What is wrong with web 2.0 social networking?
A number of things seem unattractive to me in the Internet social networking we have today. While social networks as a sociological concept are relatively old, established and useful as such, it somehow makes me sad to see them revealed and made explicit the way Facebook does. My friendships and acquaintances are dear to me on a very deep level, and it disturbs me to see Facebook lay my connections out for me. While there are no outright node graphs on Facebook such as the ones on the Wikipedia page I linked to (although I'm sure there's a clumsy app that does that for you, complete with bad grammar and lots of typos), seeing my "mutual friends" with everybody all the time just seemed a bit superfluous. I am not disputing that social networks are a useful way to model human behaviour in sociology, but I don't need to be reminded of what my life looks like laid out flat like that, because it makes the experience very hollow and depressing.A related problem is that using Facebook I never felt particularly connected or present to anyone. Facebook created an illusion of being connected to everybody at once, even though I was still alone, reading about other people's crap and posting about my own. Passively watching a nondescript mass of people's lives chaotically unfold before your eyes is just weird. There is no interaction, and more importantly, no context. I don't want to read about my mother's knee operation, an old classmate's bowel movements and news of a death in someone's family, all within the same 5 minutes.
When they introduced the chat feature, Facebook became a whole lot more meaningful, but only marginally. The chat improves on the interactivity and one-on-one communication, as well as makes the overall experience more human.
But chat has been done before, and much better. Chatting on the Internet has been around for decades, and people are accustomed to it. The concept is simple: you talk to another person, or to a number of persons, and usually you can see which other people can see what you are saying. With Facebook posts, things are way more complicated. Privacy settings are quite convoluted, and there are entire websites devoted to people making fools of themselves on Facebook, about 40% of the time precisely because they have trouble perceiving social context and keeping track of who sees what they are posting.
It used to be that email was one to one (or atleast to the people explicitly listed as recipients), chat was one to one or many to many who you can see constantly listed, and websites were one to the whole world. In Facebook, posts are visible to a very complicated set of people, defined by all kinds of groups, pages, friend lists, privacy settings and even per-post visibility settings. To me, this gets confusing very quickly, or at the very least frustrating, to keep going through the thought process of who might or might not see what you are posting. And what if you forgot to add someone to your "co-workers" friend list which you have otherwise blocked from seeing your wall, for instance?
What Facebook is about
The users are not Facebook's customers. They are the product. Facebook sells user profiles and social network data to advertisers so that they may better target their ads to very specific demographics. The advertisers are Facebook's customers, and what they are buying is roughly everything you post on Facebook (not really the things you post, but all kinds of statistical meta data automatically syndicated from it). You are working for them for free.This is perhaps what bothers me the most. Social networking as of today is in the hands of very few private companies, and the whole phenomenon is very heavily commercialized. It used to be that the Internet was far less centralized (infrastructurally, politically and commercially). Basic communications infrastructure, such as email, IRC and Usenet servers, was offered by ISP's as part of the service you subscribe to. People publishing websites either self-hosted or put their sites on their university's or ISP's server, or they purchased web-hosting individually for their own needs. Facebook is a huge, single corporate entity that really does not have any competition. It is essentially a black box with regards to what you put in there, and I think it would be wise to take some heed in things the likes of Julian Assange are saying about it.
What Facebook is good for
I have noticed that circulating "funny office emails" have practically disappeared, which is a very good thing. Idle chatter, pictures of cats and GIF animations of athletes suffering impacts to the groin are now being posted on Facebook, which seems like a much better environment for that kind of thing. Facebook is great for spreading information among people you know. The event function is great for organizing parties and things. If you have a light-hearted link you want to share with one person or a group of people, it is generally bad form to mass-email it to everyone, but you might paste it on an IRC channel or you might post it on your or someone else's Facebook wall.On the other hand, I feel that Facebook has kept me from blogging more than I have. Given that most of the people who read my blog are also my close friends, just posting a link with ten words of commentary was so much easier than properly blogging about something that I eventually never got around to writing the blog post.
tl;dr
- The social part in Internet social networking is clunky and deceptive.
- The Internet sold out.
- Facebook is a great low-threshold tool for people who don't know computers to have an instant Internet presense.
- It's not for me. The individual things that Facebook does have been done before, with an option for anonymity and greater stability.
