Time’s Mark Zuckerburg Person of the Year* article**, besides from being very good, really summed up a lot of my recent thinking on Facebook. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
…Sometimes Zuckerberg can sound like a wheedling spokesman for the secret police of some future totalitarian state. Why wouldn’t you want to share? Why wouldn’t you want to be open — unless you’ve got something to hide? ”Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Zuckerberg said in a 2009 interview with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. This is a popular attitude among the Silicon Valley elite, summed up by a remark Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last year on CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Say what?! Those are some of the craziest statements I’ve ever heard! It’s really bizarre hearing this from two people who are billionaires because of their ability to get into the human pysche and provide what it wants. Luckily, the writer of the Time profile, Lev Grossman, pushes back:
“But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we’re collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn’t mean you’re leading a double life. That’s just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn’t a simple thing; it’s complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn’t built to flex.
For all of Zuckerberg’s EQ, Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.”
(I even think the metaphor “skyscraper… in a high wind” doesn’t do the types of metamorphosis required by modern society — I think the opening lines of this Interpol song are more apt.)
All of this relates to Zadie Smith’s final pronouncement on facebook — one that I agree with — that she made in her NYRB review of the Social Network:
”… The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”
There is something reducing about the way people present themselves on Facebook. This has a little bit to do with the layout of the website — as Smith writes — but more to do with the ridiculous amount of people who have access to your Facebook page — as Grossman writes. There’s an argument to be made about keeping your “facebook friends” to a slim number, but I think that ignores some of the societal pressures/practicalities that Grossman lays out in the last paragraph that I excerpted of his article.
I would say that I have a lot different interests and do a variety of activities. A lot of these interests/activities are seemingly unrelated. Now, if I listed all of these interests/activities out — or wrote facebook statuses in relation to these interests/activities, I think that would seem pretty ostentatious —and that’s something I’m very aware of. Most people I have interacted with maybe have seen me through the contexts of one or a handful of these interests or activities, but very few people are aware of all of these things. And that’s fine. The great thing about today’s technology and society is that there are a lot of little communities that you can participate in — either passively or actively — and therefore be able to share these interests and activities with.***
And I don’t think my friend who I talk to about the Packers’ playoff games and the new Big Boi album really thinks that I have weak integrity or am hiding something from him if I don’t talk about the latest Evan Osnos piece, or if I don’t talk about what it is like being a vegetarian in Taiwan. Having diverse interests/activities requires an ability to adapt to your surroundings and/or to whatever little world you are in at a certain moment. Very few people these days occupy only one world, as Grossman points, and this adaptive process is almost necessary for today’s world.
But facebook really doesn’t cater to this more fluid sense of identity — it’s, more or less, all or nothing.
I actually don’t want the guys I grew up with playing basketball around the neighborhood to read my blog or even know that I’m in Taiwan — yes, some people like their privacy — but I would sure like to lament Brandon Jenning’s 4-6 week injury and talk about the prospects of the Packers beating up on the Falcons this Sunday. But rather than do that, I basically have just given up facebook as a medium.
I still have facebook, but I mainly use it to keep in contact with friends that I really do want to keep in contact with — past a 60-some character status update about some time and Wisconsisn-specific sports event — or to check out other people’s profiles, out of some undying anthropological curiosity — which is why I never have deleted a friend.
So that’s why I was so intrigued by this Sean Parker video (top of post). The whole video is interesting but the relevant part is from 3:10 to 5:00. He says some really encouraging things that are very connected to my own thoughts about Facebook:
“This is my biggest criticism of the facebook project today, and when I spend time with the facebook project team, this is the thing that I’m always pushing is that the tools for segmenting or compartamentalizing your life and broadcasting information to one group versus another, and subscribing information from one group to another are not advanced enough yet… We need to get better [at this].”
David Kirkpatrick, the author of the best-known book on Facebook and the one interviewing Parker in this video, points out that “lists,” a facebook application that was an attempt to do what Parker is describing, was attempted but later de-emphasized. In response to that point, Parker says, “This happens because it’s a mass product, and we’re trying to serve the needs of the mass population.”
So by the end of the video it’s unclear whether this is something that isn’t a reality yet because 1. the technology is not there yet or 2. it was tried out and the masses dumped this in preference for an algorithim to sort their friends by who they are most in “contact” with.
I very much hope it’s the later. It would be nice if I could use facebook regularly again, and maintain contact with people from my past or how I’m not that good of friends with without being worried about having my privacy being invaded. I haven’t talked to the guys I grew up with in 6 or 7 years. I don’t really have a need to go out to lunch for them and talk about what we’re doing now — that actually sounds horrible. But I would like to comment on a post on their wall about how much the Bears suck. I think they would appreciate that too.
But I’m a little doubtful as to whether that’s going to happen.
The fact that Parker brings up this idea gives creedence to one of the thesis — yes, that is the plural form of thesis, I checked — shared by Grossman, Smith and Jose Antonio Vargas — who wrote the New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg: Facebook is a product inextricably linked to its creator, Mark Zuckerberg.
Compare this from the Time profile of Zuckerberg,
“He works constantly; his only current hobby is studying Chinese… He’s spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome… Zuckerberg [started dating his girlfriend] seven years ago, before he started Facebook… He drives a black Acura TSX, which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving break, he took his family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. He bought a wand at Ollivander’s.”
to this from a Vanity Fair profile of Parker:
“…Parker is widely considered a Web oracle… That said, he has a libertine side. Parker has a knack for missing deadlines and appointments, for disappearing for weeks on end, for avoiding the press… He was pushed out of Facebook after an arrest for cocaine possession in 2005. (No charges were filed.).. A lover of the good life, Parker maintains a collection of elegant white shoes, a closetful of Tom Ford suits, and a $100,000 Tesla electric sports car he never quite seems to have time to drive… When his friends fund-raise for charity, several told me, Parker is often the one who contributes the most… An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral… There is hardly a topic—literary, political, medical, or technological—about which he cannot offer an informed and nuanced opinion in his rapid-fire patter… Oh, and when he’s home in New York he takes piano lessons from Sean Lennon.”
It’s not hard to see why Zuckerberg would have such a clean and simplified sense of identity, and why Parker probably has a more postmodern one.**** Maybe Zuckerberg’s business sense will win out and he will see that the majority of his 600 million users have a similar outlook as Parker or maybe Parker will have to accept that masses don’t want to compartamentalize. I guess it could go either way, but if I had to put money on it, I would say that I probably won’t be using Facebook all that actively for the forseeable future…
* First of all, it is ridiculous that Zuckerburg got person of the year when Julian Assange really should have. There is nothing 2010-y about Zuckerburg except that he was the subject of a pretty unrealistic film, where as many of the biggest stories in 2010 couldn’t have been imagined without Assange.
** The Time piece is a really nice compliment to the New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg, which was also awesome. It kind of makes you wonder why this bloggingheads episode between the two writers of those two profiles was so vapid and pointless.
*** Alexis Madrigal points out that this is one of the biggest flaws in Smith’s piece, as well as writing some really good insights into how we have adapted to using facebook in general.
****It’s also noteworthy that Parker emphasizes “identity” as the core message of Facebook — as he does in the youtube video — where as Zuckerberg emphasizes connecting and being “open” as the core message — in both the Time and New Yorker pieces.
