Aug 16, 2007
Facebook and the perils of prodigious sociability
Another post in the series of musings about Facebook as user experience and social microcosm…
The trouble with Facebook is that it’s a confused social space. There are too many different facets of personality being exposed through social openness. So much so, in fact, that it gets a bit difficult to manage.
For example, at present on Facebook, I have (among others) the following listed as “Friends”:
- My husband
- Several people I’ve known since I was 11
- College friends I haven’t talked to in 15 years
- My boss
- A couple of people from university I’d lost touch with
- Several people I know from t’internet, but haven’t met / don’t actually know
- A few people on a mailing list I belong to
- A handful of family members
- A few people who work for me
- At least one ex boyfriend
- People who I’ve seen around the office but never exchanged more than words of greeting with
While I obviously wouldn’t have connected with these people via Facebook if I hadn’t wanted to, it’s pushing the definition a bit to lump all of them together into the same bucket, labelled “friends”. Why? Because most of them aren’t strictly friends (although they’re all lovely, obviously).
Or rather, they may well be friends, but not all friends are equal. As we all know, there are different sorts of relationships, some of which are better kept distinct.
Put simply, I wouldn’t consider having a party to which they were all invited at the same time - apart from a wedding - so how can I expect to engage with them socially in a single setting online?
And most people I know are in the same boat.
Where in life we are each at the centre of a Venn diagram of all our social groups…
…in Facebook, it’s one big mixer.
All contacts are friends, regardless of their relationship.
Because the Facebook permissions are limited to being handled at the groups/networks level (rather than by individual), everyone who is now my “friend” has access to everything I publish - and vice versa. As a result, there are two main effects:
- I know way more about some of them than I would otherwise
There’s something about Facebook which encourages possibly ill-advised blind over-information, to the point that (via status updates, photos, relationship updates and more) I now know when people’s personal circumstances change from being “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated” (never a good sign) or “single” (and I never know what to say - “sorry”? “congratulations”?); whether they’re looking for “anything they can get” (which sounds sinister, somehow) or just “friends”; when they go out and get pissed (and the drunken facebook wall-to-wall conversations they have when under the influence); their religious and political views (and I’m actually quite surprised, in some cases); the terrible haircut they had when they were at university plus what they looked like on their wedding day; how they feel at any particular moment and perhaps nosiest of all, who else they know.It’s rifling through someone’s address book, diary, photo album, round-robin christmas letter and lonely hearts ad, all at once. It’s observing someone out of your mutual context.
Consequently, I get to see my boss at play, my friends talking talking to other friends I don’t know, behaving differently. I get to see my old schoolfriends - who are destined to remain forever teenagers in my head - with families and MBAs and civil partners and bald patches.
It feels like snooping. It is snooping. Socially-sanctioned snooping, but still…
- Since all the social connections are lumped together in one place, I’m at a loss as to what is relevant/appropriate to share
I’m acutely aware of all these people watching - being notified about - my every move on Facebook. When I play another round of the world trivia game, everyone is told what my score is. When I add a new friend, there’s an announcement. When I change my status, or add a website to my profile, or decide to change political views from “liberal” to “woolly liberal”, everyone gets to know about it. It’s like having my own personal entourage of sports commentator (”Ah now, that’s interesting, Meg’s just joined the Cheese Lovers group”), Master of Ceremonies (”Meg is now friends with Bob!”) and Town Crier (”Hear Ye! Hear Ye! It’s eleven o’clock and all’s well! And Meg is feeling hungry!”)And then there’s the content of those actions - what’s the appropriate level, given that everyone’s watching, and a weird combination of people at that?
I’m constantly aware of being snooped on as much as I snoop on others. Whatever I write, or add, or play is going to be potentially (mis)interpreted differently by every “friend” on there. As a result, the lowest common denominator for values of “appropriate and relevant” information usually wins - i.e. nothing.
So what’s the solution? How could Facebook work to ensure less paranoia social awkwardness?
Well, here’s one solution - one way, if you like, to use the existing functional constraints to be able to disclose certain bits of information to certain people.
Step one: Create personal invite-only groups for friends, colleagues, etc
Step two: Ask existing “friends” to join these, as appropriate. One person might be a member of several groups.
Step three: De-friend all your “friends” so that your only relationship with them is as fellow members of a group for which you are the admin
Step four: Adjust your notification/privacy permissions on a group by group basis. So, one group (”good friends”) might have access to your full profile, while another (”work colleagues”) will only have access to your wall and status updates.
If you do all this, you’ll end up with something that looks a bit more like this:
It might just work, you know.
Great analysis. I took the liberty of flagging this post on my own blog. Like many people, I was wavering on the doorstep of Facebook, wondering, what is it for? I think with your advice I’ll hang back a little longer.
Meanwhile aside from everything else, I’d love to know who does your diagrams. Very effective, very striking.
Thanks! I do my own diagrams - anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a visual thinker (but I’m no designer, alas)
Valid points and something I’ve wondered about myself a time or two. However, I do have to say I disagree about your assertion that it is snooping to know all this information. People are willingly (whether that is smart or not is irrelevant at this point) sharing this information so you being able to see it because of your connections with said person, does not, in my opinion, qualify as snooping. It’s not as if you’ve hacked into their account and are secretly catching up on their lives. Again, whether or not you really want to know it all, that’s another matter altogether!
Patricia - agreed. It’s not snooping in the invasive sense of the word, but in the sense of being exposed to lots of infomation you wouldn’t otherwise have. So, not going to someone’s house and breaking in to read their diary, but being invited over and finding their photo album etc lying open where you just *happen* to be able to see it…
You can’t look away.
Hooray! That’s exactly what we do. It’d be great to see Facebook create those kinds of more complicated social groups, but the truth is, their motivation is for you to share as much with all of your friends as possible. The more notifications there are, the more there is to keep you coming back, and ultimately it comes down to ad impressions.
This is one of the big problems with the web industry as it stands: more complicated models are made impossible because services need to pack in as many eyeballs as possible. Therefore, what works for the lowest common denominator usually goes.
Beautifully put, I’ve been having many of these thoughts myself but not in such an articulate way! I have an extra dilemma, in that I’ve been blogging for years, not completely anonymously, but not in a completely out, worksafe sort of way. Some of my colleagues know, but they are the ones who are also my friends. Facebook links my blog with my name (unless I never link the two, but my blog is also linked to Flickr, and last.fm, as is my Facebook profile) and I feel that identities I have managed to keep fairly distinct thus far are about to bleed all over each other! A lot of younger friends / colleagues / cousins / whatever seem to have none of these boundaries, I wonder if it’s a demographic thing? (Meg, I’ve included my work email so you can figure out where we met!)
Good to see put into words, and an intersting analysis, issues which I’ve been pondering.
I know a few health workers who are on facebook, and have a constant dilemma about how to handle privacy - to protect themselves from unwanted attention from patients. Do you set up a pseudonym and tell people who want to befriend you what it is, therefore somewhat defeating the sociability; or set up some complex privacy settings. One i’ve spoken to is not very au-fait with setting preferences and finds it quite a maze… Your ideas set out here are definitely of interest.
very interesting. i’ve only just joined facebook and was wondering what it is all about. i saw that my company has a network but i didn’t join it for the exact reasons you mention - i’m uncomfortable with what can and can’t be seen by work colleagues (some of whom i have never met because they live someplace else). not like i am up to anything bad, but i am concerned about unintentionally doing something that could affect my employment. it’s best to keep social and work separate, in my view.
Wow good stuff. I think you’ve hit the nail right on the head with this one. I also have the same problems as I have a very diverse range of people as “friends” on Facebook, many of whom I wouldn’t ever call friends in real life.
Funny how I’m sharing my personal details with people I may never see or speak to again in real life.
My answer? Be a curmudgeon, refuse to respond to the deluge of Facebook requests, and sit in perfect isolation.
Fer chrissakes people, didn’t we used to all go down the pub?
I suppose the virtual pub encourages solitary drinking, but that’s the future, chrislunch. In any case, the post makes think that the author would almost like to have multiple personas (or at least profiles) to go along with the relationship groups.
Still, the Copernican notion that the world revolves around me and that somehow I can remain at the center of that Venn diagram is something I’d love to see. It will take several generations of UI breakthroughs to make it happen.
I can’t agree with your more.
Although I see it less as a venn diagram and more as a an onion. I should have drawn diagrams too. Basically I see friends ranking outwards from really important to me, to vaguely important to basically archived.
Whilst your groups idea gets the end result, I don’t think it would work. People on FB don’t really treat groups that way, and it involves too much work, both for the person settings things up, as well as for the other people. It also breaks down the venn diagrams of of overlapping connections, which I think is a critical part of how facebook/linkedin etc work.
What you really need is a simple, or near automated way to do this with minimal effort. Easier than the “how do I know this person” they currently have, which whilst interesting has very little value, and is mostly wrong because hard wired tick boxes cannot account for enough situations.
What I would see as a solution (which admittedly only came to me when reading your blog) is an importance bar. On the left site is “really important people” (wives, close friends, etc) and on the right side is “people I really can’t be bothered with, more of a reference if I need it” (that guy I knew at school, my now married ex, etc)
Every person then needs two variables. A placement and a modifier. The placement is where you stick them on the bar. The modifier is a 1 or 2 step shift up or down the bar based on how you communicate with them.
Then when your friend a person, it gets shown below on this bar. A couple of key friends could appear on the bar as reference points. You then slide this person up or down the bar to the point where their relevance to you is. Really quick and easy and not much effort to set up.
Then in setting you can control how much information about you is revealed based on the bar position. You can also give more or less control to facebook to modify people’s position automatically based on how much you communicate with them, and poke them, and view their profile etc. Information delivered to you about other people is obviously prioritised towards their importance on the bar.
I think this fairly accurately reflects how we view people in life. I think it’s very little effort to do, to deliver context and simplifying things, as well as being able to dynamically change things based on activity. It also retains and holds interconnection information between contacts as well as adding too it.
I now have over 250 contacts in FB. Way more than I can manage. I suspect most people have this problem. If Facebook doesn’t improve this aspect of their platform, they will start suffering from it. If they aren’t already.
I’m not sure what to make of Facebook. I do realise that my friend whel is very very different from everybody else’s in that there is virtually no overlap. Even Labour Bloggers are firmly in the Labour camp and not the Blogger camp. I’ve also got the added complication of having added aspirant opera singers and a government minister.
I think that it might be very stupid of me to have twitters and blog entries importing into Facebook for my cousins’ adult children, my partner’s nieces and my immediate colleagues to read. On the other hand, they don’t have to read, they can skim.
Three things:
1. I’m happy to have avoided the whole Facebook thing. Rather like chrislunch, I’d rather go to the pub, meet for lunch or have people round for dinner. Maybe I’m just old fashioned and analogue.
2. "At least one ex boyfriend" implies that there are other people who may or may not have been boyfriends, or boyfriends who may or may not be "ex". As you are happily married, I assume the former case holds true, not the latter.
3. Only Sevitz could have a category of "wives". One at a time, Adrian, one at a time.
Gbo,
1) I find facebook enables me (at least partially my friends are all lame) to organise lunch, pub and dinner. It’s not a replacement of social contact for me, but an enabler. Give or take a few ables.
2) I have no boyfriends. I don’t believe Meg has any currently either.
3) Those of us who are single envision a future … no wait that’s Star Wars. I meant people in general have wives collectively (hence plural) not that I plan to have more than one. Hell I can’t even get a date (not even with Facebook’s help) never mind someone who wants me to go down on one knee.
There’s been so much written about Facebook it’s all become a bit of a blur. But you sum up here the main Facebook weirdness: lack of distinction between different kinds of relationship.
I know it’s still crude, but how do you feel about a comparison with Flickr’s variety of relationships:
Contacts, Mutual Contacts, Reverse Contacts, Friends, Family, Friends and Family, and Blocked.
(Have I missed any?)
And of course on Flickr you can decide the visibility of individual pieces of content, as you go along. For example, we all see your holiday photos, only your friends (not your family) see your drinking photos, your friends and your family see your wedding photos. It’s all up to you.
Would this work in a context like Facebook, or would it be too complicated?
As I’m still a student, I’m not that worried about damaging my employment prospects through FB. I believe FB was originally designed as an online yearbook at Harvard. If you’re squeamish about over-exposing yourself, you could always make your privacy settings more draconian. I just assume no one’s that interested in me anyway.
What concerns me is the amount of time I waste on it. I’m waiting for an application that would let me rank my level of friendship (although most of the applications are really annoying and tacky and debase FB to the look and feel of MySpace). I’m not sure if the Top Friends or Compare People applications (or whatever they’re called) do this.
I’ve been on FB since 2004 when it was still called The Facebook. It only really took off amongst my peers at uni about 18 months ago. Then at the end of 2006/start of 2007 they freed it up to non-students and allowed developers to create applications for it. Since then it hasn’t worked so well.
I left FB for a few months earlier this year, just to see what effect it would have and whether I would feel left out (and because I was spending too much time on it). I had similarly held off getting a mobile phone until it seemed too anti-social not to have one. I was curious to see if FB was getting that way. I went back to it because I realized some of my friends are more likely to get in touch with me that way than by email (very similar, then, to how mobile phones work as a form of social exclusion). I only use it to keep track of a handful of friends, even though I have nearly 200 FB “Friends”. It is being used more and more to organize events, so being on it at uni will become essential, almost as important as having an email address.
I always feel embarrassed when I find out something about my friends that I didn’t know about them in real life (particularly their relationships or what they’ve been doing) and always try to dodge the subject whenever I meet them thereafter.
You could split your groups of friends and acquaintances between different social networking platforms. I’ve just recently gone back to Bebo because I realized all my old school friends are on there, whereas none of them use FB.
As for being ultra-conservative and not posting anything in your profile: I always think it looks prissy and you might as well not be on FB at all if you’re not going to play the game and even post a picture of yourself.
I use to find it a ‘challenge’ managing / disguising my work / social / personal relationships online. I’ve found the whole Facebook phenomenon to be rather liberating to be honest.
There comes a point when you say - THIS IS ME, here’s what I get up to. Some things probably aren’t your scene, which is why I’ve never felt the need to talk with you offline about them.
Plus it’s a two way process. I’m finding out wonderful things about my ‘friends’ that are taking our offline relationships in a new, positive direction.
You know Facebook has reached a critical mass when your parents poke you. Even this management of ‘news’ from a distance has been liberating.
I’m not quite prepared yet though for the ‘S***** & A*** are attending a swingers party…’
[...] Terrific post about Facebook and how it throws up complex networks of prodigious sociability. http://meish.org/2007/08/16/facebook-and-the-perils-of-prodigious-sociability [...]
meg, have you seen the friend wheel application on facebook? you might be interested - i thought of this post when i saw it (but it doesn’t relate exactly)
[...] Facebook friend Kathryn Corrick, here’s a good post by Meg Pickard on the issues raised by Facebook’s one-size-fits-all definition of friend and [...]
[...] Facebook friend Kathryn Corrick, here’s a good post by Meg Pickard on the issues raised by Facebook’s one-size-fits-all definition of friend and the [...]
Hey Meg,
“observing someone out of your mutual context”
That is the key to unlocking the problem of address book bloat/contact clutter. Here at Naked we’ve been developing the idea of Open Messaging which I’ve been writing about on my blog Naked Yak.
Your diagrams are great, and remarkably similar to the development diagrams we’ve been through! As social networks evolve, the venn diagram in which we are the centre needs to change to represent closeness, with us at the base and different sized concentric circles coming out from us…
~biff~
I’m with Jason.
Meg, you could always treat Facebook as an exercise in letting go of the need to control what other people know or think about you. In reality you never had that control anyway - you just thought you had.
The thing about human nature is that if a piece of the picture is withheld from someone, they’ll colour it in for themselves, and you’ll have absolutely NO say in what they mentally put there. Wouldn’t it be better if it were based in reality…
How would it be if everyone around you only saw one Meg Pickard, rather than Meg the friend, Meg the colleague, Meg the family member, Meg the blogger etc.? How liberating would that be?
Very interesting analysis.
I think peeple need to be a little bit cautious and think carefully about how much they reveal. With the spread and interconnectivity of social networks (as you mention, FB linked to Flickr linked to Last.FM etc etc)there’s potentially a great deal of info about us out there, and the crucial point for me is that it’s a lot easier to put it out there than to get rid of it. It’s a new frontier and we don’t yet know fully where’s it going.
For myself, I just prefer to exclude my family name on these things. I’m not comfortable with my colleagues / the girl whose hand I once held on Midsummer Common / my bank manager being able to type my name in to google and see that I’m at home cos my Last FM is updating / what my girlfriend looks like / that I just blew 80 quid on Ebay on a new camera.
[...] the internet, my friends, (real ones, not those who purely are a ‘friend’ on Facebook, read Meg’s posting on this following a conversation over beers), and also specific people whos opinion I wanted on [...]
[...] Facebook and social relationshipsSee here. [...]
It’s probably to do with my years in journalism — I want to snoop on others but have my own butt protected ;) Hard to do both when you’re basically a blowhard, though!