Why Facebook? Why Not? The Social Networking Divide

One of my friends just joined Facebook and was greeted with tons of posts that basically said the same thing: "what took you so long?" The criticism isn't altogether serious, but its probably rooted in some truth: maybe those of us who are surrounded by heavy internet users find it more "normal" for someone to join a social networking site than to not join. Normal is just a numbers issue. If 80% of your peers are doing something and you're not, then you're abnormal in that respect. Obviously, being normal isn't necessarily good or bad, but its something that people tend to be aware of on some level.

In my quest to find out whether it was normal to join a social networking site if you were 31 and from my hometown in Massachusetts, I noticed this funny little trend. About 1/3 of my high school class listed themselves on Facebook as part of the class of 94. I thought I'd check to see how many people per class were on Facebook for other years, expecting the number to go up the closer you got to this year (on account of millenials' affinity for all things digital). Instead, I found that the number stayed right about at 1/3 for the past 15 years, then started to drop off in the early 90's to about 1/5. it stays there for about a decade, until the early 80's when it goes down to 1/10. Surprisingly, there are people who graduated from our little high school in the 60's on Facebook! (didn't even know our school was around back then).

I'd suspect that as you go back further in time, people would be less apt to join b/c Facebook is primarily a young person's network (unlike, say, reunion.com which probably advertises on email sites which older people are more apt to use). But then what accounts for the plateau at 1/3 around the mid-90's? Maybe every group separates into two halves: the technologically outgoing and the technologically shy (which don't necessarily correlate to real-world outgoing/shy groups). Both groups seem to regard the other with a kind of contempt.

So there's roughly 2/3 that either doesn't want to be on Facebook or, like me, forgot to mark themselves as alumni. Is it people who are so "well off," socially, romantically, and professionally, that they don't feel the need to join this particular network? Conversely, they might be such big losers that they wouldn't show up at the online equivalent of a class reunion. Maybe they're just not into social technology.

It made me wonder: what are the motivations for joining Facebook? There's people who use it to network, usually related to dating or their occupation. There's "staying in touch with friends," though I'm dubious of this reason; email works just fine for that. There's some sort of nebulous desire to be with familiar people, some desire for company. There's the reunion factor, which I think is rooted in people's desire to compare themselves to one another, using the internet as a means of social surveillance, as a way of determining how normal they are, be it whether they're married, how well they've aged, what job they have, where they went to school, etc. Its not something we like to admit, so I don't think you'd find it in self-reported motivation surveys. But still, it might be driving people to use the sites (you could find out by tracking how much people scan the news feeds and how much they actually message one another).

I've been doing some work here in Washington on closing the digital divide. In terms of the degree in which it socializes people and helps them learn about the world, the internet is more like public school and less like television. I know a fair amount of people who don't watch TV, and I don't think of them as fundamentally different than me or anyone else I know. But people who don't use the internet? Though there are some socio-economic, ethnic, and age gaps, plenty of poor people are on the internet, plenty of old people are on the internet, plenty of rural people, urban people, all genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities are on the internet. So internet culture isn't white, wealthy, or hetero (not to the degree that TV and film culture is), and in the future it might not even be especially young. After the years and years I've spent immersed in online culture, I'm starting to think of non-users the way that I think about people who didn't go to school. 80% of the US is part of something that they're not part of.

Social network adoption numbers aren't even close to 80%, and I'd guess they are and will continue to be much more popular among younger people who are shaping their public identities. But adoption rates have gone up steadily in the past few years. What if the 1/3 plateau is temporary? No doubt if you were to take MySpace into account, it would be closer to a half, maybe more (also keeping in mind that some high schools might be more apt to adopt Facebook than MySpace). At any point will there be genuine social pressure to join a network? If you say that you're not on any of these networks, will people assume that you're paranoid about technology or have something to hide?

I'd say yes, keeping in mind that there's a significant difference between people who have minimal online presences (people who've used Facebook once in the last year) and those who have no online presence. Light users may not be interested in finding others, but they've put themselves out there so that others, if properly motivated, could find them. There will always be people who hate this or that social networking site, but to hate them all will be like hating every person on the planet. Even most misanthropes have a friend or two.