Gender, social networks, the rise of Pinterest

I've been hearing more and more about Pinterest: via my Facebook feed, via a field observation study of media use of undergraduate students. Curious, I checked it out and, to the extent that I could understand the function of the site without actually becoming a member, noted some similarities between Pinterest and social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and, to some extent, news and entertainment aggregation sites like Reddit. As I understand it, users post images and other users comment or "like" things or re-post them, thereby boosting their overall visibility.

What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.

So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?

Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).

I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.

The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.

Over-sharing, time dilution, and the weaponization of words

If there are classes on "how to use social media" that will be taught in secondary school, its likely that one of the topics will be the hazards of over-sharing. There's a common sentiment, typically expressed by digital immigrants like the New York Times' Timothy Egan, that young people share too much via social media. Many people seem baffled as to what the reward might be for telling people so much about your inner thoughts and feelings. Egan suggests, like many others, that this compulsion to share is driven by (and drives) the sharer's narcissism, though some research I'm working on right now with a colleague indicates that no such connection between narcissism and social media use exists. In fact, if there is any connection between tweeting and narcissism, its actually in the opposite direction than is suggested by Egan and Co.

What really concerns many digital immigrants are the consequences of over-sharing. Drunk status posts live forever in the digital archive of the internet, preserved word for word, undistorted by individual memory. Most conversations about this topic concern employment or election: one's past indiscretions come back to haunt those seeking work or public office. Its interesting how the conversations about reputation that only used to apply to celebrities and politicians and reality TV stars apply to all of us now. We can all be publicly disgraced and publicly redeemed.

The argument against sharing assumes that collective, disembodied digital cultural memory operates like the collective, disembodied pre-digital cultural memory and pre-digital individual memories. But I wonder if there might be some differences that aren't being accounted for. There might be a kind of dilution of the past going on. Perhaps each bit of information about the past matters less because there's simply so much of it. We judge gaffes the same way we judge everything else: on the extent to which they are rare. People also speculate that more information shrinks our attention span and with it the duration of the news cycle, so that people move from topic to topic quicker. We might move through the cycles of admonishment and forgiveness more quickly as well.

But maybe the critics of over-sharing are right. Maybe each person who has tweeted something stupid or left a stupid status update is instantly and permanently discredited by some for doing so. In a market where there are so many people out there who are equally accessible online, employers, voters, consumers of entertainment content, and even online daters can discard people for single infractions because there's always a comparable replacement who hasn't said anything stupid (yet). Dismiss anyone for tweeting something stupid and you'll be dismissing a lot of people, but maybe that's not such a problem when you've got so many people to choose from.

There's another way in which over-sharing might be changing the nature of conflict. If you tweet something potentially embarrassing and it lives forever, does that mean that everyone's words can be used as weapons by their enemies against them in the future, the way it happens with politicians now? This might just be the next frontier of human hostility: searching people's pasts and using what they've said as a point in an argument against them, context be damned. Maybe we could only forgive because we could forget, because our memory of ugly, hostile behavior softened with time. Now that we can't forget, now that every ugly, hostile remark is retained, we'll stay mad at people and never give them another chance. We've started to get cynical about politicians because they were the first to have every one of their moves recorded and re-broadcast out of context. Soon, when this happens to many of us, we'll become cynical about human nature.

Here, I must make a point similar to one I've made about privacy: digital social media gives people ammunition to hurt others, but it doesn't create the will to use it, nor does it assume that we can't make rules, laws, or norms that prohibit using past or private information against people.  The preservation of information doesn't necessarily mean that anyone will dig it up and broadcast it in the future. Someone has to care enough about finding the information to search for it and have some reason to defame another person. So maybe you can go on sharing as much as you'd like on twitter and facebook. Just don't get on anybody's bad side so that they will go to the trouble of digging up something stupid you'd said years ago and use it against you. And if they do, know how to fight back in the ways pioneered by the frontiersman of character assassination, the political operative: dig up something on your opponent or dismiss their efforts as "mud-slinging".

The outlandishly stupid tweets used by those making the over-sharing argument are rare and, so long as these "be careful what you post" stories are out there, liable to become rarer still. I just don't see people cutting back on sharing, despite the fact that the preservation of day-to-day sharing can make any heartfelt sentiment seem stupid when taken out of context. If people are pre-disposed to disliking a person, they'll take a questionable post from the past as evidence to support their dislike. It they are pre-disposed to liking the person, they'll shrug and say "so what if a person tweeted something embarrassing 5 years ago? Who cares?".

Many assume the words and pictures that preserve and transport our past acts have a certain power, but our view of just how powerful they can be is distorted by our experience with how they were used in the previous age. Before print, television, and film, these things were ethereal and hard to use against anyone or for advancing any agenda. During the broadcast era, they could be used to convince a great many people of a great many things. I imagine that many were initially inclined to the "sticks and stones" way of thinking about preserved, portable information. After some rough lessons, they came to see that the pen could be mightier than the sword. Underlying all of these shifts in the way words and images convey our pasts are conflicts and allegiances that revolve around scarce resources. The power of words to advance any individual or group's agenda depends on its permanence. The print era, with its centralized authority, taught us the power of words and images to shape our view of the past and of individuals and their reputations, but we shouldn't assume that words and images will be just as powerful when the power to create and distribute them was in the hands of the few.

A Perfectly Social World

There's an interesting window of time between when you've heard that something new and supposedly "game-changing" is about to happen and when know what it is, the moment before the unveiling. Once you find out, it usually disappoints, but before you hear about the reality, knowing that something big might be on the horizon gets you thinking about what's possible. I remember that happening in the months leading up to the release of the Segway scooter. We knew that an inventor with an incredible track record and lots of resources had secured some very interesting looking patents, but we didn't know if this thing would fly, how it would be powered, or how fast it would go.

It feels like a similar situation now with a supposed re-design of Facebook on the horizon. This article speculates that Facebook will put an emphasis on passive sharing: rather than signifying that you like something by clicking the "like" button or posting a link on your profile or on someone else's, you will just go about your web browsing and other people will see it (or, more likely, just the parts of it that you want seen). Let's just assume, for a moment, that Facebook does something like this.

The first gut reaction is that its too much of an invasion of privacy, and I'm sure people will write tons about this angle if this ends up happening. But its more interesting to think about why passive sharing might be appealing and what it might feel like to live in a world where more moments of every day are shared and social. So, start out by imagining there's a magical switch that is thrown each time you browse on something that you don't want certain people to know about. It filters out exactly the people you want to keep from knowing what you're doing and it does so without you needing to actually do anything. If this existed, what would be the appeal and effect of increased passive sharing?

As I read articles for my research, design experiments, read the NYTimes, watch ESPN, go to reddit, I have an inner monologue, sometimes an inner dialog, a kind of hypothetical conversation about what I'm reading or writing. Heavy posters on Facebook or twitter (or even heavy texters) have taken to transcribing this inner mono/dialog so that it can start a conversation, and they can do this at any place or time. But passive sharing doesn't necessarily initiate social interaction of any kind. It might act as a pretense for conversation ("I saw that you were reading that article I read yesterday. What did you think of it?") or we might just use it as a more finely tuned means of social comparison than just seeing what people actively post about themselves. You run out of new actively posted items to look at on Facebook pretty quickly, but I doubt you'd ever run out of passively shared activity of others to look at. Plus it seems like more of an "honest" look at how they really are, not just the happy, shiny selves they present in their pics.

Since I'm in dissertation mode right now, thinking about one theory and how everything fits (or doesn't fit) it, I'm thinking about this in terms of choice, value, and delaying gratification. You could always use Facebook and other social media (even a phone) to have a social experience, but for people to connect with you or even to see what you're doing, you had to take some initiative. The people taking initiative - the frequent posters, the tweeters, etc. - may not have been all that relevant to you, in terms of your mood or your pre-existing social connection to them. But what if you always had the option of having an interesting conversation with someone you wanted to converse with about something you wanted to converse about? If that option is sitting there in that little rectangle of light you're staring at right now, you would probably choose it over most other activities.

Its been said that we're social animals, that all humans need social interaction and that society grows from this. But all social interaction has been embedded in the rules and systems of culture and physical space. You were surrounded by people, but they were people whose personal lives you didn't care about all that much. Its interesting to think about a world in which you could always look over and see what your friend is doing and strike up a conversation about it.

The Two Facebooks

Facebook has changed the way that it presents updates of information about a user's friends, starting the familiar cycle of backlash and revision. Setting aside the inevitable grumpiness of many users who are averse to change, why did Facebook make these changes? How and why is it hoping to reshape the user experience?

As I posted before, Facebook's appeal depends to some extent on the "freshness" of the information presented in the feed. There's probably thousands of hours worth of "content" available on most people's Facebook pages. If I considered all the updates from all of my friends as the total information available on Facebook, I (like most people, I would assume) have seen very little of it. The value of each little bit of information about my friends depends on a few things: its recency (wouldn't I rather know what happened to my friends within the past few weeks than know what they were doing last year?) and its relevance to me. Facebook's privileging of the "top stories" over the "most recent" may be an attempt to get users to more relevant information.

They haven't taken away the "most recent" option. Instead, they've turned it into a ticker and put it on the side of the page. Really, they're just preventing users from opting out of seeing the information it deemed to be "top stories" by simply clicking on "most recent". Its interesting to consider the differences between the "most recent" and "top stories" experiences of Facebook. Its likely that people are more apt to merely read "most recent" news and not to actually post anything about it. Facebook has an interest in getting people to post and interact more and be less passive about the experience. That gets them more involved and attached to the application, more "embedded" in some sense. More interaction also gives Facebook more data on users. They can't track what you're looking at when you're scanning "most recent", but they can track posting patterns and use that data to make the "top stories" even more relevant, more satisfying, and better at keeping people on the site.

"Most recent" is really a way of using Facebook for social surveillance, not as a venue for interacting with close ones remotely (which is significantly more valuable a service). Some people may have become accustomed to using Facebook to see the news of people that they really wouldn't classify as close friends, even if Facebook gave them the chance to parse their friends into groups more easily. Maybe they were using it for downward social comparison or "stalking" people, and asking them to create a group of people they like to gawk at and not interact with breaks some sort of spell, makes people more aware of their inner voyeur. In this way, this particular user backlash might be about preserving the "mis-uses" of Facebook, not as a tool for better communication but as a way to look at people without being looked at.

The other privacy setting on your Facebook account

After attending another stimulating International Communication Conference, I've been thinking a bit more about the issue of privacy and everyday use of social media such as Facebook. Its one of those issues that seems to interest nearly everyone, not just theorists, but teachers, parents, even teenagers.

I have problems with the popular narrative that Privacy is a human right and that it is eroding or otherwise disappearing in the age of networked selves ( I fully articulate most of these in this earlier entry). To echo Ron Rice's argument in 'Artifacts and Paradoxes in New Media', I think we just assumed that the level of privacy we knew was somehow the natural state of things, and that we only tended to think about privacy when it was obviously breached, but not about how it was constructed with the help of older technologies in a certain way, to hide certain information from certain people. One example of many: having a private conversation required certain kinds of architecture: small rooms in big structures with sound-proof walls. I supposed these technologies kept some of the privacy we'd grown accustomed to when we weren't living in tightly packed urban centers. Still, it seems likely that, as individuals and as groups, we would have a strategic advantage to achieving our own ends and outwitting our competitors if we were able to trade information with allies while our enemies weren't able to overhear, and that this (along with the simultaneous drive to survey our environment for threats or resources) drives innovation in privacy enhancing and destroying technologies. While I'd agree that anyone totally robbed of privacy would be at a distinct disadvantage compared to those doing the robbing, and that this imbalance between those with and those without must privacy is to be avoided, talking about it like its a fundamental human right implies that it is somehow absolute or that, once upon a time, we actually had the ability to communicate with many others and keep those communications hidden from others, or that such a world could or should exist, which I don't buy.

The most compelling way to talk and write about technology and privacy would be to reveal the ways in which technologies unintentionally and subtly enhance or erode personal privacy. This got me thinking about Facebook. Most of the public debate over Facebook and privacy has been about its settings: how customizable they are, how easy they are to use. The mere existence of buttons that you click to change your level of privacy stops many users from thinking about other ways you can use the technology to alter your level of privacy. In particular, I'm thinking of the number of friends one chooses to have. As that number creeps up, the photos and the status updates you post gradually become more public and less private. The more gradually this happens, the harder it is to notice. It would be interesting to know the rate at which people acquire (or get rid of) friends on Facebook and if this rate is associated with how aware they are of their level of privacy and if that affects their behavior in any way.

More generally, this is about technologies of self-performance that allow us to set our privacy or "reach" at one point, letting us grow accustomed to one imagined audience. After we set the settings, we think "okay, I know who I'm performing to and I'll tailor my performance to that group", even though social media audiences are always changing in unpredictable ways. Even this blog and others like it are written with one imagined audience, but then that audience changes in ways that would be very difficult for the author to predict: encompassing people from various spheres of the performers' life.

As always, changing the technology can help us out of this bind. Maybe there could be a little graphic representation on every social media that let the author know what kinds of people were in the audience and how that was changing over time. It would take into account the current occupation and place on a professional network of each audience member (a color-coded "status" marker) and the social distance from you based on frequency of interactions between that person and other people you know. You could probably find that information if you really dug around for it (google insights and the like offer good data on web audiences), but what you need is something that is up in the face of the performer, just as it would be in the real world when you enter a room and start speaking. Technology will always change our levels of privacy. Instead of stopping it or trying to reverse it, the best we can do is to make it explicit.

Compared to Whom?

After finishing up another semester of GSI-ing a media effects class, I returned to considering what the effects of social media might be on its users. Of all the theories covered in the class, the one that seemed the most applicable to social media is social comparison theory. If comparing ourselves to others is something we do naturally in order to establish an identity and an idea of what constitutes normal behavior (especially when we're young adults and teens, which happens to be SNS's key demographic), what better tool could you create for comparing your self to others than Facebook? The questions, from a public/psychological/emotional health standpoint are: in what ways does FB present a distorted image of others, and could the ease with which one can compare one's self to others lead to increased time spent dwelling on how well or how poorly one measured up to one's peers?

I think one key variable to look at is how one uses the site. Do they spend more time looking at other people's pictures, comments, and friends, or do they participate by posting their own? What moods are they in when they go to FB? Some research indicates that people in high affect states tend to be social, talking with others, going to parties, while those who are in low affect states (though its not exactly equivalent to "bad mood," we might think of it as such for now) watch more TV. I could imagine going to FB in either state: when bored and in a bad mood, just to passively look at what others are doing, or when I'm excited to express something about my life.

Then there's whether or not you see FB as a place to "put your best face forward." Obviously, everyone does a bit of image tailoring when they post pictures of update their statuses, but some people seem more keen on impressing others (or inspiring jealousy?) with their images, while others display a more warts-and-all aesthetic. I would think there would be a tendency to assume that others use the site in roughly the same way you do: if you're a warts-and-all poster, you assume others are, too, and if their profiles are pretty much squeaky-clean, you assume their real lives are.

The reason why I think FB is so appealing for the social comparer in all of us is the ease with which we can see what other people very similar to us are doing with their lives, and we can see it evolve in real time in some sort of context. Of course, you can do this by observing your peers at work or at school. You can do it by tuning in to local gossip. You can do it by hearing/watching/reading stories (even if they're fiction, the fact that they ring true with a large audience tells you that they're depicting behavior, identities, and values that are, in some sense, normal; even more so w/ reality TV, probly). But the nice part of using FB to compare yourself to others is that you can't be seen while you're doing it. Also, these people are usually more similar to you than your work peers (though some of them might be your work peers). The lives of people you grew up with seems like a more natural thing to compare one's self to. These people, unlike people you meet later in life, had the same starting point as you.

In a way, this reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows: the Up Series. I always saw that show, which explicitly compared documentary footage of a few people who grew up together as they aged from 7 to 49 (so far), as one of the most useful tools for learning about what you can do with your life, why some people's lives turn out different than others, and why most people try to make themselves happy whether or not they live lives that are seen as "successful." It did what a lot of reality shows don't do: examine the criteria we use to compare ourselves to one another and show how it varies from person to person.

In some ways, Facebook is like a reality TV competition shows and the Up Series in that it presents an opportunity for social comparison. However, there is no narrative built into it to guide you to think about the nature of comparison, success, or happiness or guide you to decide who the winners and losers are and which one you happen to be at the moment (and how you might go about becoming more of a winner). My hunch is that it can accentuate any tendency you bring to it, the tendency to compare or the tendency to think about why and how we compare ourselves to one another.

Are Online Communities Sustainable? (or online relationships, for that matter)

Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.

Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.

Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.

Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.

But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.

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.

Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.

Corporate Image and Social Networks

I'm starting work on a larger project about the economics of online video, but before I delve into that, I thought I'd kick around a few ideas about its possible antecedents. I see online video as a combination of online social networking (which has roots in social network theory in general) and film/TV (so film theory of all types might be useful). Some users treat it like TV: passively watching hour after hour of viral vids or, if you're more creative, generating episodes of the webshow that you hope will launch your career in showbiz. Others use it as a way to interact with people, either by making videos or frequently commenting on others' videos. I'd suspect that most users use it as some combination of both.

Let's start with the social network side of things. I'm interested in why some social networks get popular and others don't. The allure of social networks, as I see it, is the ability to make contact with other users. The network host, be it Facebook, MySpace, Virtual Laguna Beach, or what have you, is just a venue that has some special characteristic (an incentive) that draws in some people. If those people are cool and plentiful enough, other people will come to socialize with them. Maybe that incentive is brand association. Maybe its some new way of interacting with people (an easy way to check up on what you're friends are doing, or a way of sharing photos or playing games with friends). Maybe the network is a hub for people to exchange valuable information about stuff like Yahoo.answers.

Social networks can make money in several ways. They can promote an existing product. If, say, Jergens were to have a forum on which members could discuss the finer points of makeup, the venue itself (along with plenty of banner ads, I'm sure) would act to promote the real-world product, and members would tolerate that as long as they were getting useful info and the pleasure of interaction with other members. Maybe Bud.tv is an example for the online video world: its centered around a product, the videos act as entertainment to get people there, and the socializing with other members keeps them there. Its not truly "user-generated," as the shows are produced in-house, but still, there's a community centered around a product.

Social networks could also sell adspace to all sorts of different products. When I think of video sties, I think of collegehumor.com, or YouTube for that matter. But more broadly, we could think of the current incarnation of Facebook or perhaps MySpace (though MySpace tends to advertise only the properties that its parent company, NewsCorp, produces). People come for the socializing, they stay for the advertising.

But here's the key distinction between a Bud.tv and a Facebook. One started out as an obvious attempt by a large corporation to sell its wares while the other started out as a small-scale ad-free social network designed to connect people. What I'm getting at is that the trend setters that advertisers covet probably won't go to a site that they see as corporate in order to socialize with other trend setters. They'll only go to small start-ups like the Facebook of 2004 or the YouTube of 2005. Facebook and YouTube needed some sort of innovation or entertainment to lure people there in the first place, but they don't have to overcome the "lame factor" that corporate sites like Bud.tv have to overcome. Bud.tv, or the hypothetical Jergen's forum, have to have an incentive that is that much more appealing to the public (specifically the trend-setters in each demographic) in order to lure them there.

So if you're a big corporation, you can either create some sort of appealing innovation or content to lure the trend-setters (and once they're there, try not to be too pushy about your product, less you scare them off), you can advertise on someone else's social networking site, OR you can acquire a fledgling social network. If you do this too early on in the life of the fledgling site, trend-setters will probably jump ship and your site will be sunk. But if you wait long enough, there will be so many people on the site and so much momentum that they won't jump ship just because the site is now owned by Viacom. You'd really have to fuck with the site to get enough people to leave to make a difference.

So the cycle goes like this:

• Some undergrad invents some new application and starts a site.
  
• Trend-setters flock to the site and start networking.
• Undergrad sells site to larger company, resulting in some attrition.
• Larger company sells ad space, makes millions.

There are an endless number of applications that could act as draws for those trend-setters. But I think whether you're an undergrad or NewsCorp, you've got to offer people some new way of interacting. You can't just give them content and expect a community to form around that, unless its ridiculously convoluted content that millions of people love to talk about (see Lost).

I really think that what people think of the companies that own and advertise on these sites will determine their success. Corporate image acts as a discount, meaning that users will go to the site with the coolest people, the most innovative applications, and the best content, but if any of those are really that much better than another site that isn't owned by NewsCorp, then they'll go to the other site. For this reason, big corporations can acquire social networks late in the game (MySpace) but they can't start them up.