The Facebook Generation

A distant relative visited me during Christmas. We talked about many things, including the printed newsletters some families send with their Christmas cards. "Women send those," he said. "You know, the ones that say how great their family is and all the exotic places they've traveled to? It's all about status and showing off to their friends. 'My family is better than your family.'"

"I send out a monthly email to tell friends and family what's going on," I said. "I talk about the struggles as much or more than other things. Those things are more meaningful."

"It's a fine line to walk," he replied. "I've been asked several times to join Facebook but I've always declined. Women on Facebook have a hissy fit with one of their friends and they drop them as a friend. A few months later, when it's all forgotten, they sign them up again."

"Like the Christmas newsletters, most of the postings are useless...There's nothing meaningful, no meaningful relationships."

In "The Faces of Facebook" (The Lone Coder, January 2008), I talked about how the need for acceptance drove people to this "social networking" (Social Network, Wikipedia) site while studies showed that Facebook users were exploited by bosses, scams, and worse. While trying to be popular, people were harming themselves by giving up too much private information.

Several acquaintances suggested that I didn't give Facebook a fair chance. I created a Facebook account as an experiment to examine Facebook more closely. However, I wanted to use my account effectively. In "Capitalism: A Love Story", Michael Moore asked what our society will be remembered for. He suggested videos of cats flushing toilets, an example of how North Americans didn't recognize value and wasted their opportunities. I didn't want to waste my opportunities so I considered the needs of readers and chose a set of rules for how I would use Facebook:

• I would accept all requests for readers ("friends", even from people I despised). As far as I was able, I would ban no one. If people wanted to see my posts, I would let them. They could join in discussion. They would be free to leave if they wanted to.
• I would, each day, post information that is useful and relevant to others, such as quotations from the software engineering books I had been reading. These posts would engage people in meaningful ways or improve their lives.
• When posting about my personal activities, I would only post news about completed activities. I would be accurate and realistic about what I told others and would not seek approval to do things.

I recognized that I was not using Facebook in the way that many people use it. I was attempting actual social relationships. In the last month of my investigation, I made 41 posts. These are some of my observations:

1. Facebook hampers communication. Typing is a time-consuming, isolated, misunderstanding-prone activity when compared to face-to-face dialog. Facebook allows comments or has a "like" button to quickly inform people that you read and agreed with a posting. Of my 41 posts, only 12% had a meaningful reply or a "like". If only 12% of my readers were engaging in a two-way communication, then Facebook was an 88% failure as a communication tool.
2. Facebook makes discussion difficult. The piecemeal snippets and sporadic postings like white noise inhibits conversation clarity and makes it difficult to express opposing viewpoints. Facebook spam further breaks up discussion. Of my 41 posts, every discussion stopped after at most one reply.
3. Facebook did not make it easier to follow the activity of friends. Conversation was inhibited by the large number of unrelated postings from even a modest number of readers. There are no threads of conversation, making it difficult to sort and prioritize all the information meaningfully. Posts like "The doctor says I need more tests" are easy to overlook, leave the reader wondering what the original condition was, and do not make it clear how the reader can be involved or find out.
4. Facebook is inaccurate. It is difficult to prepare, edit or correct posts. The user interface changed twice during my investigation. Several times I would submit a post and it would not appear in my newsfeed and page status. Others also noticed this problem on Facebook. Did friends see a post? Was it a software glitch? The message size limit made it impossible to form a complete thought: an introductory sentence, a list of facts, and a concluding remark. All of these things promote misunderstandings.

Towards the end of the experiment, I tried breaking my rules a bit to see if it made any difference. I posted some humourous videos then tried crossposting my Pegasoft General mailing list Linux news items to Facebook. To my surprise, these didn't make much of a difference in the reader interaction.

Perhaps, then, Facebook was not about interaction with people. Maybe it was about posting facts about what a person is doing. Someone made this observation to me: if you see a posting about a baby taking its first steps, it's not the same as calling the parents or being there when it happens. A person may announce a personal tragedy but few friends will post a reply and fewer still will leave their chair and go visit that person. Facebook broadcasts short announcements but it is not the same as interacting in people's lives. Interaction is an intellectual activity and Facebook does not increase a person's thinking time to use in relationships.

A national study from SDSU showed that 57% of young people use Facebook for self-promotion, attention seeking and narcissism. ("Social Media Is for Narcissists", Mashable Aug 2009).

"'We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others,' said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell...Narcissism is a trait of particular interest, Campbell said, because it hampers the ability to form healthy, long-term relationships. 'Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage,' Campbell said. 'They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run.' ("Facebook profiles can be used to detect narcissism", Physorg.Com Sept 2008) Campbell also pointed out that this doesn't guarantee that Facebook attracts narcissists, but they tend to develop large friends networks (because of their need to be the center of attention) so that they dominate posting traffic (hence the Solomon quote at the start of this article).

Narcissistic people have no need for socializing or dialogue. I spoke with a worker with teenage girls recently who said that she is overwhelmed with hundreds melodramatic text messages a day from girls involved "teen drama", girls blowing things out of proportion to be tragic stars, the center of attention in their own peer groups. As more young adults focus on social acceptance sites over blogging sites ("Bloggin Is Out, Facebook Is In, Study Finds", PC World Feb 2010), it may be that people are losing the practice and skills to write essays, think logically and clearly, to have compassion and invest in the lives of others, to have a good attention span, to accept and learn from their mistakes or to have meaningful two-way discussions. ("Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier", PBS Frontline).

The Journal of Computer-Media Communication published a more positive view of Facebook relationships. "[Social Networks] help maintain relations as people move from one offline community to another. It may facilitate the same when students graduate from college, with alumni keeping their school email address and using Facebook to stay in touch with the college community. Such connections could have strong payoffs in terms of jobs, internships, and other opportunities. Colleges may want to explore ways to encourage this sort of usage. (The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites, Journal of Computer-Media Communication 2007). The key word here is "may". Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook was not designed around job hunting. None of the posts I received from my readers had any bearing on job hunting or maintaining contact information. Some companies have policies that prohibit or restrict such job hunting discussion. As I wrote in my previous article on Facebook, social networking sites can harm your career. If the JCMC is proposing a blank Facebook page as kind of a contact forwarding tool so people can find your current email address, does that really count as social networking?

Facebook may also serve as a news feed for important causes or interests, like subscribing to pages for upcoming plays or music events. This is a news service, not social networking service and the same information is available from mailing lists, RSS news feeds, and other non-Facebook sources.

People with mobility or communication problems aside, Facebook remained, in my opinion, not a social networking tool but a tool for social acceptance that actually made it harder to have meaningful relationships. A person can post a fact about themselves, seldom receiving replies, the post lacking context, accuracy and detail and seldom for the benefit of others. At best, it's a tool for speading impersonal jokes or news clips, things that had no social interactivity attached to them.

As a relationship tool, perhaps the most telling example was (as I recall) an issue of Wired magazine where the author of an article remarked that a person had died—the ultimate non-relationship—but their Facebook page lived on like an errie ghost. It was interaction with someone who no did not exist anymore at the other end of the keyboard. It was an illusion that someone listened to your posts.

I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn. This is an area of intense study by sociologists. However, according to one study, men were predominantly conformists in the 1950's. By the 1970's, virtually no men were conformists. ("Gender and Grace", Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, 1990). Social interactions change. Perhaps Facebook can be viewed as a barometer of how we value human relationships: technology, in general, has increasingly separated people from one another. We have high-stress, competitive work environments. Our lack of contentment for what we have. The inherent dishonesty about our existence. A colleague from South America once remarked that in his home country the doorbell can ring at 2 am with a bunch of friends wanting to hang out at a jazz club. In Canada, you have to schedule a visit with friends, sometimes weeks ahead of time. Canadians were busy watching videos of cats flushing toilets but they weren't investing time in the people around them.

Perhaps it's not Facebook's limitation that's the main problem, but North American values, choosing virtual relationships and the illusion of interaction over human contact because it gives us something we lack in the cold, real world: to imagine ourselves standing in the spotlight.

February 25, 2010