be rushing to get it to print before it becomes obsolete.

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A Sociology of Happiness?

Yesterday I attended a provocative conference entitled “Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and Cultural Capital.” Some of the research included:

• How medical practices mitigate the unhappiness associated with languishing in waiting rooms using TVs and handheld computers, while simultaneously shaping patients to serve the practices’ own interests.
• How a large technological corporation offering countless benefits (I wonder what company that could be…) affects employee behaviors and attitudes.
• How self-help books articulate a model of happiness that is an internalization of Foucault’s panopticon, in which “the gaze of the anonymous other [is] reanimated in the mirror.”
• How those with pessimistic outlooks are exploited by so-called “indie” films that reinforce these beliefs, producing a “euphoric fatalism” in the consumer.
• How participants in the unconventional lifestyle of open marriages construct happiness through their deviant behavior.

It was a somewhat disjointed, but generally interesting series of presentations. Some recurring themes seemed to emerge:

• Happiness is usually constructed as external to the individual. The favorite culprit is money, but other externalities (family, health, time) are also equated with happiness.
• This happiness-as-external meme is relentlessly encouraged and exploited by producers, institutions, and organizations, financially as well as emotionally.
• Resolving tension between the personal self and the social self is conceived as a prerequisite for happiness. While some methods suggest that the key to happiness is to improve one’s social presentation skills (e.g., personal branders), other methods suggest that modifying one’s personal self to be more concordant with the social self is the answer (e.g., self-help gurus).

Throughout, I kept wondering what a sociology of happiness might look like. Though we imagine happiness to be an internal state, it seems that even happy people–whether they are genuinely so or merely report themselves as such–consider certain modes of social engagement (or lack thereof) to be a necessary component. It would be an interesting compliment to the nascent field of positive psychology to determine what social behaviors, interactions, and interpretations are associated with happiness, and to what extent the internal state is dependent upon the external stimuli. I imagine that many studies have addressed these questions indirectly, but I wonder if anyone has situated them in this context specifically.

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