This essay is a response to
Facebook destroys real relationships.
Q. Is Facebook damaging to the ability of people to maintain social
relationships?
A. It depends
I think that every argument about
Facebook will, in fact, be
subjective, since I really don't know two people who use it in exactly
the same way or for the same purposes. However, I think this is
itself an argument
against the idea that "Facebook destroys
social relationships" (which, in a more well-specified form would
probably translate best as "The overwhelming majority of ways in which
Facebook is used are damaging to interpersonal relationships.") and
for
the counterargument "There are many ways of using Facebook that are
beneficial to interpersonal relationships." There are a handful
of universal features about the way Facebook is used that give it the
potential to do more good than harm when used wisely.
Moreover, Facebook would not
be popular if it were not
solving
a problem. It has created a whole
new paradigm of social
thinking, of course, which will naturally create
new problems (which
are then solved, and so on). But it would be unwise to ignore the
fact that
there was a problem before Facebook existed and it solved
it. The first problem it solved was this: modern urban life
(especially university life, where Facebook originated
requires
that one manage a larger group of contacts than the evolved human
social capacity is designed to handle. Keeping track of all the
faces and names that are attached to them, and their
relationships to
one another that one is and has always been expected to keep track of
is computationally
intractable for a human brain. (See
this study showing that urban social
network sizes are larger--rampant urbanization compounds the
problem.) Furthermore, when Facebook expanded beyond the
university setting, it solved another growing problem: in an
increasingly
interconnected world, more and more of one's contacts are
distant and more and more social
communities are formed whose only way
of interacting is on the internet. Restricting one's self to
"letter-form" personal communications such as email for managing these
internet-only social lives ends up being
more time-consuming
and
less inclusive. Restricting one's self to
"asynchronous conversation" communications such as
newsgroups and {forum|fora]
requires more effort from all parties because it is not an inherently
socially-aware medium, and forces social information recipients to mine
for that information on their own.
There are a number of other existing problems that Facebook provides
solutions for, but rather than getting into them, I will go on to the
point-by-point rebuttal:
Trivializing friendship and personal relationships
Summary: Facebook conflates "acquaintance" with "friendship," and so
people believe that they have a lot of friends because they have a lot
of acquaintances.
Rebuttal: There is a reason that the term "Facebook friend" has entered
the
American English dialects.
No one actually thinks that
being friends on Facebook means as much as being friends in meatspace.
Even though Facebook has chosen to use the word "friend" as a
metonym
for "social connection", even the Facebook system itself is aware of
the difference. Hence, the implementation of the "friend list"
feature, which allows you to categorize your contacts into groups and
control how much of your information each of those groups is allowed to
see. You can, at the time of adding a new contact, immediately place
them into any existing group. Personally, I use only two
categories: "Limited Profile" and unrestricted. Everyone that I
don't know closely goes in the "Limited Profile" category which heavily
restricts the information they can see about me. You can be sure
that far more of my Facebook friends fall into this category than the
unrestricted one.
Depersonalizing communication
Summary: Facebook users communicate with one another by
broadcasting to their entire social network, and the burden of mining
this information is placed on the person who wishes to learn about
it. This is not the way social communication is supposed to work.
Rebuttal: Facebook actually provides several modes of
communication. It provides forum-like communication modes in its
Groups system. It provides private messaging, which is just an
extension of the email/
SMS paradigm. It provides
BBS-like
communication with the "Wall" system: a bulletin board that is "owned"
by a person: it is found on their profile and contains messages that
are to that person but are intended to be
public. And
lastly, it contains the "update broadcast" mechanism which is referred
to as "status," and this is the messaging paradigm criticized by this
argument.
So Facebook contains four types of message: private conversations (PM),
public conversations (fora), broadcast commentary (status), and
targeted commentary (wall). This covers about all the ways in
which people can interact. Yet, Facebook is detrimental for only
one of these: broadcast commentary is somehow a detrimental form of
communication. Why?
Because it is addressed to "no one in particular" and therefore
contentless? Is TV contentless because it is addressed to no one
in particular? Are websites contentless because they are
addressed to no one in particular? This is a ridiculous argument.
Because people use it to convey information they should be using one of
the other paradigms for, such as PM? I know quite well that this is not
the case. I have yet to see anyone using
status updates as a
replacement for one-to-one communication. If this was the case,
then my news feed would be filled with updates containing information
only meaningful to specific people. But this isn't true.
Frequently, they contain information interesting to the entire world.
Is it because the burden
should be on the person with
information to share it with all their friends on a person-to-person
basis? This is ridiculous. This would be like saying that
one should write a personal letter to every invitee to a wedding.
If there are 300 people on your guest list, there just
isn't enough
time to do that. Hence, engaged couple do and always have
constructed a single message relevant to all potential guests, and then
broadcast that
message (the old-fashioned way).
Most likely, it's because the idea of broadcasting information about
one's private life is somehow an abomination, because most of one's
contacts aren't really interested in your private life. This is
true, and it was once a problem (as any new technology is bound to
have) but it is a problem that Facebook has already solved: based on
your activity, it
heuristically determines which people you are closest
to, and automatically
filters the information broadcast by those about
whom you do not care much. And if it makes a mistake, electing to
ignore all future updates from particular people is a single click
procedure. Note that this also solves the problem of putting the
burden on the recipient to
manually track and update information about
their network. Finally, every profile contains a history of major
changes in their networked social life, including all such broadcast
updates, so that if you find you need to "
catch up" (in the limited
internet social network sense of the term) with a person, you can do so
in just a few moments.
Creating the illusion of contact
Summary: Rather than actively staying in touch with close friends,
Facebook users passively follow their news feeds, believing that this
censored summary of their activities is all they need to know to "be in
touch" with that person.
Rebuttal: Along with the common understanding that Facebook friends are
really only acquaintances comes the common understanding that all
messages one finds on one's news feed are acquaintance-safe, and that
to truly be knowledgeable about someone's life, one must directly
engage with that person. Some people push the envelope and share
more private information than most with their extended network, but
show me a person that believes they are getting the whole story from
their
news feed, and I will show you a person who doesn't actually
have
any close friends (or is well below average on the
social intelligence
scale, which probably implies the former).
As for the rest of the world, they have blithely continued with their
normal
social lives, under no illusion whatsoever that they could possibly
replace it with an internet application. Really, this argument is
rather insulting to people in general.
Marginalizing non-users
Summary: Having a majority of a community's communication happen on
Facebook may make it much easier for that community to keep one another
updated in a timely manner, but it prevents those who are not on
Facebook from receiving those timely updates.
Rebuttal: This is a ridiculous argument. It would make sense if
it were true that a large portion of the communities that used Facebook
for their communications contained a large number of people without
internet access or who were somehow otherwise unable to access
Facebook, but that would preclude those communities from having been
able to thrive in a mostly-Facebook-communication setting in the first
place, so it can
never happen.
Moreover, Facebook is available to
everyone with an internet
connection.
So what this actually says is "those who stubbornly refuse to create a
Facebook account don't receive the benefits of having a Facebook
account." Let's put this in other terms: "folks without email
can't get email messages!" "folks without mailboxes can't get mail!"
"folks without phones can't get phone calls!" "folks without a web
browser can't get to our website!"
Pinning the blame for failing to invest the miniscule time it
takes to adopt the predominant communication technology of your
community
on that technology? That just makes zero sense.
Suggesting self-censorship
Summary: Users must censor the information about their lives they
publish on Facebook, thereby limiting the information that friends can
receive.
Rebuttal: Facebook provides ways of transmitting information to friends
without publishing, and they are frequently used to transmit the
"unpublishable bits." Honestly, providing a venue to learn the
benefits of
self-censorship is a valuable service that Facebook
provides. Everyone has to learn how much they can trust people
with in order to be able to manage the vagaries of real life politics
and rumor mills (which, you'll note, existed long before Facebook).
Promoting mass invasion of privacy
Summary: Facebook users face
peer pressure to publish as much of
their private information as possible, because it equates "being
social" and "sharing private information."
Rebuttal: First, this is patently untrue. Although Facebook is
about sharing, I have never seen a single instance of a message
directly encouraging someone to share more than they do, or declaim
them for not sharing enough. There is zero evidence in my
experience (as a Facebook user for the past six years) for peer
pressure of this sort. Secondly, the privacy controls now
actually work and are fairly powerful and discriminating. The
recommended privacy settings are fairly reasonable, as well.
Consuming large amounts of time
Summary: People spend a lot of time on Facebook and believe
that this is equivalent to "time spent socializing," while in fact,
they should be spending this time engaging in other sorts of
interpersonal interaction?
Rebuttal: This is a mostly valid complaint, but it is not
Facebook-specific and it is a manifestation of a deeper problem that
exists independently of any particular medium. There are many
people in the world who spend a lot of time doing things that, if they
spent them socializing with friends in a more tangible setting would
probably be more fulfilled or more socially developed as
individuals. There are people who spend all their time drinking
and watching TV. There are people who play so much
Starcraft that they
die of lack-of-sleep-induced heart attacks. It's a weighty
and prevalent problem.
The only Facebook-specific issue here is the assertion that time spent
on Facebook is not "time spent
socializing," whereas the users believe
it is. I reject this particular notion in the most general sense
while allowing that it may be true in specific cases. Some things
one can do on Facebook
are in the interests of maintaining an
active social life, and to the extent that time spent on Facebook is
spent doing these things, that time is "time spent socializing."
Conclusion
I reject the ability of a person to judge the benefit or harm of the
use of any tool just by observing the use of that tool by a
limited
number of people, and without first trying it themselves. To
anyone that believes that Facebook is detrimental to their ability to
socially interact but hasn't tested this belief, try the following
experiment (if you value science more than your stubborn, dogmatic beliefs): measure your level of interpersonal interaction with
your friends (in whichever way you like), join Facebook, use it for a
year in the way you believe that most users use it, and the measure
your level of interpersonal interaction with your friends again.
If you find that it isn't
about the same as it always was, then let me
know. I will be very surprised.