Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Friend Me?

The strangely personal world of Facebook

By Caitlin Baggott

Anneke Gronke is a vibrant and garrulous seventeen year old. Meeting people--both online and in person--is easy for her. She belongs to the Millennial Generation, a group that the media, consumer researchers, and cultural analysts describe as inclusive and multicultural, technologically connected, overscheduled, self-motivated, hopeful, and civic-minded. Like many other Millennials, when Gronke leaves Portland for Columbia University in the fall, she will already know her roommates and classmates--through text messages and shared online comments--before they ever meet in person, in large part because of a website called Facebook.

Recent media programs, such as PBS's Frontline, have portrayed the Internet as the most significant factor in shaping the Millennial Generation. Certainly, immediate access to information and ideas from a wide variety of sources offered by twenty-first-century technologies, such as e-mail, text messaging, cell phones, and the Internet itself, has altered the speed and transparency with which many of us interact with the world today. But it's the use of online social networking tools like Facebook or MySpace that sets Millennials apart from previous generations. Unlike Gutenberg's printing press or color TV, Facebook doesn't revolutionize access to the printed word or expose presidential candidates during moments of sweaty anxiety. Instead, it changes something subtler, and perhaps more pervasive: how young people think about friends, strangers, and community.

Facebook was built by a Harvard University sophomore in 2004 as a tool for socializing. Based on the paper "face book" on campus, students used the site to track down classmates. Unlike the paper version, though, Facebook did more than offer public information such as dorm extension numbers and last names. It offered students an opportunity to post otherwise private information about their romantic availability and sexual orientation, and a chance to connect online. And students went for it--not only posting basic information, but also sharing news about breakups and hookups, as well as blow-by-blow self-reporting on everything from what they ate for breakfast to how much they adore their current lovers.

At its inception, Facebook was a highly exclusive online application: Only people with Harvard e-mail addresses had access to it. Then, for about two years, access was limited to a constantly growing circle of first college and then high school students with active school e-mail addresses. Finally, in late 2005, Facebook welcomed everyone, regardless of age or school affiliation, to log on.

At the most basic level, the online application allows users to create a personal profile, including their name, home town, age, political views, and religious views. After that, there are no limits to the kind and amount of personal information a user may share. A curriculum vitae of education and employment data is balanced by a first-date primer of personal interests, pet peeves, and favorite books and television shows. Add-on applications prompt users to share and compare information about the music, cities, and wines they like most. Quizzes and rating applications elicit revelations about everything from "how I would spend one million dollars" to "my favorite sexual position." In short, Facebook offers an exhaustive menu of options for users to share just about anything about themselves.

About 85 percent of college students use the website, and the total number of users is growing by about 100,000 daily. By the end of 2007, thirty-five million people were registered members. To put this in some perspective, consider that thirty-five million is about 11 percent of the total U.S. population--an astounding number. Some simple math, however, leads to a more astonishing figure. There are seventy-five million Millennials. If they account for a plurality of Facebook users, that means roughly one-third of this cohort uses Facebook. Add to this the millions of users of other social networks, such as MySpace or Xenga, and dating services, like Match.com, and it's clear that when we talk about young Americans who have logged on to social networks, we're talking about a majority of the population.

Gronke has lots of friends--"real" friends whom she sees on a regular basis. But she also has more than 460 friends on Facebook, only about a hundred are high school classmates in Portland. These Facebook friends are privy to more details about her life than many of us share with our neighbors or coworkers or even our families. But this doesn't seem like a big deal to Gronke, who says, "This stuff isn't a secret or anything. It's who I am."

Unlike similar sites, MySpace, for instance, Facebook maintains an aura of safety--perhaps because it was originally designed to serve students connected by the relatively safe social network of their schools. Much is said about the issues of privacy and safety online, primarily focusing on how corporations, the government, identity thieves, and pedophiles might track and use personal information--from social security numbers to a preference for Sprite over Mountain Dew. But few people talk about the societal impact of sharing personal information and ideas with people who aren't necessarily invisible or ill-willed--but are, instead, strangers with whom sharing intimate personal information would have been socially unacceptable and technologically impossible only a decade ago.

For many students, these kinds of concerns seem beside the point--transparency is, to them, a net social benefit. The purpose of social networking sites is to post a bold statement of self for friends and strangers to see. It's a way to find "your optimal friends," says Gronke. Facebook allows users to connect with others who share their interests and worldviews about a wide variety of things, from the solemn to the silly. "When you're restricted to the community you find at home or school, maybe you can't be yourself if those places aren't safe. But with Facebook you can talk openly and find a support base," Gronke says.

While Gronke describes a vision of a more accepting and open world where strangers with common beliefs and values find each other and forge friendships, there is also a dark side to communities that organize strictly along lines of shared beliefs. In such a world, people forgo the opportunity to meet those who are different. This plays out regularly when, based on information shared on Facebook, students (and parents) call colleges to request roommate changes because they don't want to share a room with a gay student or a Muslim student or someone who seems to like to party. While prejudice isn't a product of Facebook, this side effect does indicate that the online networking tool is no panacea for divisions within our culture.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have revolutionized the social lives of teens in many ways, and the transition from high school to college might have undergone the most significant change. Many groups from the class of 2012 already have assembled on Facebook. The official group for Columbia University had 444 members when I last checked, and the University of Michigan's group boasted more than 1,100 members. While universities have hastened to create official Facebook groups to keep abreast of the trend, most groups are created by students who hope to start school with new, close friends. Making friends in person with strangers whom they know nothing about has become an almost unusual activity, while orchestrating first impressions in cyberspace has become the norm.

W. Houston Dougharty, dean of students at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, worries that these impressions are not always accurate. "Nothing replaces face-to-face interactions, and so often the impressions students get from MySpace or Facebook are based on stereotypes or a persona that the person is trying to present that may not be accurate," he says.

Dougharty is concerned for students who make friends based on false impressions--and for the inevitable hurt feelings that result. But he's more concerned that students aren't learning important social skills. "Contemporary students are well informed but not well connected. They don't have the interpersonal skills that previous generations had."

In response to this phenomenon, some colleges and universities have begun exploring a class for orientation week that teaches students the skills of meeting strangers. At Lewis & Clark, Dougharty says administrators are thinking more intentionally about how orientation programming introduces students to the social skills they need in order to adjust to campus life. "It's easier to shut the door and live on MySpace than to meet new people," he says. "The tether of technology can keep folks from growing--from putting down roots."

What happens to a generation of young people who don't develop the social skills of talking with genuine strangers? Oddly enough to members of older generations, for many Millennials communicating with strangers in cyberspace seems increasingly safe and free of boundaries, while meeting strangers in the physical world--in a bar or club, for instance--has come to feel proportionately unsafe. "You can spot the creeps pretty easily online," Gronke says. Like her peers, she was raised to be suspicious of strangers who approach her online. Obvious rules apply--no addresses, no phone numbers, no meet-ups with total strangers.

Increasingly, students use tools like Facebook to decide with whom to socialize. By connecting to people in her network who are only once or twice removed, Gronke can widen her circle of friends with little risk. It's easier and more fulfilling to meet and develop those kinds of friendships on the Web and, after establishing a connection, to take Web-based friends into real life.

While, in some cases, this might "optimize" the search for a perfect friend, it seems to make everyone else fungible. As Dougharty sees it, "Some students are online with friends from their hometown while others are wandering the halls looking for someone to have lunch with. They're not connecting."

Historians and cultural anthropologists find many opportunities in the history of technology to consider the relationship between technological innovation and cultural change--from the creation of the first tool for sowing seeds to the advent of the Sony Walkman. While Andrew Feenberg, author of The Critical Theory of Technology, contends that "modern technology is no more neutral than medieval cathedrals or the Great Wall of China; it embodies the values of a particular industrial civilization," many others view historical narratives based on technological shifts as faddish and shortsighted. If we are witnessing a subtle shift in cultural norms about privacy and intimacy, safety, freedom of self-expression, inhibitions, and how we create and sustain community, Facebook is probably not the cause of the change, but a venue in which to observe the change.

My generation and my parents' generation are logging on to Facebook in greater numbers each day. (I am chagrined to see the tech pundits refer to this as the "graying of Facebook.") We use the site differently than younger users. Much of the difference is based on the older users' lack of trust or comfort with the Internet and the younger users' lack of experience with other tools for building and sustaining community. The younger users bare all. The older users are more protective of personal information. The younger users incorporate the application seamlessly into their social lives--they use it to chat with friends they see every day and to keep in touch with friends they rarely see or have never met. Older users, on the other hand, tend to use the application to facilitate more traditional forms of communication. It's an easy way to do the same kinds of social things to which we are already accustomed--and with the people with whom we are accustomed to doing them. Older users typically use social networking sites to maintain contact with their current network of family and friends, writing letters and sharing photo albums, rather than chatting, texting, uploading snapshots from phones, or broadcasting YouTube videos to hundreds of people, including friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The tool itself does little to shape our behavior; with different expectations and levels of comfort, we all use it differently.

For any generation, though, the promise of social networks like Facebook is the same: that family and friendships will last a lifetime, regardless of physical or temporal distance, or changes in life circumstances. With Facebook, your network of confidants, acquaintances, colleagues, family, neighbors, fans, and classmates grows and never diminishes. You may add friends and loved ones indefinitely. There is no reason to lose old friends; they are just a click away. You can create a lifelong social network that can be a source of constant contact and amusement. No one will be lonely again.

In a way, Facebook also serves the same purpose as the Cuisinart and the leaf blower: It saves time. Who has time to let hundreds of friends and family know about all of life's big and little changes? With Facebook, as a person shuttles down the concourse of life--new jobs, new towns, new mate, children--no matter how bustling the days become, she can update everyone with a few keystrokes. The intimacy that develops from knowing the details and course of a person's life can extend to a much larger group of people. That's the idea: Facebook offers wholesale intimacy.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, does a flood of personal information result in hundreds of new close, personal friendships? Is the personal information posted on this kind of social network authentically personal?

L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, pioneered a new approach to retail sales by creating fanciful window displays in the 1890s before he became a writer. He is widely believed to have conceived of the art of the narrative store window display--transforming department store windows from a perfunctory pile of goods to a compelling dreamscape. By extension, Baum may have created commercial advertising as we know it today, as magical store-window displays evolved into thirty-second television commercials, which were subsequently transformed into Web sites in the late 1990s. With sites like Facebook, millions of Americans now have their own store-window Web pages, where they do more than pile up lists of their "goods"--they create personal advertisements to sell themselves to friends and strangers alike. Social networks like Facebook allow the user to ply the tools of the advertising trade to present their product to the world--and their product is who they are. Everyone is her own agent. But we all know that advertisements aren't reality. So why do we believe that we can use personal marketing on a site like Facebook as a foundation for friendship and community?

Social scientists call the process of determining how people present themselves in the world "impression management," following the mid-twentieth-century work of Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Perhaps taking a cue from Shakespeare's remark that "all the world's a stage," Goffman compared human socializing to theatrical performance. In a recent New York Times article, Stephanie Rosenbloom offers this concern: "Now that first impressions are often made in cyberspace, not face-to-face, people are not only strategizing about how to virtually convey who they are, but also grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences--coworkers, fraternity brothers, Mom and Dad."

For many, Rosenbloom suggests, picking a single audience is becoming a less viable option because, with the so-called graying of Facebook, Mom, Dad, and prospective employers may very well be sitting in your invisible audience whether you want them there or not. As a result, some Facebook users have begun aiming for the lowest common denominator audience--effectively, strangers. Instead of posting boozy photos and provocative diatribes to entertain friends and attract new acquaintances, they limit the content on their profile to the kinds of information they would be happy to share with Grandma, a coworker, or their own children--family photos and employment or educational information.

But not all users choose this safer path. Most Millennial Generation users continue to see the platform as a place to be themselves, perhaps because this generation, more than any that came before it, has been told that they are fine as they are--that they are wonderful, unique, and special. This is a generation raised with doting "helicopter parents" and school curriculum designed to boost self-confidence. It is the most diverse generation in American history, and, starting with Barney and Elmo, they have been encouraged to be inclusive and sensitive to others in ways that previous generations weren't--and to be proud of themselves, too.

Herodotus counseled the Greeks that a man's life couldn't be understood until his death. The sum of the experience needed evaluation, and glimpses from moment to moment could deceive. The experience of Facebook teaches a different lesson, one that the Millennial Generation has taken to heart. Each glimpse of a person tells who they are, complete, satisfactory, and--most important--always changing. Gronke doesn't recoil at the thought that her posts from last summer might come back to haunt her, or that some stranger might see her online profile and judge her for being who she is. Happy with who she was then and who she is now, Gronke sees no reason to moderate the way she expresses herself, whether it be to strangers, classmates, or her mother.

Facebook offers a technological venue for cultivating social networks where once we depended on face-to-face interaction--where judgment and surprise are more obvious, where a social gaffe raises eyebrows and the consequences of a mean remark may be visible. Close friends may rib each other for a thoughtless posted comment, but there are few opportunities for a person to come face to face with how strangers admire or recoil from him--because he never comes face to face with strangers.

The twin promises of complete and authentic personal connection and perpetual community scratch a big itch for humans. No wonder we find Facebook scary and intriguing--and fret that the tool will indelibly change a young generation that is being educated about community through experiences on the Internet.

It's hard to imagine, though, that we won't all continue navigating community and intimacy in sloppy, uncertain, unscripted ways, as we have for generations. It's also hard to imagine that we will lose interest in people we don't know. If Facebook is the Millennial Generation's introduction to the problems of intimacy and community--and on the flip side, to the notions of strangers and loneliness--it may give them an opportunity to make some interesting mistakes, and, perhaps, some equally interesting personal discoveries.

Caitlin Baggott is the director of PolitiCorps, a national fellowship term of service for college students interested in politics. She lives in Northeast Portland with her seven-foot-tall husband, two-foot-tall toddler, doting German Shepherd, and clutch of hard-scrabble chickens.

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities