Abstract
Facebook was established to help students keep in touch after graduation, but now it’s being credited with major roles in everything from domestic elections to international uprisings. In its no-longer-insular world, Facebook transforms the private into the public.
From The Social Network to pervasive public discussions of privacy, it seems Facebook has taken over. In March of 2010 Facebook.com surpassed Google as the most visited webpage in the United States. From 2009 to 2010, its users rose from 200 to 500 million worldwide. As Dan Fletcher noted in Time magazine, not only do one in four Internet users actively visit Facebook, but if the web site were a nation, it’d be the third largest in the world. Roughly 250 million people log on every day, and they spend more than a combined 11 billion hours on Facebook every month.
Initially developed in 2004 for students at Harvard—and expanded in its first year to include other elite undergraduate institutions—Facebook has shifted dramatically from a platform to help select students stay connected with one another into a global institution that facilitates communication and interaction across a wide range and array of social dimensions. The webpage, along with other social networking sites (SNS), has instigated a cultural shift both in how we share and with whom we share. Growing evidence suggests that these sites play a meaningful role in mediating the boundaries between individuals and groups, and even in setting the boundaries between personal and public life.
The rise of unfriending demonstrates how an otherwise personal ritual has been transformed into a public act.
While the social influence of Facebook and other SNS is evident across a range of arenas, perhaps one of the clearest examples of their utility is in mobilizing political action. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama used social media to facilitate the grassroots approach to organizing which has been widely credited with winning him the election. In effect, this grassroots approach used SNS to help put a local face on national issues like healthcare and the economy, thereby reinforcing their relevance at the community level. However, as sociologist John Ratliff highlighted in his Fall 2008 Contexts piece on “netroots,” the implications of online social networking on political processes can be extremely complicated.
In his 2010 essay in The New Yorker, the sociologically-acclaimed journalist Malcolm Gladwell discussed the significance of SNS for social activism on a more global scale. He pointed out that, during student-led protests surrounding Iran’s 2009 presidential election, the U.S. State Department requested Twitter (an ascendant short-form networking platform) postpone scheduled maintenance so that this tool for organizing would be readily available to demonstrators. Gladwell argued that SNS were not actually instrumental in coordinating the demonstrations, but he noted that SNS play a significant role in how political action is framed both during and after the events. He discussed how many ”tweets” credited with coordinating and fueling the protests in Tehran were made by Westerners posting in English, but subsequently treated as firsthand accounts by Western journalists and bloggers who “championed the role of the social media in Iran.” One can imagine similar issues arising as the “Arab Spring” protests continue to unfold: SNS have the power to blur the boundaries between activists and observers. As Golnaz Esfandiari, a senior correspondent with Radio Free Europe, discusses in an article in Foreign Policy, in Iran’s case this blurring diminished the distinction between those tweeting and “the Iranians who [made] real, not remote or virtual, sacrifices in pursuit of justice.”
SNS have also exhibited influence in shaping how social boundaries evolve through language. In 2010, the Oxford English Dictionary named “unfriend”the word of the year, defining it as a verb meaning to “remove (someone) from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site.” Slang terms and new phrases are routinely added to our language; however, this new word demonstrates a pervasive shift not only in how we speak, but in how we organize social life. While acts that signify the end of a relationship (such as deleting e-mails or throwing away pictures) are common, they’re also usually private; the rise of unfriending demonstrates how an otherwise personal ritual has been transformed into a public act. Lee Siegel, cultural critic and author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, argues that the social rules for ending relationships are transformed online: the “act of unfriending acknowledges that the definition of friend is different from the traditional.”
The effect of Facebook on social boundaries is even more evident in the now-hazy lines between public and private information. New communication technologies often have this blurring effect, and new lines are most often drawn where violations of privacy are believed to have occurred. In their book The Right to Privacy, legal scholar Caroline Kennedy and her collaborator Ellen Alderman suggest that the majority of violations which have helped to define the boundary between public and private involved one actor invading the privacy of another (i.e. wiretapping, secret videotaping or employee drug testing). Facebook and other social networking technologies add a new element to this process of boundary definition in that private information is first made available in the public sphere of the internet. Any infringement of privacy that occurs is the result of others using (rather than obtaining) that information in unintended or nonconsensual ways.
This new dimension of privacy encourages us to reevaluate the basic question of what is private and what is public. Researchers in both social and computer sciences have examined how privacy is managed for online profiles. Studies show that that Facebook profiles are actively constructed for public consumption, but often treated as an extension of a person’s private life. Having the ability to alter privacy settings may give users a sense that they can control the extent to which their public persona is kept private. However, the security options available can be confusing, and have changed frequently in recent years. Consequently, there is a great range of variability in the extent to which people take advantage of this control, and this may leave some users more vulnerable to privacy invasion than others. Research by Harvard sociologists Kevin Lewis, Jason Kaufman, and Nicholas Christakis shows that the more time people spend online, the more likely they are to use restrictive privacy settings. Further, people who have friends or roommates with private profiles are more likely to keep their profiles private as well. These findings indicate that selecting restrictive privacy settings is a learned process. New users, then, are most vulnerable. The default privacy settings on Facebook allow for maximum exposure, and it’s not unreasonable to think that, in the absence of shared knowledge, the boundary between public and private becomes all the more difficult to set.
Facebook really is everywhere.
Despite the potential drawbacks of a permeable public-private line (including denial of jobs, suspension from school, and teens harming themselves), Facebook and other SNS keep growing. And while these problems aren’t keeping people off SNS, they have become a prevalent part of public discourse. In 2009, a student asked President Obama for advice on how to become President. The President told him to be careful what he puts on Facebook. And, in the summer of 2010, German legislators introduced employment law that explicitly addressed how employers could use Facebook to monitor or investigate employees and applicants.
While we suspect that online privacy will be increasingly and formally regulated, it’s also clear that it’s difficult for institutional responses to keep pace with the rapid development and rising influence of these media. Facebook and other SNS continue to be subject to developing social norms and formal regulation regarding how, when, where, and by whom information made available on their networks may be used. But, at the same time, both individual users and social institutions continue to find innovative ways to utilize these communication technologies. It is important that both consumers and scholars of popular culture recognize the shifting social boundaries and global implications that are continually evolving on the Internet.