Facebook as Big Brother

Facebook has morphed dramatically from their college and pre-college base.  Now only a quarter of users are 18-24 year olds (college and pre-college) and the fastest growth is coming from mature age groups.  The number of women Facebookers 55 and older, is up 175% in the past 5 months.   Facebook now stands at 175 million members.

Fortune magazine notes that the amount of time to reach 150 million users or sell 150 million units is shrinking dramatically.  Phones took 89 years, televisions took 38, cellphones took 14, iPods took 7 years and Facebook took only 5.  [Fortune doesn't focus on the fact that the population is larger now so getting to 150 million users or units is easier and that Facebook is aided by the fact that it is free, but it's impressive growth nonetheless.]

Facebookers spend 169 minutes a month on average (or almost 3 hours) on the site and this is increasing rapidly.   Fortune doesn’t present a graphic but I assume that there is a group of manic Facebook users that spend 3-5 hours a day on the site or more and some users who use it very rarely.  Facebook does acknowledge that less than 10% of users, although still a sizable 15 million folks, do update their status every day (and this is up almost 400% from last year while over the same period the number of users was up only 75%, so the growth wasn’t just coming from more users ).

Zuckerberg’s vision is to have Facebook be a “social utility” where “one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web “ David Pogue has an interesting story showing how this is starting to come true: a woman who found a wallet in a NY cab was able to track the wallet’s owner down on Facebook when she couldn’t through 411.

Discussing the social implications and privacy, Jeesi Hempel writes in Fortune:

“At times it may seem hard to reconcile Zuckerberg’s lofty aspirations for Facebook with the utterly commonplace content that users create on the site. Consider 25 Random Things, a new take on the chain letter that has grown so popular it was written up in the New York Times Style section. You list 25 supposedly random things about yourself and send the note on to 25 of your friends (who are supposed to do the same), but your randomness also ends up on display to any gawker who may be surfing your profile. The items range from the banal (No. 17: I never, ever, ever throw up. Like five times in my adult life) to the intimate (No. 2: I knew I was gay in the sixth grade but didn’t tell anyone until I was 19). The feature is high profile – some 37,500 lists sprang up in just two weeks – but taken as a whole it just seems like a lot of user-generated babble.  [Note: Slate had a recent post about how 25 Random Things spread in a style approximating a natural virus.]

“Yet it is that very babble that makes Facebook so valuable to marketers. Imagine if an advertiser had the ability to eavesdrop on every phone conversation you’ve ever had. In a way, that’s what all the wall posts, status updates, 25 Random Things, and picture tagging on Facebook amount to: a semipublic airing of stuff people are interested in doing, buying, and trying. Sure, you can send private messages using Facebook, and Zuckerberg eventually hopes to give you even more tools to tailor your profile so that the face you present to, say, your employer is very different from the way you look online to your college roommate. Just like in real life. But the running lists of online interactions on Facebook, known as feeds are what make Facebook different from other social networking sites – and they are precisely what make corporations salivate.”

Facebook users get to “curate their stream” – the flow of information about changes individuals have made to their Facebook page that goes to their social networks on the site. Individuals on Facebook have two feeds: a personal field that logs changes you have made to your own site (a photo, a status update, a video post) and a second feed that tracks all the

“interactions your friends are having (and alerts friends to updates you’ve made on your personal feed). If your brother RSVP’d to a dinner party, for example, you might be notified about it, even if you weren’t invited to attend. And if you change your profile photo, it may let your brother know. Like Facebook itself, the feeds are subject to the network effect: The more data you share and interact with, the more robust your news feed becomes….

The information that pops up is partly a result of controls you establish in your privacy settings and feedback you provide to Facebook. But Facebook also can track your behavior, and if the site notices you’re spending a lot of time on the fan page of a certain movie star, for example, it will send you more information about that celebrity.

Kind of Big Brother-ish, and a marketer’s wet dream. The irony is that despite the use of tracking this personal information to sell you things, users sense that they are not being watched because there is not that much advertising currently on Facebook. It’s almost like baiting a bear by getting it comfortable feeding nonchalantly at a location before one drops the trap. And on Facebook there is no retracting all the personal information that users have left on Facebook about how they know Jane, or their e-mail chatter with friends, or who is in their inner and outer circle based on number of shared friends or who they share their personal feeds with.  That’s all stored on Facebook servers somewhere deep within the enterprise.

The level of advertising may change as Facebook is under pressure to generate more revenue and may not even be breaking even currently, despite a market capitalization of between $3 billion and $15 billion, fueled by a sense of what all this traffic coupled with personal information might be worth. Moreover, Facebook even has learned things about what ads people resonate with by their “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” reaction to specific ads.

We may be six degrees of separation from anyone else in the world, but only only degree of separation from Big Brother wearing the mask of Facebook.

Facebook is walking a fine line as much of their market value will go up in smoke if they lose user trust.  It is for this reason that they put the new changes to a vote in which 30% of their user’s (or 60 million users) had to approve the changes.

Read other posts about the social implications of Facebook.

See New York Magazine’s, “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?” (4/5/09) (describing how Julius Harper’s group on Facebook, protesting Facebook’s privacy policies, swelled to almost 150,000 members

Read the interesting Fortune Cover Story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives“  by Jessi Hempel  (3/2/09)

Dentyne hopes social capital message sticks

Dentyne’s latest commercial “Make Face Time” strives to associate gum chewing with connections with friends.  While it’s hard to see the connection (other than the appeal of fresh-smelling breath), their commercial is a nice wry twist on the limits of online connections and the strength of face-to-face connections.  They refer to a friend whispering to another in a pool as “voicemail” and a couple kissing as a real “instant message!.”  [It also has nice background music of Coconut Records, the moonlighting project of actor Jason Schwartzman, singing "Summer Day".]

Dentyne’s web campaign also gives you 3:00 on their website and then tells you to go out and do something.  And on the website you can say goodbye to emoticons (in the Smiley Chamber of Doom), go to the Face Time Finder (to find good local places to connect with others), and make a “Face Time Request” to someone you want to see in person.  While we applaud Dentyne’s connection sentiment, is the Internet really required for this?  How about a phone call? And do we really want to give Dentyne access to some information about our personal networks?

Does following the e-lives of ‘friends’ build social capital?

An interesting piece in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times (9/7/08, “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You”) discusses the success of Facebook, Twitter, et al in getting users more comfortable with their personal details being shared with all their hundreds or thousands of friends and whether this “ambient awareness” actually produces social capital.

Clive Thompson describes how Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, realized that in order to drive usage, he had to make it easier for users to find out what their friends were doing.  Users, seeking to find juicy tidbits (like that a friend had been dumped and his status was changed back to single) on other friends’ pages “was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.” Zuckerberg decided to aggregate all the new information that friends had posted when you logged onto your Facebook page.  But Zuckerberg initially faced a revolution on the part of Facebook users who demanded privacy controls when he introduced NewsFeed: “…the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.”  Faced with skyrocketing number of petitioners asserting that Facebook was becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, Zuckerberg ultimately agreed to provide users with controls to limit who got these feeds but not to remove the NewsFeed.  Users realized that they liked the sense of connection with their friends that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And Thompson claims that Zuckerberg, who was intentionally pushing the envelope, made users ultimately more comfortable sharing this personal information with others.

Most of the article is about why we are addicted to getting this personal information about others (*ambient awareness*). Ambient awareness is “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for microblogging: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.”  Thompson observed that this builds on patterns observed by Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito who found that couples living apart often found renewed intimacy by Ping-Ponging mini-messages that there were on the sofa or having a glass of wine.

Thompson indicates that for many over 30 it seems inane to be interested in posting or monitoring these micro-blogs, often of banal events (having a sandwich, brushing one’s teeth, waiting for a subway).  Some users strive for the arty message in only 140 text characters. But users find the process addictive and meaningful: “Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these awareness tools, admit that at first they couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to do this. Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.  Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like ‘I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus’; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

“But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.”  Each entry seemed meaningless, but as the hours and days went by, Thompson indicates that the messages aggregated into a short story or a novel.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like ‘a type of E.S.P.,’ as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

” ‘It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,’ Haley went on to say. ‘I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.’ It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, ‘So, what have you been up to?’ because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.”

The real question it seems to me is to what extent this Twittering (posting and reading) is the equivalent of either mere voyeurism or people speaking into the wilderness (I have memories of a stranger who was once on a group bike ride trip with me in Canada. 80% of his comments were of the form ‘Having a little trail mix’ — comments seeking to establish some social ties with others, but coming out in self-focused banalities that were of little or no interest to anyone other than possibly the trail-mix eater).  But if the tracking of a friends’ rhythms really does make one better able to see when they have gotten sick or better able to build stronger friendships faster, my hats are off to them.  Myself, I think if I were monitoring 150 friends’ Twitterings a day, I’d be far less likely to understand whether someone was sick or have the time to provide TLC than if I actually called or e-mailed him or her.  Thompson’s anecdotes seem a mix of the two: folks who are following strangers’ Twitters but feel highly connected to them and ones who monitor their friends’ Twitterings.  I must admit that my priors are that the ’sense of connectedness’ to others that comes from feeling intimately connected to others may be good for happiness, but I’m much more skeptical that it provides social support, or job leads, or TLC.   What’s most promising is that Twittering does seem to support and increase the number of weak ties and weak ties can be especially helpful in connecting one to job leads. It would be interesting to learn more about whether Twitterers twitter the fact that they are unemployed and looking for job leads or ask for social support through their Twitters.  Most of the Twitterings appear to be mere updates rather than demands on others.  But in principle Twitter contacts might be good sources of job leads (connecting to divergent social networks) even if they are unlikely to be fertile sources of social support (which usually require stronger social bonds of trust).

Thompson acknowledges some of this:

”I outsource my entire life,” Laura Fitton said. ”I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” [by asking her circle of thousands of Twitter-followers] (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — ”My little secret,” she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in ”parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

”The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. ”I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. ”They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”

….Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr (a popular photo-sharing site), …suggested an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends’ updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person. ”At one point I realized I had a friend whose child I had seen, via photos on Flickr, grow from birth to 1 year old,” she said. ”I thought, I really should go meet her in person. But it was weird; I also felt that Flickr had satisfied that getting-to-know you satisfaction, so I didn’t feel the urgency. But then I was like, Oh, that’s not sufficient! I should go in person!”

Ironically, Thompson notes how Facebook can start to approximate life in a small town, where you find you can’t get away from the people you dislike or the past you want to leave behind.  He provides stories of Facebook users seeing old hideous pictures of them posted on their Facebook site and tagged with their name, or exes discussing what you were like publicly.  One social scientist wonders whether every misstep will follow you through life and whether kindergarteners will have to face active choices about de-friending others.

It’s a thoughtful and provocative read.  Read the interesting “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” (9/7/08, New York Times Sunday Magazine, p. 42, Clive Thompson).  The future of socializing is likely changing.  Let’s hope it is for the better or that we’re smart enough to make wise decisions about how to use it that leave us the master and not the slave to technology.

How teens manage privacy online

I’ve written previously about issues of privacy online and vulnerability. There is an interesting new Pew Internet report on how teens manage their privacy and identity online.

The Pew report (based on a nationally-representative phone survey conducted for Pew by Princeton Survey Research Associates of 935 teens 12-17 and a parent or guardian of each) concluded that: “Most teenagers are taking steps to protect themselves online from the most obvious areas of risk. The new survey shows that many youth actively manage their personal information as they perform a balancing act between keeping some important pieces of information confined to their network of trusted friends and, at the same time, participating in a new, exciting process of creating content for their profiles and making new friends. Most teens believe some information seems acceptable – even desirable – to share, while other information needs to be protected.”

“Still, the survey also suggests that today’s teens face potential risks associated with online life. Some 32% of online teenagers (and 43% of social-networking teens) have been contacted online by complete strangers and 17% of online teens (31% of social networking teens) have “friends” on their social network profile who they have never personally met.”

Here is a general statistical snapshot of how teens use social network sites and the way they handle their privacy on them:

• 55% of online teens have profiles online, but of them, 60% limit who can see their profiles in some way.
• Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face: “Among those whose profiles can be accessed by anyone online, 46% say they give at least a little and sometimes a good deal of false information on their profiles. Teens post fake information to protect themselves, but also to be playful or silly.”  That can successfully protect teens’ privacy, but also collectively helps contribute to lower levels of trust online that also undermine the effectiveness of the Internet as a medium for friendships.  As the cartoon says, no one knows you’re a dog on the Internet.
• Reaffirming that the Internet is most useful to maintain existing friendships, not make new ones, “[m]ost teens are using the networks to stay in touch with people they already know, either friends that they see a lot (91% of social networking teens have done this) or friends that they rarely see in person (82%).” Although surprisingly, “49% of social network users say they use the networks to make new friends.”
• Contact with strangers: “32% of online teens have been contacted by strangers online – this could be any kind of online contact, not necessarily contact through social network sites…..21% of teens who have been contacted by strangers have engaged an online stranger to find out more information about that person (that translates to 7% of all online teens).” And “23% of teens who have been contacted by a stranger online say they felt scared or uncomfortable because of the online encounter (that translates to 7% of all online teens).”

Read full Pew report.

Advertisers to mine Facebook personal info

I wrote earlier about advertisers mining the personal information users store on social networking sites here. 

Latest report in WSJ Facebook Gets Personal With Ad Targeting Plan (Vauhinin Vara, 8/23/07, p. B1) highlights Facebook’s latest plans to enable advertisers to capitalize on Facebook user’s personal information.  Plans are to launch this in Fall 2007 and rumors are that it will be akin to Google’s AdWords that lets companies buy keywords for searches and then place their advertisements when those words are searched.

Putting personal thoughts on a postcard and letting the whole world read it forever

Danah Boyd (PhD student at U. Cal., Berkley) points out why online social networks violate typical assumptions we have about friendships and friendship networks. See: ” Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?“.

The main reasons are: persistence; searchability; replicability; and invisible audiences.
1. Persistence. In most offline conversations, memories fade and the truth of what was said gets hazier. While having it in writing eases communication with others not currently present, it also ensures embarrassment when your words from your youth haunt you decades later.
2 Searchability. Danah Boyd notes that “My mother would’ve loved the ability to scream ‘Find!’ into the ether and determine where I was hanging out with my friends. She couldn’t, and I’m thankful. Today’s teens’ parents have found their hangouts with the flick of a few keystrokes.”

3 Replicability. Since content is easily copyable (that’s the main virtue of ‘digital communication.’), it’s hard to ascertain whether content observed is real or doctored (whether this is a conversation or a photo).
4 Invisible audiences. In real space, we have a good idea of who is or might be listening in on our conversation. Sometimes our expectations are violated in real space by someone sitting in the row behind us in a train or standing on the other side of work cubicle. But in what Boyd calls ‘mediated publics’, she writes that “not only are lurkers invisible, but persistence, searchability, and replicability introduce audiences that were never present at the time when the expression was created.”

And the fact that most people participating in social networks are often less guarding of their privacy, and often unawares of the permanence of their words and the invisible lurkers that may listen in on their postings now or years from now, makes the potential for harm all the greater.

[Thanks to SharonB of Mindtracks for alerting me to Danah Boyd's work.]

Picking pals via pickle likes and beliefs about ADD-food coloring link?

Wis.dm helps one find friends and dates through a combination of ‘nearest neighbor technology’ (see below)  and answers to questions like whether you like pickles, whether you think food coloring causes attention deficit disorder, whether you like jelly beans and whether you’re in the mile high club.  ["Nearest neighbor" technology is the same one that Netflix uses to recommend you new movies based on what you've liked in the past or Amazon uses to recommend other books you might want to buy from what you've bought.]

The technology can certainly find others on the site that have the same or similar patterns to your answers to an array of questions, but I’m more skeptical that these shared likes/dislikes/beliefs are enough to hold people together.  But maybe the fact that you share a like of jelly beans and dislike of pickles is enough to give you an excuse for why you should be friends and thus help you break the ice.  But the fact that many of the answers are trivial still leave enough mystery and difference to make the relationship work.  We’ll have to see how successful the wis.dm dates actually are.

The site developers also hope to form partnerships with media entities that want to use the wis.dm user base to answer product related questions (like do you like Reese’s pieces).  Obviously a temptation would be to then target ads, coupons, etc. to actual or potential users within the wis.dm user base.  Wis.dm might decide to sell the information to marketers;  see earlier post on how online entries are a boon for marketers.  [Wis.dm users at the moment are skeptical -- 68% think advertisting is just another form of propaganda.]

An article about wis.dm can be found in “New Social Website Tempts the Inquisitive” (Boston Globe, 6/11/07).

Social Networking Info Online: a Marketer’s Dream

 [see related post on Social Capital Blog called Surveiling Ourselves]

Excerpt from recent article on how marketers will be able to ouse blogging information:  “Bloggers beware: the number of groups looking to harvest information about who you are and who you know is rising.”

“While social networking sites like MySpace might predominantly be forums for teens to project their graphic exuberance, the growing web of personal electronic networks is emerging as a lucrative honey pot for business intelligence gatherers.”

Read full article “Groups Mine Web Social Networks for Info” in The Age (6/8/07)

Surveiling ourselves

There’s an interesting article in the Utne Reader describing how citizens unwittingly reveal lots of information about themselves, in Invading Our Own Privacy. Tell-all blogs, digital surveillance, online profiling: Who needs Big Brother? (May/June 2007,  David Schimke)

Schimke, for example, describes a new editor at an alternative progressive weekly alarmed and embarrassed when his fellow editors uncovered his MySpace page which described how he longed to meet Howard Stern.

The article describes some of the digital traces I described in an earlier blog entry (and this coda), such as cellphone GIS trackers, but also Internet “cookies” (revealing buying habits, political affiliations, and sexual proclivities).

The article points out that “On February 22, ClickZ.com reported that Fox Interactive Media, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns MySpace, had hired a high-tech ad firm to mine user profiles, blog posts, and bulletins to ‘allow for highly refined audience segmentation and contextual microtargeting . . . which might put it in more direct competition with the likes of Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.’”

The article also mentions a Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 12, 2007) piece that notes that “two professors at Drake University’s law school, worried that their students’ casual approach to digital correspondence could hinder their careers, started a class stressing online discretion. The lesson, according to one student, is simple: ‘If you are not comfortable with shouting your comments from a street corner, you probably shouldn’t convey them via electronic print.’”

Finally, the article also refers to a New York article “Say Anything” (2/21/07) on the digital exhibitionism of youth today, willing to reveal lots of personal information about themselves on blogs, through e-mails, etc.