On Facebook, your past stalks you like a vengeful ghost carrying a litany of your indiscretions written on (pick one: damaged car doors | overdue library books | your grandmother’s linen tablecloth) with (pick one: warm beer | bicycle chain grease | all-weather deck stain).
Your only escape routes are blocked by your present and your future. Your coworkers have decided to be Facebook friends, and so have a number of your business contacts. Every time a post on your wall starts with “Doooood…” or “Your Father and I were wondering…” you cringe at the thought that what comes next is visible to people you are hoping will see you as a professional genius well on the way to world domination.
If this is a fairly accurate description of how you feel about Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll prefer the granularity and control over interactions offered by Google+. (There’s also a chance you’re a psychopath, but we’ll get to that later.) The implications of preferring one social network to the other goes deeper than just the practical considerations of obscuring references to beer bongs from your boss. The differing approaches to how we control our information have societal implications.
Facebook throws a sop in the direction of granular privacy with its “Lists” feature. But doing this does nothing to control the visibility of the incoming content that others choose to associate with your identity. The truly dedicated can gain some measure of privacy control over this content, but unlike in Google+ these settings don’t relate to your lists, offering you instead abstracts like “friends,” “friends of friends,” etc.
All these additional steps and the confusion they engender appears to be by design. As danah boyd explains in her post “Facebook and ‘radical transparency’ (a rant)” Facebook’s foundational idea is complete openness. In support, she cites this Mark Zuckerberg quote from David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect:
You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
The designers of Google+ clearly disagree. On signing up for their service, the very first thing you are asked to do is drag icons of people in your Google contacts (assuming you have Google contacts) into one or more visual circles labelled “Friends,” “Family,” “Acquaintances” and “Following.” When others add you to their circles, you are given the option of adding them to your circles. When you share content, you have to make an explicit choice about who you are sharing with. Unlike Facebook where “everybody” is the default, Google+ asks you to stop and decide before you put up a post that will be visible to every one of your FBriends.
You can easily create more circle categories as you need them, but you can’t see what circles others have you in. Where Facebook tries to impose a “we’re all friends” view on our social interactions, Google+ supports as much nuance and ambiguity as we actually feel about human relationships in the real world. You may think someone has you in a circle called “Social Media Ninjas” when in reality they have you in “Echo Chamber of Self-Promoting Windbags.”
So, which approach actually does privacy right? Like everything else regarding privacy, that’s a very personal question.
boyd pursues an interesting argument, claiming Facebook’s confusing privacy settings can be harmful to those who don’t understand them:
Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.
She sees a class element at play in Facebook’s model:
Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun.
She calls out Robert Scoble’s post Much ado about privacy on Facebook (I wish Facebook were MORE open!!!) in which he says:
Yes, I know some of you have delusions of creating the equivalent of an exclusive dinner party, or, even, something bigger like a TED conference in your Facebook page.
I’m just so bored with all that talk. Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!
Me, count me out of this whole privacy thing. I want everything I do to be public and then I don’t have to spill thousands of words crying when Mark Zuckerberg takes my stuff and exposes it in a search engine.
I don’t necessarily disagree with boyd. But then I don’t disagree with Scoble either.
My Facebook profile sometimes seem a head-on train collision between a distant past as a teenage hanger-on in a punk-inspired art subculture, with all the attendant transgressive debauchery that implies, and a present as a father and media professional. Because I feel protected and stable in my present, I revel in letting it see my past.
I enjoy the apparent dissonance caused by being seen as a person with complex, seemingly contradictory aspects. Puncturing pretense was a big part of the punk ethos, and gleefully puncturing my own pretense is true to what I think is good for society. But then I’m clearly a member of boyd’s privileged class, and what’s good for me isn’t necessarily good for everyone.
Gizmodo recently hired the services of a company that offers Internet and Social Media background screening to investigate six of its employee’s fitness for their jobs. In the resulting article, I Flunked my Social Media Background Check. Will You?, writer Mat Honan describes the process and what factors in his past caused him to be the only one of the six to not pass. Hits against Honan included discussing drug use and photos of himself naked, albeit in a non-sexual context.
Scoble embraces Facebook transparency because he believes he has nothing to hide. I’ve embraced it as a form of performance medium in which I let people who know me in limited contexts see me in different ways than they might expect. Honan is quite literally letting it all hang out and cultivating something of a gonzo image that he draws on for his professional work. We are all privileged users, who are self-aware of how we control our images.
There are other privileged users who only want to use Facebook as a self-promotional tool. When Scoble talks about people wanting their Facebook Walls to be “an exclusive dinner party” these are the people he is talking about.
On Facebook, these image conscious users tightly control their personal information although their posts are almost always about themselves, even when the topic ostensibly is not. In one example that I’ve been struck by more than once, where many Facebook users might mark the death of a notable person by commenting on that person’s work, a highly image conscious user’s post might turn the topic to themselves by reminding the world of the time they met that person, or how something that person said influenced their career choice. Posts about matters of personal taste, such as music, movies or food, can likewise seem to exist solely to project the poster’s chosen image. They are stingy with the “like” and shy away from actual discussion, especially when those involving differing opinions.
In its current incarnation, Google+ seems custom-tailored for the image conscious. The controls on sharing favor intentional segmentation. I can certainly see the appeal in how it is easier to project targeted images of oneself to specific audiences.
Google+ makes it much easier for me to make sure I only share reminiscences of youthful mayhem with some people, and wordy analyses of the way we use social media with other people. I’ve enjoyed playing these two real aspects of myself off each other on Facebook, but would I really have bothered if Zuckerberg’s “radical transparency” hadn’t forced me to make decisions about how to handle my wildly disparate group of Facebook friends? While Facebook discourages users from limiting what they share, Google+ discourages users from sharing indiscriminately. In a twist on the old New Yorker cartoon, you could create a Google+ circle that knows you are a dog, while concealing the fact from all your other circles.
Google+ is to Facebook what Facebook was to MySpace. It’s where the smart kids with an advanced sense of themselves go, leaving the older social network to its increasingly déclassé users with their silly games and embarrassingly tacky self-revelations. And that’s a shame.
It’s a shame because Facebook pushes the image conscious in a direction that is more human, more democratic. boyd is right that Facebook can damage people who don’t know enough about what they are doing by exposing things they can’t afford to have exposed. But it can also expose something very useful about those who do know what they are doing: The fact they don’t want to be exposed.
Hypesters that promote social media as a transformative force in society, without wading into the messy fray of social media Facebook-style expose more about themselves than they think. The underlying tensions caused by actions not following words can be interpreted as fault lines of classism where pretenses of democracy grind against meritocratic self-regard, and privileged users feed on the sheep-like behaviors of the majority.
In the Google+ segmentation model where conversations are limited to target audiences, it will be harder to spot this “exposure via intentional concealment.” On other social media networks, someone whose entire output amounts to “I am a thought leader” can easily be spotted as having produced no actual thoughts. On Google+ there will always be the sense that these missing thoughts might actually exist inside a circle that you can’t enter because the doorman won’t unhook the velvet rope for the likes of you.
Getting fixated on exposure by concealment can be a slippery slope though. It’s similar to what author Jon Ronson described in the “How to spot a psychopath” excerpt from his latest book: If you look for aberrant behaviors you start to think you can see them everywhere.
But on the other hand, if it’s true that 1 in 100 people is psychopathic — bear in mind that we’re talking about your common everyday psychopath and not a crazed killer from a cheesy horror movie — and that the concentration is higher in business leaders, then might it not be likely that the concentration is higher in boyd’s privileged users as well? That little thing of turning a notable person’s death into a chance to talk about oneself? Hmmm…
It’s a stretch bordering on wacky conspiracy theory to think that each Facebook profile used primarily for self-aggrandizement is the result of an underlying abnormality the in user’s amygdala, the part of the brain suspected as the source of psychopathic personalities. But what if what’s actually going on is the fetishization and eventual normalization of psychopathic self-absorption because it is seen as a winning business strategy? Is it better to compartmentalize this behavior off in Google+ circles where it can be reinforced by like minded individuals, or keep it in Facebook feeds where the pretense might be punctured by friends or family that don’t buy into it?
Google+ looks to me like a winning product. It’s likely going to “MySpace” Facebook at least to the extent of capturing a large number of privileged users. It might even be the reason Facebook fades away into irrelevance sooner rather than later, if general users find it appealing. I certainly can see myself using Google+ more and more, and taking full advantage of the audience segmentation it offers for my own purposes.
But, while I’m by no means a fan of Facebook’s reputational risk to its users with the most to lose, I will miss it as a democratic leveler. The more the image conscious have to struggle to keep it all about them the better is is for the society America professes to be. I’ve enjoyed the times when my Facebook profile has facilitated interactions between friends from wildly different spheres and with wildly different perspectives. It’s like Scoble’s “exclusive dinner party” minus the exclusivity. When Facebook is at its best, everyone knows everyone else is a dog.
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