How we ruin social networks, Facebook specifically

I found out my new college e-mail address in 2005 from a letter in the mail. Right after opening the envelope, I went straight to the computer. I was part of a LiveJournal group made of incoming students, and we had all been eagerly awaiting our college e-mail addresses, which had a use above and beyond corresponding with professors or student housing: back then, they were required tokens for entry to the fabled thefacebook.com.

That was nine years ago, and Facebook has now been in existence for 10. But even in those early days, Facebook’s cultural impact can’t be overstated. A search for “Facebook” on Google Scholar alone now produces 1.2 million results from 2006 on; “Physics” only returns 456,000.

But in terms of presence, Facebook is flopping around a bit now. The ever-important “teens” despise it, and it’s not the runaway success, happy addiction, or awe-inspiring source of information it once was. We’ve curated our identities so hard and had enough experiences with unforeseen online conflict that Facebook can now feel more isolating than absorbing. But what we are dissatisfied with is what Facebook has been, not what it is becoming.

Even if the grand sociological experiment that was Facebook is now running a little dry, the company knows this—which is why it’s transforming Facebook into a completely different entity. And the cause of all this built-up disarray that’s pushing change? It’s us. To prove it, let’s consider the social constructs and weirdnesses Facebook gave rise to, how they ultimately undermined the site, and how these ideas are shaping Facebook into the company it is now and will become.

Cue that Randy Newman song

Facebook arrived late to the concept of online friending, long after researchers started wondering about the structure of these social networks. What Facebook did for friending, especially reciprocal friending, was write it so large that it became a common concern. How many friends you had, who did and did not friend you back, and who should friend each other first all became things that normal people worried about.

Once Facebook opened beyond colleges, it became such a one-to-one representation of an actual social network that scientists started to study it. They applied social theories like those of weak ties or identity creation to see how they played out sans, or in supplement to, face-to-face interactions.

In a 2007 study, when Facebook was still largely campus-bound, a group of researchers said that Facebook “appears to play an important role in the process by which students form and maintain social capital.” They were using it to keep in touch with old friends and “to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection.”

This sounds mundane now, since Facebook is so integrated into much of our lives. Seeing former roommates or childhood friends posting updates to Facebook feels as commonplace as literally seeing them nearly every day back when we were still roommates at 20 or friends at eight.

But the ability to keep tabs on someone without having to be proactive about it—no writing an e-mail, making a phone call, etc.—became the unique selling factor of Facebook. Per the 2007 study above, Facebook became a rich opportunity for “convert[ing] latent ties into weak ties,” connections that are valuable because they are with people who are sufficiently distant socially to bring in new information and opportunities.

Some romantic pixels have been spilled about the way no one is ever lost to anyone anymore; most people, including ex-lovers, estranged family members, or missed connections are only a Wi-Fi signal away.

“Modern technology has made our worlds smaller, but perhaps it also has diminished life’s mysteries, and with them, some sense of romance,” writes David Vecsey in The New York Times. Vecsey cites a time when he tracked down a former lover “across two countries and an ocean,” something he would not have done in the absence of passive social media monitoring. “It was only in her total absence, in a total vacuum away from her, that I was able to appreciate the depth of love I felt.”

The art of the Facebook-stalk

While plenty of studies have been conducted on the productive uses of Facebook—forming or maintaining weak ties, supplementing close relationships, or fostering new, casual ones—there are plenty that also touch on the site as a means for passive monitoring. Whether it was someone we’d never met, a new acquaintance, or an unrequited infatuation, Facebook eventually had enough breadth that you could call up virtually anyone’s profile, if only to see how fat they’ve gotten.

One study referred to this process as “social investigation.” We developed particular behaviors to avoid creating suspicion: do not “like” anything by the object of a stalking session, or if we do like it, don’t “like” too quickly; be careful not to type a name we want to search into the status field by accident; set an object of monitoring as a “close friend,” even if they aren’t, so their updates show up without fail; friend their friends; surreptitiously visit profile pages multiple times a day in case we missed anything.

This passive monitoring is one of the more utilitarian uses of Facebook. It’s also one of the most addictive. The (fictionalized) movie The Social Network closes with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, gazing at the Facebook profile of a high-school crush. Facebook did away with the necessity of keeping tabs on anyone. You simply had all of the tabs, all of the time, with the most recent information whenever you wanted to look at them.

The book Digital Discourse cites a classic example of the Facebook stalk in an IM conversation between two teenagers:

“I just saw what Tanya Eisner wrote on your Facebook wall. Go to her house,” one says.
“Woah, didn’t even see that til right now,” replies the other.
“Haha it looks like I stalk you… which I do,” says the first.
“I stalk u too its ok,” comforts the second.

But even innocent, casual information recon in the form of a Facebook stalk can rub us the wrong way. Any instance of a Facebook interaction that ends with an unexpected third body’s involvement can taint the rest of users’ Facebook behavior, making us feel watched.

Digital Discourse states that “when people feel themselves to be the objects of stalking, creeping, or lurking by third parties, they express annoyance or even moral outrage.” It cites an example of another teenager who gets a wall post from a person she barely knows, and it explains something she wrote about in a status update. “Don’t stalk my status,” she writes in mocking command to another friend, as if talking to the interloper.

You are who you choose to be

“The advent of the Internet has changed the traditional conditions of identity production,” reads a study from 2008 on how people presented themselves on Facebook. People had been curating their presences online for a long time before Facebook, but the fact that Facebook required real names and, for a long time after its inception, association with an educational institution made researchers wonder if it would make people hew a little closer to reality.

But beyond the bounds of being tied to a real name, users still projected an idealized self to others; a type of “possible self,” or many possible selves, depending on their sharing settings. Rather than try to describe themselves to others, users projected a sort of aspirational identity.

People were more likely to associate themselves with cultural touchstones, like movies, books, or music, than really identify themselves. You might not say you like rock music, but you might write Led Zeppelin as one of your favorite bands, and everyone else can infer your taste in music as well as general taste and coolness from there.

These identity proxies also became vectors for seeking approval. “The appeal is as much to the likeability of my crowd, the desirability of my boyfriend, or the magic of my music as it is to the personal qualities of the Facebook users themselves,” said the study. The authors also noted that, for instance, users tended to post photos of themselves mostly in groups in social situations. Even the profile photos, which would ostensibly have a single subject, were socially styled.

As the study concluded, “identity is not an individual characteristic; it is not an expression of something innate in a person, it is rather a social product, the outcome of a given social environment and hence performed differently in varying contexts.” Because Facebook was so susceptible to this “performance,” so easily controlled and curated, it quickly became less about real people and more about highlight reels.

We came to Facebook to see other real people, but everyone, even casual users, saw it could be gamed for personal benefit. Inflicting our groomed identities on each other soon became its own problem.

Fear of missing out

A long-time problem of social networks has been that the bad feelings they can generate are greatly disproportional to good ones.

In strict terms of self-motivation, posting something and getting a good reception feels good. But most of Facebook use is watching other people post about their own accomplishments and good times. For a social network of 300 friends with an even distribution of auspicious life events, you are seeing 300 times as many good things happen to others as happen to you (of course, everyone has the same amount of good luck, but in bulk for the consumer, it doesn’t feel that way). If you were happy before looking at Facebook, or even after posting your own good news, you’re not now.

The feelings of inadequacy did start to drive people back to Facebook. Even in the middle of our own vacations, celebration dinners, or weddings, we might check Facebook during or after to compare notes and see if we really had the best time possible.

That feeling became known as FOMO, “fear of missing out.” As Jenna Wortham wrote in The New York Times, “When we scroll through pictures and status updates, the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret… we become afraid that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.”

Even if you had your own great stuff to tell Facebook about, someone out there is always doing better. And Facebook won’t let you forget. The brewing feeling of inferiority means users don’t post about stuff that might be too lame. They might start to self-censor, and then the bar for what is worth the “risk” of posting rises higher and higher. As people stop posting, there is less to see, less reason to come back and interact, like, or comment on other people’s material. Ultimately, people, in turn, have less reason to post.

Its own undoing

None of this is to say that Facebook is in some kind of horrible spiral. Its usage stats remain high, both in sheer user numbers and traffic generated. But Facebook has shown better than any other social network how such a system can be its own undoing. Even after it manages to pull so many of us together, its internal forces drive us apart again.

Facebook can be connection, but it can also be alienation, driving us to its more secluded corners where we can watch without risk of scrutiny. Those risks are profoundly small—seriously, big deal that only two people liked your status update—but the cost of holding back is even smaller.

Facebook appears to see these forces at work, because for some time, it has been slowly turning itself into something else entirely. The social network part is retiring, and something else is emerging.

Looking forward: More and less social, more and less network

What we’ve learned from all this time on Facebook is that, given a sufficiently large social network, normal people can’t be relied upon to create content consistently for their audience of “friends,” let alone the “public” that Facebook unleashed on everyone in 2009.

As Facebook itself knows from watching people type up statuses or comments and then delete them before posting, people feel pressure to say or do the right things when using services like Facebook. Part of that feeling stems from the breadth of the audience; when you want to say something about the latest Fox News broadcast, but your whole social network is politically mixed, you are likely to hold back your comments.

There is also the aforementioned identity creation aspect; Facebook gives people an opportunity to only present their best side, to only speak up when they are on a vacation, getting a promotion, or winning some kind of award. The best days of our lives happen so rarely, we don’t always have occasion to write something. The world can only take so many “bored, lol, what’s everyone up to tonight?"s.

But not broadcasting doesn’t mean we don’t communicate. And even if we aren’t really making content for our fellow Facebook goers, we sure are waiting around for people to give us stuff to read. Accordingly, Facebook has made a full transition from being a huge collection of profiles to what it is now, and it’s kind of apparent what people actually want to be doing here.

We want to talk to people, but really only a few people at once

The other thing that Facebook’s self-censorship study turned up was that people are more likely to communicate something when they know their audience, or more importantly, know the audience will be receptive to it. Social networks, especially ones that develop breadth as quickly as Facebook, are not great places to share something unless you are the specific type of person who doesn’t mind broadcasting.

Facebook as a platform has become too intimidating for most people. It’s too hard to guarantee a positive reception or even a reception, period; it’s embarrassing to post something and receive no likes or comments.

Where we are sharing instead is in messages. 2013 was the year of the messaging app wars; not only were there lots of apps to choose from, they were blowing up among a diverse range of age groups and locales. Snapchat, Whatsapp, GroupMe, WeChat, and Line are only a few of the apps that got a lot of attention and eyeballs. While Facebook doesn’t get a lot of attention in this respect, its messaging service does get traffic.

The ever-messaging teens don’t really use Facebook messaging, but the medium is important enough that Facebook has started aggregating it into broader statistics. For instance, to the dismay of some users, privately messaged links are now tallied as public “likes” for the relevant brand’s Facebook page.

The importance and ubiquity of messaging is also tied to that most dreaded of words among companies that started out on Web 2.0: mobile. Facebook and other sites and services struggled to figure out how to make money from people accessing them from their phones. It’s extremely clear that messaging is one of the most common functions of a mobile phone, particularly a smartphone. It’s easy enough to manage a messaging service above and beyond SMS that data-based messaging has become a hot area of competition.

Facebook has tried to compete with its failure of a Poke app (meant to imitate the functionality of Snapchat, which Zuckerberg now calls a joke) and, longer ago, its Facebook e-mail addresses. But like the rest of Facebook, the company can always fall back on data to justify some feature. As long as a private message can be served ads, and the message’s content can be parsed for anonymizable data that can be fed back into Facebook as “likes,” Facebook has a business on its hands.

Getting the attention that other messaging upstarts get will remain a problem. Facebook doesn’t have to worry about drawing users back from other messaging services as much as it has to worry about retaining them.

The Messenger app has been successful for Facebook. If trawling those messages for “likes” doesn’t turn out to be a transgression, it even has a way to make them functionally useful. And messages also have a better chance of being a place where people discuss personal matters or needs, making them better fodder for ad targeting.

Publications take up the mantle

That void left by public posts and content creation from users? Brands were more than willing to fill it. So rather than making their own content, users can post links, like pages, and integrate them into their own news feeds and, in general, use brands as a proxy for their own views if they are still into that whole “identity creation” thing.

“Fan pages” existed since 2007. But like messages, a more general “page” suitable for use by companies, celebrities, and even concepts (“long romantic walks to the fridge”) took shape in 2010. This largely replaced Groups and became a manageable vector for companies to feed their content into Facebook.

Looking back, it’s clear now that this move was Facebook’s first step toward becoming a platform almost entirely for passively sharing, browsing, and consuming non-user created content. This move is not the point when Facebook stopped being about people, but rather, it was when Facebook made its first clear indication that the company knew its fade from relevance was coming if it didn’t repurpose.

This has come full circle with the company’s recent release of Paper, which parses Facebook in a new way. The news feed is still there, but it has its own dedicated section within the Paper app. Next to News Feed, there are sections for different subjects (Headlines, Tech, Creators) that will be populated by publications and “emerging voices,” with pieces hand-selected by editors employed by Facebook. Paper is not a replacement for the main Facebook app, but, even before its release, some are suggesting that it should be.