greenpoint design

Facebook and the Fleeting Crowd

Trendmongers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have noticed a funny smell at Facebook lately — the unique odor given off by the death of an expired fad. Virginia Heffernan’s piece in the NYT Magazine, Facebook Exodus, put it most succinctly: “Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?”

It wouldn’t be the first time a world-uniting social network was reduced to a footnote in the annals of internet history (remember Friendster or Dodgeball?). Creating something as ephemeral and fragile as a community can be a tricky thing. Putting a value on that social grouping is even more difficult.

Depending on who you talked to, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal of a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo in 2006 was either a stroke of genius, or an act of incredible hubris by a kid who didn’t know any better. A June 2009 article in Wired, The Great Wall of Facebook, made much of the potential revenues of the network with 200 million registered users, but also noted that Facebook burned through an estimated $75 million in 2008, not including the capital it took in from investors like Microsoft and Digital Sky Technologies. The actual worth of the privately held company has left many analysts guessing, as noted in Facebook is Worth … What, Exactly?

In the real world, community is usually defined as a group of people living in the same place or sharing common interests. Online, common interests typically supplant location.  Other characteristics of a sustainable online community are:

• It fulfills a need for information or support; it must sustain interest
• It fosters interaction and dialog
• It allows users to control their own self-representation, or identity, through profiles or other means
• It has some moderation or self-regulation
• Some would also add that a successful community must have a purpose; it must reward the time put into it.

Arguably, Facebook has all of the elements of a successful online community. In its first draft, Facebook was tied to the real-world community of the Harvard campus, a group with shared interests and extensive offline interactions. As it expanded off campus, Facebook added great functionality, making it really easy for anybody to set up a personal web page and share photos and stories with their friends. Giving users the ability to accept or deny friend requests also promoted a sense of control and self-management over one’s social sphere (even while forcing some awkward choices).

So what has gone wrong at Facebook? Maybe it’s a victim of its own popularity. Clay Shirky in Communities, Audience and Scale (2002) makes the point that when communities grow beyond a small group in which most members know each other, they become audiences. This would account for some of the creep-factor felt by Facebookers today: the most active members seem to be performing their lives instead of actually living them.

Or maybe Facebook no longer provides much useful information. Maybe your extended circle of friends isn’t interested in what you had for breakfast, the fact that you’re hungover, or that the Quentin Tarantino character you most resemble is Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

Perhaps Facebook fails on the point of purpose: it just doesn’t reward the time you put into it. Or it could be just the fickle nature of online attention: Facebook has lost its cachet and the digerati have moved on.

Pre-emptive Recycling

A big part of information management is filtering out the crap you don’t need. This morning, NPR’s excellent Marketplace program mentioned an IM tool whose time has come: Catalog Choice.

Catalog Choice is a way to opt out of many of the catalogs that are crammed into your mailbox each day. Each year some 19 billion catalogs are mailed to Americans. And each year 18.9 billion of us chuck them straight into the recycling bin. That’s a lot of wasted paper, time and energy. Catalog Choice gives consumers the option to say “no thanks” in advance.

Unlike the National Do Not Call Registry, which is maintained by the FTC, Catalog Choice is a private non-profit venture. The project is funded by the Overbrook Foundation , the Merck Family Fund and the Kendeda Foundation. The well conceived and easy-to-use site design was done by Makalu Media.

Privacy, Liberty and the Transaction Economy

Some elaboration is required on two items in the last post. By suggesting that anonymous e-mail and handwritten signatures be retired as old and useless technologies, I am not saying they should be outlawed or forbidden. There is a place for anonymous communication and everyone has a right to protect their privacy to the extent that they see fit. However, in today’s machine-mediated, transaction-based economy, participants must validate their identity or lose trust and risk being shut out of many exchanges.

If I buy a pair of sunglasses from a man who has set up a table on a street corner, I do not need to know the man’s name, or even the provenance of the sunnies. I can try on the sunglasses, assess the fit and judge for myself if the lenses are adequate. Then, if I am satisfied with the sunglasses, I hand the man $5 and the transaction is complete.

That exchange would not happen on the net. If I wanted a pair of discount sunnies, I’d check established retailers first — companies that had been in business a few years and had built a reputation for fair dealing. If I wanted a better discount I might go to ebay, but I’d take a close look at the sunglass vendor’s trust ratings and the number of transactions he had done. Likewise, the seller would require assurance that I was paying with real currency. That identity check would be performed by a credit clearinghouse like PayPal or Visa. Without a mutual verification of identity and reputation, that transaction would not happen.

The distinction that needs to be made here is between voluntary and involuntary identification. In arguing for better identification technology I am advocating a safer marketplace where transactions flow more easily — a space where I choose to yield some of my information in order to participate in certain transactions. However, better identification technology also increases the chances that my identity will be taken from me involuntarily.

Last week I had some business in a Midtown office building. In addition to the usual security checks that have become so common in post-911 New York, I was asked for my photograph. The digital photo that the security guard took was printed on a sticky-backed paper ID badge along with my name, which became my day pass to the building. I submitted to that rigamarole because I had business transact there. Although, one has to wonder how long that information will stay in the building’s database or if it will migrate to other information repositories (the persistence of information will have to be a topic for another post).

Not everyone is so compliant. Three years ago Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben famously declined to come to the United States to lecture because he refused to submit to the identity checks performed at our borders. Similarly, Michel Foucault made a career railing against bio-politics and surveillance, most notably in the Discipline and Punish. The notion that our personal information is no longer our own has even filtered into the popular culture with movies like Minority Report, which had the chilling tagline “You can’t hide. Get ready to run.”

These are legitimate concerns and they should not be overlooked. By the same token, it’s foolish to wish away technology that already exists. The tools themselves — retinal scans, biometrics, integrated databases — are value-neutral; they either work or they don’t. It is the application of the information these tools gather that posits moral questions.

As a member of modern society, working in information design, I can’t realistically opt out of the networked marketplace. I can, however, demand control over the information that pertains to me, especially ambient information that is not strictly transaction-based. This would entail a revision and expansion of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which has been patched many times since its first passage in 1970.

Legislation is famously slow to catch up with technology, especially in the information space realized by the net. A better safeguard of our liberty is an awareness of how information is gathered and used and a constant assessment of its value in transactions.