The Facebook Era

These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect. Sherry Turkle

It was the week of the big Facebook IPO fizzle. It was also the week I read a review of Facebook research recently published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, (Vol 7, 203-220). Even erudite scientific journals are not immune from the Facebook Effect.

The authors summarize the results of 412 studies from a variety of peer-reviewed journals. They report that Facebook now has over 845,000,000 (that’s 845 million) users from countries throughout the world. In fact, 80% of the users (Facebookers?) live outside this country. While I am aware of the popularity of Facebook (who could not be?) I didn’t realize it passed Google in 2010 to become the most visited website in the US.

The authors ask us to assume the activity of all these people on Facebook has some degree of generality to social behavior in other situations. They also ask us to assume the information shown in a user’s Profile is accurate, in other words, truthful. I am not sure about either of these assumptions.

The average user is reported to have 130 friends but the distribution on this measure is highly skewed, such that 20% had fewer than 25 friends, 50% had over 100 friends (Do you have over actual 100 friends?) and a small number had over 5,000—the maximum number allowed. I was intrigued to learn that 92% of the users were connected by only four degrees of separation from other users.

The question posed by the authors that interested me most was “Why do people use Facebook?” It sure beats me.

The most common reason cited in the research is the “users desire to keep in touch with friends.” This isn’t much of a bombshell, is it? Surely we knew how to do this before Facebook arrived on the scene. The researchers distinguish between strong ties—actively communicating with a small group of friends—and weak ties—more passive following the news of other “friends.”

A small number of studies suggest that loneliness may motivate some users, although the research here is equivocal. Others mention they become Facebookers to relive boredom, a motivation that seems more plausible to me, in the sense that it becomes a diversion, a time out, or a break from working on an effortful task.

The authors wonder if Facebook profiles are accurate. I don’t know how they expect to ever arrive at clear answer to this question without actually interviewing the profiler in person. In my case, to be sure only one, my profile was written in jest and while I am a pretty bookish guy, I do not look like the photo on my page. Anyone who knows me would realize in flash that I was only being playful about other matters, as well.

A great many commentators have worried about how Facebook affects a user’s personal relationships and especially for young persons, to what extent it interferes with their education. In the absence of research, the authors address none of these questions. Here we must fall back on the many published speculations and the accounts of individuals we know.

Does Facebook represent a positive contribution to society? The answer to this simple question is also beyond the scope of the report, probably beyond the scope of any systematic research. To answer this question, we might wish to imagine how our life would be different if there never was a Facebook in the first place. Would other forms online exchange fill up the void? Or what did we do before Facebook? Can we get along now without it?

In discussing the impact of Facebook on modern life, the authors suggest it played a major role in facilitating the Egyptian uprising that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. They claim that during the two weeks before Mubarak’s resignation, with five million users in Egypt, “over 32,000 new groups and 14,000 new pages were created on Facebook in Egypt.”

We have heard similar reports about other protest movements in the Middle East and the Occupy Wall Movement in this country. Again we must ask ourselves if these movements would have occurred in the absence of Facebook. To answer this question all we need to do is look to history for examples of protests and revolutions long before the Facebook Era.

At the end of his article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” in this month’s Atlantic, Stephene Marche concludes: “What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.”

On Facebook

And why had he never had a friend as Jorge O’Kelly had been for Prado--A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death?
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

I don’t understand Facebook or Twitter or really texting either. It’s not that I’m opposed to them. Rather, I simply don’t get their appeal. Of course, many explanations have been proposed and I’ve not found anything too objectionable in these accounts. But what I don’t understand is the purpose, the goal, the raison d’etre of communicating this way.

It is said that their goal is connection, to connect with one friends make new ones, find out what’s going on with them. What a strange way to make contact with another person, sometimes hundreds of persons, many of whom you’ve never met or spoken with, or have the slightest idea who they are.

In her essay Generation Why? in the New York Review of Books (November 2010) Zadie Smith also asks,

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….”

Doesn’t anyone wonder about the nature of that connection, its quality, durability, the degree to which it is a genuine connection? Currently there are said to be over 750 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook on any given day. The average user is said to have 130 friends, although a “friend” of mine has over 850 friends, and two members of my family have well over 800. What does it mean to have over 800 friends anyway? Is this some kind of a contest to see how many friends we can accumulate?

How can anyone have that many friends? Why are we not discussing the value of this kind of friendship?

I pose these questions not because I was raised during the letter-writing era, followed by the telephone and now e-mailing or that I’m simply an old grouch. I find some of these new communication techniques and the Internet itself a bit of a miracle.

Do Facebook members think much about the quality their connections? As far as I can tell the exchanges that occur on its website seem silly, rather superficial and scarcely the stuff of what we mean, or used to mean, by a friendship.

“Yes.” “Haha, that’s very funny.” “What a beautiful couple.” “Great photos.” “We're hard core: waited 2 hrs for screen door brunch. After a super grueling aerial class this morning I was so hungry! But the summer veggie hash was so worth the wait!” “New Job, new puppy, new car, new desk, new computer, new year since birth--same old guy.” There are an enormous number of Likes and X is now friends with Y and lots of Yeses.

Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?

In response I suppose devoted Facebookers could always quote Charles Lamb who in a letter to Coleridge wrote about his how he felt about his long suffering sister: “’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

Eventually Smith closed her account at Facebook and writes: “The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too,… If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.”

This Revolution Was Tweeted

Last year Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker about the role of social media in generating protest movements. He argued they have always emerged without anything like the contemporary forms of social networking. The revolution will not be tweeted was the way he put it.

As is his wont, he provided an example or two in support of his argument, those that emerged well before the Facebooks and Twitters of modern day networking. Most of his discussion centered on the civil rights movement in the South that depended on well organized, well planned protests by a group of friends.

Glawell asserted these and other pre-Internet revolutions occurred “without e-mail, texting, Facebook or Twitter.” He goes on to say that, “What mattered more was an applicants degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.” Here he is following the views of the Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam whose research suggested that strong ties among the activists are critical to the success of any protest movement.

In contrast, Gladwell argued that social networks are characterized by weak ties. “Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch.” He believes that such weak ties do not give rise to high-risk activism.

Here, as in his other works, Gladwell over-generalizes from one or two cases to a much larger population of other ones. In this respect, he ignores counter examples, ignores the fact that not all revolutions, or activist movements occur for the same reasons.

He also does not take into account that today’s world is not the world of the sixties or revolutionary France where different factors played a role and where other reasons motivated individual behavior. Martin Luther King did not need what the people of Egypt needed and he didn’t have the tools the protesters have in Egypt either. Every social protest movement is different. In this respect, they are the same as any other natural phenomena.

What is the evidence about the events in Egypt? Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was recently imprisoned there for twelve days credits Facebook for starting the revolution that resulted in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. It was Ghonim who created a Facebook page in honor of Khaled Said, who was allegedly tortured and killed in 2010 by Egyptian policemen in Alexandria.

A comprehensive article about recent events in the Arab world by David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger in the February 13th issue of the Times takes issue with Gladwell’s claims about limits of social networks. They write that Facebook groups were “part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world.” The evidence they review leaves little doubt that Egyptian revolution was a well-organized, well-planned movement that took advantage of the enormous power of social networks. They were by no means limited by their purported weak ties.

We know that thousands of Egyptians were galvanized by it to join the revolt. As James Glanz and John Markoof put it in Wednesday’s Times, “Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons.” We know that the movement did not spring de novo from a few people on the street, that there was a small group or organizers who were instrumental in planning and organizing the protest in Tahrir Square and elsewhere now in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and Libya.

We also know that shutting down the Internet and access to Twitter and Facebook was one of the first steps taken by the Egyptian government to quash the revolt. And we know that similar steps are now being undertaken in other Arab countries where the protests are gathering momentum.

In the light of recent events in the Middle East I thought that Gladwell would at least qualify his views. No, he hasn’t. Earlier this month he reaffirmed them in a short note at the New Yorker online News Desk saying that “the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Ah, the wonders of the confirmation bias.

To be sure individuals who have for years experienced oppression and whose rights have been abrogated will find ways to communicate with one another. But that rarely leads them to revolt. The tools that make revolutions possible are just as necessary as the reasons that motivate them. In fact, the tools of social networking may, in the final analysis, lead to the restoration of human rights at a much greater pace that has historically been the case.

Note: On Wednesday’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter. He spoke about the role the online service played in the Egyptian protest and how its leaders had been using Twitter as early as 2008.

500 Million Members

Facebook: You can’t avoid it. Zuckerberg here, Zuckerberg there, the IPO (Will he or won’t he?), the movie, the profile in the New Yorker, the book (The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich) and no doubt another book or two in the works.

What is it all about? I am on Facebook. I don’t know why. No one ever seeks my friendship. I rarely seek the friendship of anyone or say very little about myself. Most of it is fabricated anyway. I even have my face there. That is a mistake. No wonder no one wants to be my friend

Once I tried to befriend a person, if that is what you call it I found on the site. I did so only because she had written to me about a book I wrote: “Your book was an inspiration.”

I never received a reply. That seemed odd. She is no longer a public presence there. Already we have had our first argument.

Why would anyone want to talk, if that is what you call it, on this site? How can you make these exchanges so public? The discourse is moronic anyway. Why not sent an e-mail, write a letter, or make a telephone call? If you’re not good for more than a word or two, text the person.

Zuckerberg is reported to be a strange one in the New Yorker (9/20/10) profile by Jose Vargas. “…a wary and private person…. mixture of shy and cocky… he can come off as flip and condescending … backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive.” Yes, perhaps a bit disdainful, autocratic, secretive, but extraordinarily successful. Is that what it takes?

Zuckerberg’s story is a familiar one, especially if you have read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s account of the reasons some individuals become enormously successful in their field. According to Vargas, like so many digital wizards, Zuckerberg was a computer prodigy as a kid, played computer games, and early on began to tinker with coding. When he was about eleven, his parents hired a computer tutor and not long after Zuckerberg began taking evening computer courses at a nearby college.

Soon after he became a freshman at Harvard, he built a CourseMatch, a program that enabled students to decide which classes to take and another, Facemash, that Vargas characterizes as a kind of “sexual-playoff system” that was promptly shutdown by the administration.

And then as Vargas describes it, “Afterward , three upperclassmen …approached Zuckerberg for assistance with a site that they had been working on, called Harvard Connection.” Apparently Zuckerberg worked with them a while “but he soon abandoned their project in order to build his own site, which he eventually labeled Facebook.” The site, originally a social network for Harvard students, soon thereafter expanded to other colleges, became an instant hit, whereupon Zukerberg dropped out of Harvard (as Gates did and as Jobs did from Reed) to run it. The rest is well known.

I am less interested in Zuckerberg the person or the current controversies over Facebook’s privacy policies than I am in the conditions that led him to formulate the Facebook concept, create its software, and then apply it with such success to the Web. In Outliers Gladwell formulates a five-factor theory of success: talent, hard work, opportunity, timing and luck.

Obviously Zukerberg had a great deal of natural savvy about computers and knack for coding. Equally clear, he spent hours and hours, perhaps Gladwell’s magical 10,000 hours, developing his computer software skills. He parents gave him every opportunity, hired a tutor and provided a first-rate education.

As for timing, one really never can be sure when an idea will take hold but by the time Facebook was launched, the Web had become a very fertile ground for match making and, as a friend put it to me recently, "mischief-making." And then luck is such a vague term. Of course, Zuckerberg was lucky. No one becomes an extraordinarily successful person without a good deal of luck. So that factor, along with timing, is of little value in predicting success and even less useful in fostering it.

Still there is the lingering unknown of whether or not the idea and execution of Facebook was based (“stolen”) upon the work of the upperclassmen who had approached Zuckerberg for assistance with their own highly similar site. Two of the three are appealing for more than the previous sixty-five million dollar settlement with Facebook and the case is currently under review.

However, the settlement was a financial one that leaves unanswered the question of who was really responsible for the Facebook concept. I suppose one can never really know these things anyway and in the words of a young German writer I cited in an earlier post on where ideas come from, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,”