Competing Facebook Architectures

Newsweek's recent article got me thinking...

I still remember the slightly haunting image that greeted me the first time I signed on to Facebook. The ubiquitous literal face of the site (later I learned it was that of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg), filtered through a haze of binary code, gave off the creepy sense that one had entered a secret community maintained by omniscient hands. Facebook’s face has since disappeared from it’s webpages- perhaps many felt as uncomfortable about it as I did- as has some of the site’s mysterious aura. Now one of the hottest and most talked about Internet companies, the online social networking site is a common feature in the lives of many (dare I say most?) of its targeted core demographic, college students. And with the gradual inclusion of high school, company, and now citywide and regional networks (and soon to be multiple languages), it is beginning to take off with others as well.



However, the disappearance of the quirky logo symbolizes a much larger shift, one that has come under greater scrutiny of late as Facebook moves to position itself among other Internet behemoths, such as Google and YouTube. While some view these changes as merely an expansion, in reality the company is altering the underlying architecture of the system, a system that was originally developed to be specifically inclusive as well as exclusive. This shift, whether conscious or not, could threaten to disturb much of the original intent and attractiveness of the site. Only time will tell if the new direction will successfully cope with the consequences incurred.

It’s clear that the Internet revolution we have witnessed over the last decade and a half has had an incredible impact on how the world communicates. This is seen no less in the ways we utilize these new technologies to socialize. E-mail, weblogs, instant messaging, and social networking sites have all greatly increased the access we have to our friends, as well as introduced mediums through which new formulas for interaction have emerged. I remember distinctly how one of my closest college friends became involved with her eventual long-term boyfriend primarily through instant messaging conversations. Who’s to say what would (or wouldn’t) have happened if she had not had this specific mode of communication, at once intimate, informal and un-intimidating, by which she could develop a connection with her crush? As Facebook the company itself claims, the key to its success is building off social networks that exist in the real world. Mark Zuckerberg notes himself in his recent interview with Newsweek that he envisions his creation “not [as] a social-networking site but a ‘utility,’ a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections.”

Whatever one wants to call it, early on Facebook definitely attempted to conform to a notion of social boundaries, in this case dictated by the college stratum. This sort of architecture allowed for a continuation of the semipublic, semiprivate space in which users could interact freely within their comfortable social nest. The structure worked especially well for the founding college networks, Ivy League and other small, elite private schools that in many ways function as insulated, self-contained social groupings (at my school it was referred to as the Amherst “bubble”).

To be sure, Facebook didn’t merely imitate real social networks, it also influenced and altered them. By taking an existing grouping, that of a college campus, and increasing the transparency of it to its users, it deepened a sense of community within these networks. Facebook “groups” and “events” reflected an insider perspective, and stories and photos fodder for campus news and gossip. At the same time, in some cases the use of the online social-networking tool also maintained and even reinforced social barriers, as I myself realized when I tried to explain to my parents news that was old-hat to anyone with an account.

It’s unsurprising that the creators of Facebook would attempt to expand the network in light of the sensation it created. Indeed, key to the success of such sites is its use by the majority of one’s social network. Soon after its creation olleges across the country began pouring into the network, dozens a week. It’s rare to find a college nowadays that doesn’t have a Facebook presence. However, realizing the potential for growth outside its traditional market, as well as the pressure from both sides of the college-age demographic (both wannabe high schoolers and graduating pioneer Facebookers), Mark Zuckerberg & co. decided to take the network in a new direction. Opening up Facebook first to high schoolers, then companies, and finally to anyone with a valid e-mail address, Facebook suddenly became a much more populist endeavor. And while the initial expansions into high school and corporate networks maintained at some level the inclusive-exclusive feel of the site, in general the company’s policies and innovations have decidedly taken what could be called a Myspace-like route. In fact, it is hard not to surmise that Facebook has attempted to cash in on Myspace’s less hands-on strategy. Although it adamantly maintains control over layout, innovations such as developer tools reflect the growing impression of the need to give users more control (As a side note, this new language has also helped to ensure rapid innovation, a key to maintaining the interest of users. Users no longer having to rely on Facebook itself to create the next new fancy gadget, as a willing army of young college-age students and commercial marketers are chomping at the bit to attain fame or an extra dollar).

The dynamic between the Facebook classic and Myspace architectures essentially comes down to an emphasis on freedom versus security/comfort. With Myspace, the free-spirit of the Internet, embodied in the legality of HTML manipulation on profile pages (the heart and soul of online social networks), allows for a sense of individuality and expression that many crave, as is demonstrated by the shear popularity of the networking site. Facebook, while appealing to individuality, maintains a stricter sense of belonging and privileged access. This more rigid structure succeeds because it is built along real social boundaries, and thus reinforces communities with implicit links of trust. Facebook social networking is less about creating new networks than about deepening already existing networks, as Mark Zuckerberg himself admits in the recent Newsweek article. Myspace, by contrast, abounds with people searching out new professional contacts, consumer markets, or romantic interests.

There are prices to be paid for either type of network architecture. With the Facebook (classic) model, one must adhear to preset aesthetic and format standards, limiting expression. In addition, these networks also attempt to conform to real-life social boundaries, and thus have less flexibility than some would wish in a virtual utopia. However, the benefits of such a system can often outweigh the alternatives, as illustrated in the Myspace model. First, de-emphasis on networks debases their significance. Identities selected within a meaningful set of options, in this case college affiliations, mean more than comparing affiliations between schools, companies, cities and regions. Are the social networks of all but the largest university and a city even comparable? Another consequence is the increasing emptiness in communication. Spamming and commercialization devalue group forums, walls and event invitations (Facebook’s introduction of the News Feed was actually a clever means of maintaining the significance of information and communication transfer in the face of ballooning networks, but imagine the effect when the majority of feeds are advertisements and impersonal notes). A third issue is that less barriers to access means that more people can see how you interact, whether you want them to or not. The growing concern over employers’ use of Facebook highlights this problem.

These issues go beyond a sense of lost innocence in the network. If there is any doubt about the perceived difference between these two systems, one need not look further than the online protests that rocked Facebook in response to the decision to open up the site. Groups against the increased access abounded, with many threatening to discontinue use if the status quo was not maintained. In response, Facebook has taken great steps to increase options concerning access and distribution of information, which admittedly did much to calm discontented users. Still, this is only a partial solution since it doesn’t address the underlying reasons for a need for increased security. No longer contained within relatively trusted networks, the freedom of the Internet becomes a dangerously foggy place, where understanding over who does and doesn’t have access is clouded.

The interesting dilemma of Facebook’s evolution brings about paradoxical questions of elitism and hierarchy in these online networks: How to maintain the inclusiveness and community of a Facebook model while also encompassing a more individualistic, less exclusionary system similar to Myspace. It is a difficult question, but I believe one would do well to address it by going back to Zuckerberg’s claim about Facebook as a tool meant to facilitate existing networks. As Bowling Alone’s Robert Putnam notes, sites such as Facebook may be the most useful as a socializing ‘alloy’ that maintains strong links to real-world networks. Creating these distinctions, or at least creating room to define them, may be a way of reinforcing such real-world connections.

Saying all this, I’ll no doubt continue using my Facebook account to stay in touch with friends, to chat, snoop and gossip. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that I must make a decision about how I use Facebook: whether to connect with friends, update parents and older relatives, facilitate my professional/academic future, etc.. Of course some of this decision-making has already been done for me (Facebook’s popularity discourages posting every detail about my personal life in my photo albums for instance), but to an extent I still have some choice. It is difficult, however, for me to choose all of the above and have my account maintain its usefulness, since I can’t (or won’t) interact with friends and censor myself at the same time. I don’t know which path I will eventually choose, but rest assured, as it now stands it will be a decision I will have to make.

Live BBC Interview

I just came upon this BBC interview of a group of Congolese from the Katanga. It's interesting because it's a group interview conducted in real-time with questions coming in via the Internet from all over the world. Similarly to the much hyped YouTube US presidential debate, it brings a new perspective to the issue at hand, the then upcoming DRC national elections, by presenting questions not normally asked by reporters. However, I think the most significant aspect is the real interaction between interviewers and the interviewees. I liked the realization by the Congolese interviewees that they were able to address the entire world, and that the world was concerned with their problems. I'd like to set something up during my trip with locals and friends and family back home. It'd be a real kick to find out the similarities and differences between sides.

Wild Frontiers

A conversation with an old acquaintance earlier this week sparked a series of meditations on some strangely connected topics. We were talking about the “lawlessness” of the internet, with its disjointed structure and relative lack of overriding governance. Hackers, thieves, and disreputable people roam the web, making it a modern day wild (wild) west. The two features that truly popularized the internet, porn and ripped music, reveal how lawlessness has characterized the internet phenomenon since its popular beginnings.

Yet, how long will this last? Is the wild wild web, just like its 19th century predecessor, an ephemeral phenomenon? Even now issues of government oversight and internet neutrality seem to hint at the solidifying trajectory of the web. Governments such as China, Iran and Singapore seek authoritarian control over how the internet is used, and by whom. At the same time in the US and other capitalist countries regional and national internet service providers are lobbying for more control over access and marketability of the web. While these two efforts might have divergent goals and motives, they essentially signal the effort to control and manipulate this heretofore relatively open space (notwithstanding the obvious inherent private, elitest nature of access that cannot escape noting). I believe that there is still amazing potential for the internet to evolve into a tool that continues to help inform, educate, and facilitate socio-political equality. However, I fear that there is also the very real threat that this wild frontier will be destroyed by an overbearing urge to control.

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On a seemingly divergent note- but one that shares a similar theme- I recently finished Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, a revisionist historian’s (Dee Brown) look at the taming of the wild west from a Native American (or Native Indian, or just plain Indian, depending on who you are talking to) perspective. This book, first published in the 1970s, covers the American government’s conquest over the native peoples who originally inhabited this land. Proceeding both in chronological order and (roughly) by tribe, it is in essence the same story of greed-induced deceit, unimaginable cruelty, and devastating tragedy told in more than a dozen different contexts.



Putting aside the remarkably saddening picture the book paints of the interaction between whites and natives, an important lesson gleaned is the role socio-cultural perspective plays on interaction between different groups. In this story the idea of ownership and productivity play an incredibly important part in the conflict. These two pinnacles of capitalist idealogy serve as the backbone of misunderstanding between inhabitant and invader. From the native perspective, land was something that could not be bought or sold at any price. It did not belong to anyone in the sense that it could be bartered with or commodified. Inhabitants had a responsibility to the land, to ensure that it continued to sustain those who depended on it. This turned out to be a much more ecologically forward-looking perspective than that of the white settlers and government officials who came to dispossess these native inhabitants. What US government and white prospectors, farmers and merchants saw was the misuse of valuable natural resources by an ignorant group of people. Progress, the watchword of the 19th century industrialization era, dictated that land that wasn’t maximized for humans’ short-term benefits was ipso facto a waste. From the perspective of these Anglo invaders, the land’s bountiful resources were there to be exploited, and the land itself destined to be possessed, bought and sold.

Whites’ perspective on land and land use, along with their own greed for wealth, informed their opinions of the native tribes, who they saw as lazy, ignorant and undeserving of the land. The pressure to attain this land and properly utilize it necessitated the formulation of a doctrine, embodied in the 19th cenury idea of Manifest Destiny, which lent justification to the dispossession of Indian land by Anglos. The psychology needed to accompany these devastating and inhumane acts sprang from the differences in understanding of the relationship between civilization and nature. Hence, at the same time during which the worst of these atrocities were being committed by the US government, the development of the stereotype of Indian savagery also came into focus. This perspective can best be summed up in the words, later popularized, by US Army General Philip Sheriden to his Comanche prisoners: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” (Brown, 170. Interestingly, the idea of the “noble savage” only came about after this period when native tribes no longer posed any real threat and the memory of the “wild west” began to be romanticized by nostalgic whites).

The psychology of domination in the mid to late 19th century American West draws many similarities to imperial and colonial ideology exhibited by Europeans throughout much of the rest of the world at the same time. This was especially the case in Africa, where the conquest of the entire continent was taking place, and the introduction of Europeans and European culture was just beginning to impact indigenous tribes. In many ways, I believe Africa served as the European “wild west,” a vast expanse of “uninhabited” land, potentially rich in natural resources and needing only to be cleaned out and cleaned up. Religious conversion and salvation also played an important role in both conquests, and helped form the ideology of superiority needed to justify the conquest. Ultimately, the colonial psychology, much like the psychology of Manifest Destiny, eventually condoned incredible atrocity- today we would call it genocide- against native cultures, some of whom were driven to near extinction.

* * *

Looking back at the stories of 19th century imperial and colonial conquest helps bring perspective to today, where we continue to wrestle with issues of cross-cultural conflict. At the end of my diatribes I often ask myself where I fit into this picture. Am I working to deconstruct or perpetuate the present-day heirs of these ideologies, neo-imperialism and ethnocentrism? Does my well-intentioned belief in the positive power of technology and the internet merely mimic the well-intentioned beliefs of former religious and secular zealots who, through the imposition of their world views, destroyed the social and cultural fabric of many an unfortunate indigenous group? What am I doing but perpetuating Progress with a capital ‘P,’ facilitating the entry of previously unaffected people into a consumerist society, where their thoughts will be increasingly distorted by a degredated Euro/Ameri-centric capitalist frame. Do I want to perpetuate the tragedy of the American Indian, who have long exhibited the scars of forced assimilation and continue to be the foremost forgotten victims of American success? I believe there are some important differences, yet I acknowledge that there is a slippery slope when it comes to righting legacies of injustice in a modern world. Having a personal connection to the plight of the American Indian, and a significant interest in the search for post-colonial equality and justice, I find the crisscrossing of historical and sociological narratives that inform these situations distinctly interesting. Three different stories of wild frontiers- American, African and virtual- coalesce disjointedly in a disjointed world.