Mediation and midlife-crisis movies (14 April 2011)

Perhaps in anticipation of an incipient midlife crisis, I recently watched John Sayles's 1980 film Return of the Secaucus 7 and then The Big Chill (1983), one of the "what happened to us, we used to be so cool!" movies that came in its wake. Though the films are similarly structured -- they both focus on a weekend-long reunion of baby-boomer friends during which they drink a lot, play sports, hookup illicitly and indulge in nostalgic reveries -- they are entirely different in tone.

Sayles's film is loose and subtle, populated with nonactors and aiming for a kind of organic naturalism, whereas The Big Chill is full of histrionic Hollywood stars and ham-fisted thematic exposition. (Early on, Jeff Goldblum has a phone conversation in which he basically explains what the movie is supposed to be about. Very meta.) The acting in Secaucus 7 is not particularly convincing in a conventional sense, but the stiltedness starts to connote authenticity and becomes a kind of transparency. In The Big Chill the acting is anything but transparent, and its badness can't be ignored, especially since they seem to be trying so hard. (What is with Kevin Kline's Southern accent? And when Jobeth Williams makes a pass at Tom Berenger, is she supposed to come across as campy? And is there anything more contrived than the "dance" sequence in the kitchen?)

Secaucus 7 has a timeless indie-ness about it, but it also comes very distinctly from a pre-mediated age. (One telling scene has characters stuck on the highway, wrangling with an actual paper roadmap -- hard to conceive in the iPhone era.) It's shot on location in a nondescript town in New Hampshire. The characters (who have come together in what seems to be an annual ritual) play board games, listen to live music at a town bar, hang out by the river, play basketball at the neighborhood playground, and that sort of thing. The film is saturated in small-town pleasures and pursuits; the only hint of any "glamour industries" is in the characters who work for a senator in D.C., whom they disparage. No one seems to have much money. The emotional significance of everything is muted: One of the visiting couples has just split up and their pain is palpable without being overwrought, sending out ripples through the relations of everyone else. The looming possibility of love's entropic decay serves as a background for the other implicit tensions: a character played by Sayles drunkenly runs through the pros and cons of parenting, a woman in med school sleeps with a local Lothario (played by a young and goofy David Strathairn), a drifter wannabe musician bums money off his friends and considers really trying to "make it." You have a sense that it has just dawned on all of them that life might possibly having turning points and that adulthood inevitably involves a reckoning with the adolescent dreams that may or may not have propelled you to where you are and which may still be malingering in the back of one's mind. It's all meant to ultimately disconcert viewers; the surface mellowness can no longer defer having to deal with life. For people who love one another and have become embedded in one another's lives to continue to get along, they have to embrace conflict. Social being takes inescapable effort.

In The Big Chill, everything has been Reaganized. The film is set at a mansion on the South Carolina coast, and there are Porsches, power suits, cocaine, branded running shoes, VCRs, home video cameras, hideously furnished family rooms with home entertainment centers, and so on. The small town we see briefly appears to already be a gutted relic rather than a living place with its own palpable rhythms. Several of the characters work in media: a TV star, a writer for People magazine, a radio call-in psychologist, and their melodramatic posturing sometimes seems as though it is a consequence of their proximity to the media. It's not clear if this is by design or of it was simply an expression of the zeitgeist, but all the characters exude a smug self-awareness that makes their emotional difficulties seem maudlin and extra contrived. (I think the moral center of the film is Jobeth Williams' square husband, who views all the other characters with contempt, seeing them as the childish narcissists that they are, and simply leaves the scene after basically telling them to get over themselves.) The occasion for their reunion is the suicide of one of their friends, which prompts lots of overwrought and glib soul searching. William Hurt narrates his pain to a video camera, setting the template for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and while there is no live music in the diegesis, all the characters experience poignant moments scored to 1960s hits, proto-Wes Anderson style. And eventually the rightness of nesting and checking out politically is affirmed, as Kevin Kline praises the cops for protecting his property, Mary Kay Place gets impregnated, and William Hurt hooks up with Meg Tilly to fix up an old house. Conflicts have been discharged for viewers, who can flatter themselves that they have been living right all along. The question of social being becomes irrelevant; there is only private life.

My point is that Secaucus 7 dramatizes how friends help one another get through life, positing a bond that transcends life's phases and stages. The friends as group transcends the ebb and flow in the individuals' lives and gives those individuals a point of orientation, a reason to resist moral drift. The Big Chill shows us the opposite: the evaporation of the concept of collectivity or collective identity and the self-dramatization for friends-as-audience that replaces it. The friend group in The Big Chill has degraded into a social network: the bonds connecting them are wholly nostalgic. They get together to serially justify themselves to one anther but mainly to themselves. They give each other no resources on which to draw to resist rationalizing their lives into hollowness. That's why Jeff Goldblum's blunt and repellant reporter character, who tries too hard to sleep with the deceased's girlfriend and who eagerly exploits the details of his friends' lives for work product, is covertly normative in The Big Chill; though he is tepidly demonized, his character's true function is to authorize the sort of calculating behavior he pursues, represent it as honesty, against which the other characters' hypocrisies can appear. His tactless self-promotion seems like the truth about how people really are. I wonder if the mediatization that becomes so palpable in The Big Chill has something to do with this shift in values. Media form audiences but dissolve communities.

ADDENDUM:
I came across a passage from Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) that lays out the contrast I see in the two films.

The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families! -- how I hate them! the misers of love!" -- Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance--and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.)

Obviously the Secaucus 7 doesn't constitute a full-on nomadic "band," but I think the film is gesturing toward a collective identity, something open to a kind of intersubjectivity that assimilation to adult life in capitalist society certainly suppresses. The film is about preserving something like tribal loyalty to one's friends in the absence of concrete external enemies -- or rather when the enemies turn out to be ourselves. Whereas The Big Chill is all about the restitution of the nuclear family, augmented by a certain selfish individualist myopia that epitomized the moral outlook of the Reagan years, and likewise epitomizes neoliberalism in general.

"Every Person for Themselves" Economy (18 March 2011)

Justin Fox, who doesn't blog enough anymore, wrote a good post about this Democracy article by Andrei Cherny, about the "Individual Age." That's Cherny's phrase for what used to be called "the new capitalism" and what left-leaning types (like me) tend to describe as "precarity" or "post-Fordist labor conditions." The security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state (and secured through labor union activism) were discarded with the rise of neoliberalism, which preached deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility (remember Who Moved My Cheese the 1990s ode to employee servility?). Neoliberal (or post-Fordist or postindustrial) relations of production dispensed with employer-employee loyalty and made most workers free agents, drifting from job to job, perpetually insecure, perpetually having to sell one's usefulness anew to employers always looking for reasons to get rid of you. Fox cites this 1997 Fast Company article, "Free Agent Nation" by Dan Pink, as an early reflection of these changes; Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Corrosion of Character are all about these developments as well, and more recently Tina Brown termed it "the gig economy."

Here's how Cherny explains this change:

The differences between the economy of the 19th century and that of the 21st are too many to list, but today, as in Jefferson’s time of independent farmers and shopkeepers, it is individuals, not large conglomerations, that propel the economy. The number of Americans working for themselves is growing rapidly and most Americans no longer work full-time for someone else. Yet it is not just the self-employed or entrepreneurs who are part of this new world. Every worker is grappling with the Individual Age. Lifetime employment with a single company is largely a thing of the past and the dependable health, retirement, and training benefits such a relationship held are fast disappearing. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44. That trend is accelerating and is much more pronounced among those born in later decades. Untethered from large institutions, bouncing from one job to the next, today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business.

The way Cherny tells it, this "trend" is just sort of happening and no one is driving it or can do anything about it; it's just the world historical process playing itself out. This elides the actual concerted effort (ideological, political, economic, etc.) that has gone into making the neoliberal condition a reality, allowing for the needs of capital to dictate the living conditions of more and more people, subsuming more and more of everyday life.

Cherny hopes that government will change policy to support personal entrepreneurhood: "Health-care and retirement benefits should be made more personalized, portable, affordable, and universal." But as Fox points out, the emergence of the entrepreneurial self undermines the sort of solidarity necessary to lobby the government for this change to be implemented and for fairer tax treatment and the like. "To get us laws that reflect the new workplace reality, Free Agent Nation, by its very nature dispersed and allergic to large organizations, needs to develop a unified voice. Can it?" Fox asks. I'm pretty skeptical that it can; the destruction of such solidarity is almost explicitly the purpose of neoliberal reform, as the attack on public-sector unions' bargaining rights suggests. The goal is to get every person thinking and acting for themselves, which makes them most desperate and vulnerable -- oh, wait, I'm sorry, I meant free and flexible.

Pink, in the Fast Company article, paints a picture of precarity as knowledge workers making a savvy career choice to be independent, outside the corporate box and therefore "authentic." Various interviewees in the article gloat about their blissful work lives, like this serial small-time entrepreneur:

"I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

As Pink stresses, in the neoliberal world, "work is personal" and there are no boundaries separating work and nonwork. This fits with the tendency for our consumption to increasingly serve a productive function in the economy as "immaterial" or "affective" labor, contributing to marketing innovations and enhancing brands' equity and devising new uses for goods, new consumer wants, new ways to get pleasure from spending. As more of our self-presentation can be captured digitally and tracked and amalgamated, particularly through social media and mobile communications, our identities themselves become productive factories of economic value.

Pink assert this sort of thing makes work inseparable from fun. And maybe in a noncapitalist society the disappearance of work-life separation would mean freedom from alienation, pure harmonious praxis, meaningful and recognized work for one's livelihood. But under capitalism, this lack of boundaries yields limitless insecurity, and it leads us to entrepreneurialize ourselves, see ourselves as little firms and work hard to augment our personal brand (which seems to me synonymous with neoliberal subjectivity). Rather than work becoming fun, fun becomes work, and hipsterism in it current guise is born. Our identity work becomes anxious, calculating, inescapably reflexive, the opposite of spontaneous. We become conscious that every little gesture must ideally be turned to account somehow to help us get ahead and protect our standard of living.

I think the rise of social media -- beyond merely mobilizing immaterial labor -- has had a lot to do with structuring, promulgating, and naturalizing the entrepreneurial subjectivity necessary for neoliberalism to function smoothly. They support the concept ideologically and institutionally where government doesn't, giving us a sense that we are capitalizing on ourselves and compensating for the collectivity and security we've lost. So the personal brand supplants the personality or the lifestyle -- terms that horrified earlier generations of social critics worried about commercialized identity. Now we network and self-promote and see this as the extent and purpose of social life. Of course! How else could it be? Why wouldn't we capitalize on our friend quotient, our "social graph" -- why shouldn't we measure ourselves in terms of what we can sell about ourselves? That's now how we discover what is "authentic" about us. It seems that we are approaching a point that only what we can sell or hype about ourselves seems real to ourselves -- only what is retweeted or liked on Facebook speaks to who we really are.

Reverse Schadenfreude and Facebook (27 Jan 2011)

At Slate, Libby Copeland writes about recent psychlogical research that suggests we underestimate other people's misery and overestimate the uniqueness of our own loneliness. The lead researcher, Copeland reports, "got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. 'They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,' he told me."

That certainly captures my typical experience with Facebook -- a vague panic at how much fun everyone is having without me. In my colossal narcissism, I find it particularly troubling to have the concrete evidence in front of me that I am not at the center of everyone else's life and my company is not a prerequisite for their joy. Without Facebook (and other social media) it was much easier for me to put that dismal truth out of my mind. Before social media, what I would know about my friends lives was what they decided to tell me, and that decision alone was enough to make me feel included in the events they described. Finding out about their fun in a status update makes me feel as though I had been deliberately excluded.

The structure of Facebook exacerbates the problem of assessing the true extent of others' happiness by nudging users toward only expressing enthusiasm and optimism -- there is no "I hate" button, no thumbs down. Copeland writes:

By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature.

It's hard to see what she means by "exploit" in this context, because you wouldn't think Facebook wants to make its users miserable. It wants us to be friends, not losers. But exploit may be the perfect word choice, if the best way we can come up with to stifle that feeling of misery is to craft witty and sparkling updates of our own. When we share more, Facebook wins. If it has to count on us vainly trying to sublimate our misery in serial acts of sharing, then so be it.

The ongoing need to counteract each other's apparent joys with expressions of our own would not only produce a negative feedback loop, it would also prompt us to experience a different kind of insecurity about our identity. Copeland points to what Sherry Turkle calls "presentation anxiety" in Alone Together: increasing self-alienation as one self-consciously produces a self online. This is a more acute ramification of the intense reflexivity that sociologist Anthony Giddens, for one, claims is an inescapable condition of modernity. (I wrote about Giddens here.) It's a familiar idea -- identity is destabilized by the waning of tradition and the rise of fashion, and what results is "ontological instability," an ongoing need to posit and refresh oneself. Facebook obviously caters to that condition, and perhaps worsens it in the process, giving it an inescapable concrete foundation. There we can always see in an indelible way how frail and mutable our identities really are, even as our friends' come to seem like demoralizing monoliths of optimism.

Rented friends (6 Oct 2010)

The BBC has an item by Claire Prentice about the emergence of friend-renting services. In the past, these services were often known as escort services and often implied prostitution, or they are known as travel guides. You might be friendly with such people, but friends? With the reification of friendship through online social networks, however, the meaning of the word friend has been denatured and made into an all-purpose synonym for someone with whom you are having any sort of social relation at all, as Prentice notes:

'Friend' has become a word we use unthinkingly and it's almost ruined as a result. It started before we had 'friends' on Facebook whom we've never met.

This has put the concept of friendship as a noncommercial relation motivated entirely by affection under some stress, making such relations seem almost naive or suspect. Friends, in the new dispensation, are, as Prentice points out, "service providers."

Prentice's piece turns on the distinction between rented friends and "regular" friends. One rental friend is quoted as saying, "I'd definitely be open to transitioning from being a rented friend to a regular friend, but I haven't met anyone I like enough to do that yet." I just can't conceive of a situation where such a transition is possible. You proclaim yourself outside the boundaries of friendship once you take money to consent to be in another person's presence, once you pretend to like them for profit. A regular friend is someone who has earned your trust and attention and affection through reciprocal acts. Renting a friend removes reciprocation for both parties and ushers them into the realm of commercial exchange, where the contract is governed by the principles of getting the best bargain. The rented friend expects someone else to pay her for an option on friendship that she holds the right to exercise.

Are people that desperate and deluded? Do they think, "If only I get my foot in the door with a stranger, she will recognize what a good person I am and want to get to know me for free"? The cash payment then serves as a way to circumvent the awkwardness of initiating contact, of risking oneself (that precious commodity, that carefully tended brand) in reaching out to a guarded stranger. But that awkwardness can't be priced in cash; it's nonfungibility is what gives it value as a marker of true vulnerability, the prerequisite to "regular" friendship. The riskless alternative is something resembling friendship, perhaps, and maybe it beats being alone, but you have to risk something intrinsic to secure a true friend. But in the era of hyper-conscious self-construction and externalized identity building, the question, though, is rapidly becoming whether we have anything intrinsic left. Does anything about our "self" seem essential remain, something we couldn't possibly lose or remake, that we can offer in a gesture of pure friendship? I think that when we reify our identity in various ways online, it makes such intrinsic character harder to recognize in ourselves.

"Engagement Ads" on Facebook (28 Sept 2010)

Brad Stone's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Facebook's advertising strategies gets at several different ways that marketing through social media is nefarious. It's moving beyond the already creepy technique of silently scanning your data trail (far more intimate, presumably, in the Facebook realm) and presenting you with ads that it predicts will be relevant to you. Since it has so much more data on you, it can refine its target on you, hit you square between the eyes.

Facebook takes targeting even further. If you recently got engaged and updated your Facebook status to reflect it, you might start seeing ads from jewelers in your hometown. They've likely used Facebook's automated ad system to target recently engaged couples living in the area. If your profile mentions your appreciation for old-school hip-hop, the right local wedding DJ can find you, too.

Those who are looking to be sold to may enjoy this experience, even though giving in to predictive marketing essentially means closing off certain horizons while having them superficially broadened. If you accept that identity has become a matter of consumer practices and what niche we find ourselves in, then you have to accept the conclusion that the data trail we create online can hem us in and trap us, restricting our ability to deniche-ify ourselves. I can imagine a future service that "likes" a bunch of random things and browses through a bunch of random sites on our behalf to throw off the ad targeting -- in the same way those tags you can put in your Gmail email (words like murder and funeral) can shut down the contextual ads. (One could theoretically browse in "private" mode and eschew social media, but then one risks becoming an outcast. All those people who send out invites to things only through Facebook are dragging all their friends into the marketing cesspool, and normalizing the whole sordid process.) But right now, our past history becomes inescapable, shaping the contours of the online experience we can have, which more and more shapes the kind of life experience we can have generally, limiting what we know about, what we do and how we are seen and what we accomplish.

But it gets even more depressing than that. Facebook wants its ad system work (which, by the way, you cannot opt out of no matter how you jigger its byzantine privacy settings) by making one's friends seem like the marketers rather than the companies buying the ad space.

[Facebook] talks up more ephemeral measures such as recall and brand recognition, which it argues can be boosted by social activity that occurs around an ad. Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

I have a tendency to "share" things in Google Reader when they seem provocative to me, and I suppose that is not that different from "liking" a Nike ad in Facebook. By sharing those posts I think I am trying to extenuate or complicate or further arguments I have written about before that I think anyone who bothers to follow my shared items would also be interested in. But I also have this uncharitable suspicion that people, including me, "like" and "share" things to publicize their gesture of liking and score some general recognition for their good taste. To some degree, they are promoting themselves through these likable things rather than the things in question. This is how social media works to exploit our identity-making process, to extract productive labor out of our ontological insecurity in ways never before possible. The more we construct ourselves in social media (a move becoming more and more necessary), the more we have to rely on liking and sharing as the building blocks of the self, and these building blocks automatically becoming marketing gestures. And the fact that everyone knows they are marketing gestures reflects back on the self we build, commercializing it, opening up to the sort of judgment we reserve for corporations or other strictly profit-seeking entities. That's another way of saying that making a self in social media instrumentalizes it to an unprecedented degree.

Social media generally diminishes what it means to belong to a community. "Likes" for instance are effort-free gestures of faux reciprocity, casually recognizing someone else's sharing, which itself is often automated by the medium itself. As Jodi Dean points out in this post, social networks are "community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when you've moved on!)." Facebook is essentially a "consumer space" where the contacts between people are engineered to be convenient and more or less friction free, and without that friction, there is no true possibility of building solidarity or political engagement -- a point Malcolm Gladwell makes in this New Yorker piece. He argues that the "weak ties" of social media are not conducive to activist commitment, which requires the strong ties of true intimacy. Gladwell:

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

The increasingly commercial and instrumental world of social networks is not likely to inspire you to die for a cause; you won't risk a police beating in hopes that someone will "like" your sacrifice. And someone who "likes" a Nike ad as well as a protest march is unlikely to inspire to many people either. The "like" draws a demeaning and diminishing equivalence between different orders of experience. This is one of Facebook's chief accomplishments, to reduce all sorts of different aspects of social life to a uniform pap that can be liked or unliked. This makes participation trivial enough that people will market for companies for free, because there's an outside chance someone will think they are cooler for doing it. And participation of this sort seems so ephemeral that it does not dent one's social capital at all; it doesn't cost anything. Social media, as Gladwell points out, offers a

form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Activism on social media is indistinguishable from self-promotion and congratulatory participation at a distance. It lowers the bar for that feeling of doing something about some sort of injustice. We all can feel like we're making a difference without looking away from our phone. Individual agency gets supplanted by a collective relay of buck-passing referrals until someone else at some point actually does something about it.

But what depresses me most of all about Facebook's "engagement ads" is how they threaten to shift the modus operandi of advertising practice generally.

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

The ads are meant to be no different than your friend's status updates -- it's all just social-media content. So there is no separation between the edit and ad sides, as they say in the magazine-publishing business -- no suspicion that there is any conflict of interest or pretense of neutrality or objectivity. So to extent what may be a useless metaphor, our identity, as it's constructed in social media, is not "pure edit" content, it's not objective but can be seen as having been co-opted by the advertising it sponsors. The self consists of the same "content" as the ads; there's no wall between the self doing the "liking" and the stuff "liked". Not surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg strongly endorses this approach:

Zuckerberg says that ads, just like videos and news links, make it into the main stream of activity only when friends want to share them. "The most important thing for ads is that they work in the same way as everything else on the site," he says.

In other words, ads should by design be indistinguishable from non-ad content; that is, all content should be subject to the suspicion that it is an ad; that is, everything is an ad and why should that even bother you? It's the attention economy, and everything you do is just a ploy for "earning" more attention. Nothing can be for its own sake anymore. Why waste a good marketing opportunity, a chance for engagement? What else are friends for if not to leverage them?

Fake friends (1 Jan 2010)

William Deresiewicz has an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that provides a broad-stroke picture of the history of friendship in the Western world before zeroing in on a favorite Marginal Utility topic, how social networking is the opposite of friendship. The critique feels a little dated, since the plague of social networking has been with us for a few years now, but Deresiewicz adds a few new variations to the familiar theme.

1. I like how Deresiewicz puts friendship on a continuum with community and suggests that we are slowly peeling away layers of the social onion, and will continue until we are totally isolated by communication technology.

As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.

"Connection" has been flattened, become something that can be signified rather than necessarily experienced. If someone adds us as friend, "connection" is signified, even if the parties involved haven't had any direct contact at all. It has become a "sense," a derivative of itself. Real connection is not necessary to the signified "connection."

2. I often make the point that social networking is like ham radio, that it is broadcasting. Deresiewicz comes to the same conclusion and emphasizes how this reduces our friends to an audience.

Now we're just broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

Our desire for the unmediated reciprocity of friendship is being edged out by a new possibility -- quantifiable attention that delimits our public notoriety. Recognition gets commoditized through social networks, becomes something tradeable as opposed to something that emerges as a by-product of time spent with another person. We simply announce our identity using the new media tools and wait for anyone to notice and validate it. It no longer matters if that proclaimed identity matches how we actually behave over stretches of time.

3. Friendship, commodified by being mediated, presents the same problems as the superfluity of consumer goods. We have access to more goods then ever, but have never felt so bereft. It's never been easier to be "in contact" with other people, but we are lonilier than ever. A paradox sets in: "The more people we know, the lonelier we get."

4.Our online presence must conform to the social networking medium, which distorts who we are and who our friends appear to be in the medium. Trying to use Facebook, Deresiewicz laments

the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.

Social networking lets us focus entirely on self-fashioning and identity-mongering as species of human capital, as productive immaterial labor. We have to keep reinventing ourselves, to keep identity signifers circulating to enhance their value. The developing real-time components of social networks accommodate this serial publishing of new editions of ourselves. Seen from the outside, Facebook is an alienation machine, forcing us to make ourselves repeatedly strange in the effort to capture some new catchy essence of ourselves to market.

5. Deresiewicz says this of those odd random people who come out of the past to friend us out of the blue:

They don't matter to you as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your life, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of that texture—read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation—and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your 18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should not know them.
Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory.

Facebook is a false utopia, based on the idea that we never outgrown anyone, that friendships never really end but can be relived and consumed again like old TV shows. Inthat fase fantasy, friendships are not reciprocal but something we engage in passively. Chasing that dream flattens out memory, indulges nostalgia until everything once precious becomes trivia.

6. The crux of social networking is naturalizing the idea that identity is nothing more than consumer preferences. Then it entices us to elaborate ourselves in those terms, enhancing the value of various brands and commercial services. Social networks encourage us to think that

identity is reducible to information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid thing you did in seventh grade.... that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we're all conducting market research on ourselves. Far worse is that Facebook amplifies our longstanding tendency to see ourselves ("I'm a Skin Bracer man!") in just those terms.

Baudrillard foresaw this in the early 1970s, extrapolating from the consumer society's "system of objects" the inevitability that we would reduce ourselves to the code of signifiers. AT that point every attempt to escape is just another signifying gesture of neutralized rebellion.

7. The contrast between mediated "friendship" and the sort of friendship that is disappearing:

Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too.

Consuming the personal information is like consuming pornography as well -- done alone in front of a screen, an indulgence of idle curiosity on one's own terms entirely, with no emotional investment. This is how friendship is sacrificed to the god of convenience.

The Facebook "lobster trap" (24 July 2009)

It's foolish to say this without data to back it up, but it feels as though the Facebook fad is losing steam. Critiques of the business model -- that it's somewhat unseemly to allow a third party to monetize your friends, that it's creepy to have your social life surveilled directly by marketers, that once you deploy intrusive advertising on your site you become more of a rent-seeker rather than a service provider -- seem to be taking hold and are becoming almost commonplace. And people don't seem to be as insistent and enthusiastic about others using it. Maybe it has integrated itself into people's lives to the degree that they don't mention it anymore. The opposite happened with me -- I felt browbeaten into logging on to Facebook every day or so for a period of a couple weeks, then slowly I forgot about my own account with the site and went back to thinking of Facebook as an abstract evil that others are caught up in. It failed to integrate itself into my everyday life, didn't prove irreversibly useful. This may be because I am unusually antisocial, but I have this hope that my experience mirrors that of many social-network dabblers.

The site seemed a place to turn in anxious moments of loneliness or existential vertigo for pseudo-sociality and pseudo-connectedness; it was a place to turn to relieve the sense of being hopelessly mired in ourselves how we are and do some illusory work on our own characters instead by fine-tuning some settings, making some updates, passing some surreptitious judgment on those friends of ours who seem, judging by their updates, to be even more desperate than we are. Of course you'd have to sort through the chipper updates from the pathologically narcissistic who evince absolutely no trace of self-doubt or troubled introspection, but they made for a bracing backdrop; they set up a kind of grim ideal for what we'd have to eventually become, or else. But now it is starting to seem like that the threat of that dystopia is receding.
Anyway, Kottke linked to this piece by Michael C. Gilbert about Facebook, and reading it felt blessedly like received wisdom, all of a sudden. Offering advice to nonprofits, Gilbert likens Facebook to the pre-industrial-revolution practice of enclosure, by which the commons were privatized so they could be harnessed to capitalist ends and be made more reliably "productive." Gilbert argues that, "The acts of enclosure of the information age are about social assets, they are subtle and invisible, and they are being implemented, to a large degree, by peer pressure." His analysis of the Facebook "lobster trap" is astute:

This walled-off nature has three interesting layers to it. First, it's hard to get your content out of Facebook once you put it in. When someone figured out how to create a simple outbound RSS feed of your own updates, Facebook managers blocked it. You can't just export all your content in a form you can use elsewhere, without going to a lot of trouble. Facebook is a content management system (CMS), among other things, and should be evaluated by any responsible organization just like any other CMS, including interoperability and exit costs. Second, the more content you put into Facebook, especially if it's in a form that people can't get elsewhere, the more you're serving as Facebook bait yourself. It's even worse if you start inviting your stakeholders there directly. All the same exit costs apply at this level as well, only multiplied by the difficulty of being bound by expectation that it's inside Facebook that you'll connect with your stakeholders and them with each other. Third, this scales up to entire social networks and communities. If everyone's friends are at the mall, then we'll abandon the public spaces as well. That's enclosure.

If information wants to be free, as the technoutopians argue, then Facebook should be as doomed as Compuserve. An open-source version of the modest services it proides may come along at any minute and wipe it out -- it will just be a matter of getting everyone to go to the trouble of setting up networks again. Facebook will fight like mad to keep your networks proprietary to itself, making overt the essential problem: Facebook needs to act like it owns us and our friends in order to "serve" us.

Obviously Gilbert is skeptical of the similar bargain Facebook offers nonprofits: "When you invite your stakeholders to join Facebook, you're handing over your list to a company that will provide them some useful web-based tools, expose them to other companies (advertisers) that will try to sell things to them. And you don't get a cut. That's better, right?" So he sensibly advises that groups make the structure of their social networks explicit in such a way that prevents Facebook from owning the infrastructure. "Always work to make your network's social maps more generally visible. In other words, one of Facebook's strong features is being able to meet friends of friends. In the case of your networks, don't let Facebook be the only place that happens." This seems like good advice for everyone.

Necessary awkwardness (8 April 2009)

Vanessa Grigoriadis's carefully balanced article in New York magazine about Facebook basically boils down to this: The social networking thing is neat for people in their 30s because they get to find lost loves, etc., but then it gets kind of boring and/or creepy. As I was reading it, I had a strong impulse to destroy the Facebook profile I have. I don't really use it for anything. It's more of a post-office box I check now and then to see if anyone surprising has thought about me. Am I using it wrong?

I'm not sure if it makes more sense to not log in very much or not have a profile altogether; I don't want to be invisible to the people who might try to find me on the site, but I don't want to be responsible for updating it, nor do I want it to fall out of date altogether. But the idea of "sharing" on it -- well described by Grigoriadis as "the most important Newspeak word in the Facebook lexicon, an infantilizing phrase whose far less cozy synonym is 'uploading data' " -- is pretty off-putting to me. My writing here, though I sometimes draw on personal details, is ultimately meant to be impersonal. At least I hope it's interesting to people who don't know anything about me. But if I were updating Facebook, I would feel as though I was rubbing people's noses in the glory of my life, such as it is. Perhaps I would rather share time with people than information -- or would rather that the information shared emerged from a reciprocal, real-time exchange, not from a mediated broadcast.

I can't say I derive much voyeuristic pleasure from Facebook either, the sort that Grigoriadis describes. It all makes me feel uncomfortable. Information that is thrown at me without context, with Twitter-like brevity, doesn't feel like "ambient presence"; it seems like irritating static. And it has tended to diminish my memories of the people, who before Facebook's advent, I used to wonder about. Now that I can find out what they have been doing, I already sort of know, and it's dull. They are living their lives without reference to me, of course, but they are seeming to force me to know about it, and the only way I can fight back is with broadcasts of my own. But then I'd just be perpetuating the spiral. I guess I'm selfish like that. I want messages tailored to me personally; I don't want the every-hour equivalent of the mass-mailing Christmas card.

It's a bit like being trapped at an elementary school talent show (though that might be the most patronizing thing I have ever written). People seem to be trying to hard, or are entirely unaware that they should be trying, or -- like me -- they have just frozen up there on the stage. Or to use a slightly different metaphor, Facebook is like being at one of those theatrical performances in which there is surprise audience participation. I find this incredibly embarrassing, no matter who is induced to participate.

But what really bothers me about social networking is something that Grigoriadis celebrates (though maybe it's just a rhetorical strategy to achieve that balance): the way it trivializes intimacy.

This is part of the magic of Facebook, where many actions that take on weight in the real world simply don’t pack the same punch: You can reconnect with long-lost friends without a gooey, uncomfortable e-mail about why you grew apart; you can forget to return Facebook e-mail and nobody minds; you can click obsessively on someone’s profile and there’s no way for him to know it.

But maybe we shouldn't blow off the attempts people make to communicate with us or have a service to make us feel okay about it. If it's okay if someone doesn't respond when we try to reach them, than that communication is taking place within a vacuum; it's not meant as communication at all but is instead a posture, a pose. Look at me, reaching out to you. And also, without the gooey emails Grigoriadis spits on here, the reconnection between old "friends" is merely nominal; it's a pretense, a fantasy, insignificant. And sadly, it precludes the possibility that the gooey email will ever be written. Without such communication, the world -- the "social graph," as Facebook's executives like to call it -- is diminished. Yet Facebook seems to exist precisely to obviate awkward discourse.

But awkwardness is inescapably necessary. It's an almost physiological signal that something emotionally significant is taking place. If Facebook eradicates such feelings by giving us such granular privacy controls that we prevent the possibility of embarrassment, then our lives become poorer, emotionally. The people we connect with through the site seem less than real people; they seem like shadows of the real people we thought we knew -- the reality of these "friends" remains offline and even more inaccessible. In the place of intimacy, we have the more convenient alternative of user friendliness, the triumph of a new, corporate-mediated politesse.

Failures of social media (13 March 2009)

Danah Boyd, who has recently completed a dissertation about social networking, distills her conclusions in this lecture. Her academically oriented perspective is extremely useful in filtering out the hype about social networking driven by its commercial potential, and looking at it more as a social practice -- what needs has it served, what needs has it created, and how thoroughly have we assimilated the technology that makes it possible. Are they more than online friend-management services? Are they altering the category of friendship itself?

Boyd regards social media as being born primarily to provide virtual spaces for young people to interact -- places where people can show off and secure recognition, and where friend groups can be defined and police their boundaries. The influx of adults into social media shifts the emphasize toward commercial purposes -- self-promotion and networking -- and toward nostalgia. Hence the rolling (and unsettling) high-school reunion that Facebook is for people my age. Boyd's point is that network effects fuel social media's growth. We join if we think people from our high school are there (whether we are in high school now or were 25 years ago -- no wonder it seems so adolescent) and maybe want to contact us. For adults, at least, the momentum of a network's expansion seems crucial; the experience of being caught up in one as it expands exponentially is a heady experience -- as we intuit when some forgotten person from the past contacts us. But this momentum is unsustainable -- eventually it levels off. Does that take away the thrill of social networks with it?

It's not clear whether the network effects of using social media have any durability, whether they are generated not by the experience of using social media but by the hype surrounding it. Users have tended to migrate from site to site as new services become more fashionable and old services become overpopulated with lame late adopters or worse, too many of those people who cause "contexts to collide": As Boyd explains, "In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood." When your current friends get to see how you interact with people who knew you decades ago, or when parents can scrutinize profile pages looking for insight into their children's social life apart from them, it can be problematic. The sites try to come up with ever-more-fine privacy controls, but these make using sites onerous and slip-ups are inevitable. The safest things to do are to move elsewhere or cease sharing -- then the network effects that sustain social media can disintegrate.

Boyd isolates some characteristics that make mediated friendship distinctive and which make these sites, in my opinion, inherently unstable:

1. Persistence. What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronicity, not so great when everything you've ever said has gone down on your permanent record. The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.

2. Replicability. You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it. This is great for being able to share information, but it is also at the crux of rumor-spreading. Worse: while you can replicate a conversation, it's much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.

3. Searchability. My mother would've loved to scream search into the air and figure out where I'd run off with friends. She couldn't; I'm quite thankful. But with social media, it's quite easy to track someone down or to find someone as a result of searching for content. Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips. This is great in some circumstances, but when trying to avoid those who hold power over you, it may be less than ideal.

4. Scalability. Social media scales things in new ways. Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school or, if it is especially embarrassing, the whole world. Of course, just because something can scale doesn't mean that it will. Politicians and marketers have learned this one the hard way.

5. (de)locatability. With the mobile, you are dislocated from any particular point in space, but at the same time, location-based technologies make location much more relevant. This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.

All the characteristics on this list are fleeting advantages that eventually become liabilities, at which point users have incentive to light out for the territories -- head for a new, more exclusive site and build up network effects again. And online, there is always more undiscovered territory.

Giving up friendship for Lent (25 Feb 2009)

Some Ash Wednesday-inspired blogging: At PSFK, Dan Gould points to a few articles (here's one from WSJ, one from CNN, one from Cnet) about people giving up Facebook for Lent. At the very least, this suggests the ambivalence people feel about using the site. They consider it a sort of vice, but worry that they will lose friends if they don't participate in it -- that their social life can't continue normally at this point without Facebook's mediation. (Luckily, there's a support group to help with Facebook withdrawal -- on Facebook.)

What makes Facebook an entirely appropriate thing to give up, aside from its creepy voyeuristic element, is how convenient it makes friendship maintenance feel -- it removes the requirement of attentive presence, of real-time reciprocity. This clearly still feels weird enough to people to seem vaguely sinful, a retreat from real life into an addictive fantasy world. Consider this, from the WSJ story:

Ms. Wentland paused to ponder the point of such ephemeral connections. They were fun, yes, but they took up more time than she cared to calculate. It had been ages since she'd sat on the floor and played trains with her six-year-old son or baked cookies with her three-year-old daughter.
"I have a real life here, with children, a husband and a job. They need my attention and energy," Ms. Wentland says.

But it probably won't feel wrong like that for much longer, as the attitude toward social networks of the tweens and teens now growing up with it becomes the norm. The idea of giving up Facebook for Lent may seem as crazy as giving up friendship itself for Lent a few years from now. (And then we'll know for sure that friendship has become fully integrated into the culture industry-media company-telecom nexus.)

It's worth considering, though, whether it's a good idea to have so much of our personal life and well-being riding on what's a commercial site (one that has yet to turn a profit). In theory, it could simply close down one day and then we'd all be friendless, I suppose. Or we'll have an experience similar to this rather casuistic college student quoted in the WSJ story:

College students who have abstained from Facebook for Lent in recent years say it was brutal, but valuable. Whitley Leiss, now a junior at Texas Christian University, slipped up only once, on her birthday, when she was desperate to see the well-wishes posted for her. She asked a roommate to log into her account and read them aloud while she averted her eyes from the screen. When Lent ended, she logged on to find dozens of messages waiting and strangely little desire to answer them.
"I saw all that I had missed," Ms. Leiss said. "And I realized I hadn't missed anything." She also learned, she says, who her true friends were -- those who would take the radically retro step of calling or emailing to stay in touch.

As much as I sympathize with the idea that "true friends" transcend Facebook, it seems an arbitrary distinction. There's something unfriendly-like about making everyone else accommodate one's own self-imposed restriction. Imagine if she decided not to answer the phone for Lent, and then waited for her true friends to come knocking on her door. Facebook is just a means of communication, albeit an insidious and totalizing one that aims to conform the nature of friendship to suit its commercial purposes. But it wouldn't have any traction if people didn't want some measure of that conforming to take place. We want a kind of rolling yearbook for our lives, and a central dumping ground for our life updates so everyone can see them if they choose, but we don't necessarily want our friend network being leveraged as a means for targeting ads at us and our loved ones, or being strip-mined for entertaining reality-entertainment content that makes a profit for someone else. (Whether social networks can exist without promoting the temptation to manage friends like one would a iTunes playlist is another question.) Perhaps a more sophisticated, noncommercial social network will come into being that will enable us to extract the useful features of Facebook from the invasive, controlling, reifying, commercializing aspects. And then no one would ever even think to give it up this new service for Lent.

Telesociality (24 Feb 2009)

I've mentioned here before that Twitter seems like the perfect advertising medium; it distills all communication to the level of the slogan, making advertising messages fit right in among the messages from our friends and "followers". For Twitter to make any sense, one has to use it constantly -- so it supplies the eyeballs advertisers are after. And since it is liable to be integrated with social media, the stream of ads can be hyperpersonalized so that we end up reading them rather than filtering them out. If you think ads are just useful and timely information about how to satisfy our wants, you are probably relishing this future; if you think that ads make up an insecurity-generating discourse designed to obscure our desires from ourselves, this future is somewhat less appealing.

Anyway, I was surprised to find how many people in the ad business hate it. (But then, any right-thinking person in the ad business generally hates themselves as well.) Consider this post, by ad consultant George Parker. Or this one, titled "Twitter This You Douchenozzles!"

And, via this AdPulp post, these posts by ad exec Bob Hoffman. They are full of extremely entertaining bile and skepticism regarding the transformational potential of Twitter ("It's how the narcissistic keep in touch with the feckless") and social media generally, which he recognizes are "inherently anti-social". Noting the idiocy of Twestivals, at which the attendees "didn't have the social skills to say hello and instead communicated with each other at the event via Twitter," Hoffman argues that social media

are telesocial. The prefix 'tele' means 'happening at a distance' -- as in television, telegram, telecommunications. Social media are pseudo-personal interactions happening at a distance.

This seems a bit self-evident; really what he is saying is that social media is a form of telecommunication, not a superior replacement for it. The big innovation in this new mode of telecommunication is that it does away with real-time reciprocity.

Hoffman argues that Twitter allows you an ersatz sense of belonging:

I've always loved the promise implicit in the magazine Us.
Who is Us?
Brad and Jen and Angelique and Paris and Oprah and Brit and You. Yes, you! You are part of one big connected group of celebrities. Don't think you're special or important? Think you're a pathetic loser? Nonsense! You're one of Us! Come over here and let me give you a hug. Oh, and while you're here, that'll be 4 dollars, please.
Twitter is digital Us.

That seems right, and it fits in with the way online sociality has destroyed our sense of what makes for a realistic scale for our social being. We feel obliged to try to gain recognition on a global scale rather than a local one, and our expectations for that recognition need not be conditioned by any limitations inherent to our geographic community. That sounds like theoretical gobbledy-gook, so let me try to explain that a different way. The appeal of self-broacdasting identity online, of Twittering and being "followed," is that we can feel like celebrities and imagine the natural audience for our high jinks is the entire world rather than, say, the people who share our household or work with us or live on our block or what have you. This initially seems like a good thing, because it holds out the promise that we can craft communities ideally suited to us online rather than deal with the one we were born into in the physical world. But dealing with the contingencies of that real world may be what allows us to grow into a mature self and set realistic goals and limits and put an end to chronic dissatisfaction and restless yearning for impossibilities. If there were some online/offline balance that was easy to strike, the aggrandizing tendencies of online sociality wouldn't matter so much, only technological developments seem to be pushing in the direction of supplanting real-world socializing with online self-absorption, exploiting the desire for convenience (not having to deal with other people's crap) that is perfectly natural when the local community sets inescapable limits on our selfishness, i.e. when we can't escape a certain amount of dealing wiht other people, but becomes creepy when that limit has been eroded. It's easier to manage friendships online and treat friends as our fans than it is to make the mundane efforts of actually being friends with them -- scheduling time to spend with them and actually being present with them without multitasking.

Manufacturing loneliness (11 Feb 2009)

"The End of Solitude," William Deresiewicz's recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, is well worth reading, though I probably would have given it the title I gave this post. Deresiewicz's argument (simplified for effect) is that just as TV prepares us to be bored, the internet intensifies our loneliness.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that solitude is this cherished opportunity for soulful meditation that we are tragically losing, but I think there's also something snobbish in that framing -- maybe because it is associated with ultra-egotist Romantic poets like Wordsworth. (A love of solitude can sometimes seem to imply that one feels an inherent superiority that makes the company of others tiresome.) It seems bogus to presume that only in solitude is wisdom hatched, as Thoreau's example is used to demonstrate. It's a species of the great man theory of history, that presumes geniuses operate in isolation to shape the destiny of worlds. It seems more likely that social frictions produce ideas that individuals express and take credit for. Maybe solitude is necessary for noticing those frictions and framing coherent thoughts about them, but the romantic idea of people getting in touch with their real selves outside of society is pure ideology.

Besides, solitude is not simply available for the choosing for everyone -- as Virgina Woolf pointed out, a room of one's own is a privilege. An ability to appreciate solitude in the high-minded sense is probably a part of the habitus of the middle and upper classes. There's an art to being alone. It's often an elegant pose.

The problem is less that we don't respect the concept of solitude anymore and more that the internet makes us self-conscious about our pseudocelebrity; it invites us to imagine we are celebrities and distorts our relationships accordingly. We start to scheme for recognition rather than rest more comfortably in the recognition we are already receiving from those close to us.

Anyway, Deresiewicz wants to divide the recent past into eras based on technology.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.)

As for the theorists who have been banished to obscurity by the passive voice in that parenthetical, I assume that Deresiewicz has in mind sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, who argued in Distinction that "the ethic of liberation" may be "supplying the economy with the perfect consumer." These consumers "are isolated...and therefore free (or forced) to confront in extended order the separate markets ("juniors," "teenagers," "senior citizens," etc.) of the new economic order and untrammeled by the constraints and brakes imposed by collective memories and expectations" -- traditions from family life and that sort of thing. That seems right to me -- the status hierarchy, confronted with emerging consumerism and democracy, yielded a situation in which marketers could exploit the idea of liberation to leverage insecurity. The migration of sociality to the internet is giving them a new playing field, a way to make us feel lonely in the midst of more communication than ever.

Deresiewicz continues:

So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Why? Deresiewicz is not clear on this point, but I would chalk it up to technophilia, expediency, and social norms that have evolved to reproduce consumerism. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel lonely, since loneliness creates a market for communications.)

At some point, if this line of argument is correct, the capabilities of a particular technology begin to be experienced by users as a kind of compulsion, a command. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren't, it can begin to feel like a slight. Let's say you post a comment on a friend's Facebook status update and they don't acknowledge it, even though you can see they are online. You shouldn't take that personally, but I know I would. It's one of the things that makes social networking hard for me. It's bad enough checking an email inbox. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. I see that someone I hardly know but have friended on Facebook is online, and I have this awful urge to write a new update, just to see if they'll notice. This feeling is what I understand Deresiewicz to be talking about when he talks about manufactured loneliness.

The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone.

Deresiewicz rightly points out how the internet once relieved feelings of social isolation for misfits. And refuges still exist where people can find each other. But social networks seem to undermine that kind of alternative connection, importing the norms of high school to the online space that once afforded an escape. At the same time, real loneliness -- the soul-sapping sense that there is no one to share your thoughts, your life with -- is trivialized by the new loneliness, of not getting a text from your BFFs every five minutes and not having enough followers on Twitter. Worse, Twitter and Facebook are tacitly offered to us as cures for real loneliness, with the implication that if you still feel lonely despite these great commercial social-networking tools, there must really be something wrong with you.

Facebook holdouts (21 Jan 2009)

In a patronizing piece of pseudo-sage advice, Slate tech columnist Fahrad Manjoo tells us to get over ourselves and just join Facebook. Everybody's doing it, and the law of network effects demands that you follow through and get with the program.

Whenever network effects are invoked -- the more people who use something, the better it becomes for all users -- there always seems to be implied coercion. (I'm remembering my father and many others insisting that I must get a cell phone, since they all had them and expected me to be subject to the same perpetual availablility.) Often, as in Manjoo's piece, the coercion manifests as an accusation of snobbery and elitism.

I was reminded of a quote from an Onion story, "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a Television": "I'm not an elitist. It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."
Friends—can I call you friends?—it's time to drop the attitude: There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook. The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant.

Ordinary people use antiperspirant and Facebook, therefore you should too, unless you vainly think you are extraordinary. Just as, according to Manjoo, it is now "an affectation not to carry a mobile phone," it has become false and phony not to go along and get along, and maintain a Facebook account, where your self-constructed identity can be made more accessible and public domain, open to penetration by a variety of marketing efforts and data-collection initiatives. Of course, Manjoo insists that the "finely grained privacy controls" allow users to make of Facebook what they want, and insulate themselves as much as they find necessary. Somehow that network of controls, maintained ultimately by the company itself, is in Manjoo's estimation preferable to the ultimate control we can seize for ourselves by simple nonparticipation. But now Facebook is the "Wikipedia of people," (I thought Wikipedia already included people. Hmm) and failing to list ourselves is counterproductive to our own interests. And without "ambient awareness" of our friends, we will lose touch with them -- we'll cease to know them by the standards of friendship that Facebook has ushered in. Manjoo explains the New Friendship this way: "Just as you can sense his mood from the rhythm of his breathing, sighing, and swearing, you can get the broad outlines of his life from short updates, making for a deeper conversation the next time you do meet up."

But why bother meeting at all? Through the magic of ambient awareness, I can have friends on my time, while I'm multitasking. Rather than muster the concentration for a reciprocal exchange with a particular friend, I can blast out an update or a funny picture or my wry commentary on a link. (Kind of like I do on this blog -- hello, friends!) Ambient awareness seems a lot like selective attention, the ideal relationship mode for overcommitted, self-centered people. Facebook allows us to follow one another as though we are all celebrities, to be regarded admiringly from afar. Such admiration requires no direct interaction, just updating. The friend-friend relation is transformed into a celebrity-fan relation, and we flip-flop between those distinct fantasies, enjoying the vicariousness and the voyeurism on one hand, and the egomania on the other. As American Scene contributor Matt Frost puts it, "Facebook is like a breeder reactor of solipsistic fatuity."

Frost's analysis of the difference between blogging and updating Facebook is apropos:

A good blogger lives in constructive fear of two things: writing for everyone, and writing for no one. Recognizing that your boss, your kids, or even your future self will be able to read your work long after you’ve written it should impose some temperance and moderation, while the knowledge that every one of your readers could simply opt out should encourage selectivity and creativity. Facebook, however, smashes both of these healthy constraints to self-expression. The semi-captive audience of all those friends fosters the illusion that somebody cares what you had for breakfast, while the exclusivity of the network implies that your more ill-considered announcements will be charitably received. Reading the status updates of long-lost friends and acquaintances convinced me I’d like them better if they stayed lost for longer.

Ouch. But memory does a much better job of bringing to our minds what we want to think of people we have known than a Facebook page does. Facebook is an assault on memory.

Friendship as media (23 Nov 2008)

More of my friends are finding the time to get on Facebook, prompting various nostalgia trips as people from the past reconnect. This seems benign enough, but it's a little strange that the technological means makes possible a relationship that everyone involved in was happy enough to abandon to the mists of time. It's like Facebook has more at stake in that revived connection than the individuals reconnecting do -- and maybe that's true.

Actually, this seems like the essential bargain Facebook presents us with. It will facilitate our illusions of friendship and connection by making such social contact nearly effortless and highly insulated. We can broadcast gossip about ourselves and present ourselves in a flattering light and make contact with people we had forgotten about just by going to the site. It maintains our friendships for us by storing a configuration of the network of all the people who have ever mattered to us while exempting us from that particular effort that we had already, in fact, stopped bothering to make.

So we get friendship without the trouble of having to put effort into the relationships. It's friendship rendered convenient through technology, and the convenience to a degree denatures the original significance -- isn't the substance of relationships ultimately anchored in the effort we feel ourselves putting in? (Or am I simply mystifying the ideal of working at things?)

In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then processes the data interrelationships to guide the process of how we subsequently develop our identities through its site. Since it is mediating our friendships, and in effect making the effort for us, it is also directing what the fruits of that effort will be, supplying the framework through which friendships develop and making itself the very medium of friendship.

At that point, Facebook succeeds into making friendship a consumption product, and itself as the service provider. The other friends we have through it, on the other side the screen, are the product it marshals for us. And our consumption of Facebook, rather than the actual experience of friendship with all the effort that would otherwise require, now shapes our personalities -- in accordance with the commercial goals it has set out for ourselves. In that way, it isolates us more by promising to mediate our connections with the rest of the world. It deprives us of the option to make more effort, and make our social efforts more meaningful. Is this too pessimistic?

Broadcasting the self (8 Sept. 2008)

This Sunday, the NYT Magazine had a piece by Clive Thompson about Facebook's news feed feature, which broadcasts a user's profile activity as a stream of syndicated updates to selected people in the user's network. Thompson explains how the feature initially raised privacy concerns, but then users seized upon it as a convenient new form of maintaining intimacy without the nuisance of actual interaction. One could keep up with friends the way one keeps up with blogs in Google Reader -- hurriedly, casually. (This morning I plowed through 100 posts, all of them seemingly about the atrocious unemployment reports and the long-anticipated government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) He then relates the phenomenon to microblogging services like Twitter and other applications that automatically chronicle and broadcasts one's activities.

The applications -- sometimes with our voluntarily assistance, sometimes not -- do a good job of transforming our life into digital information that is easy to manipulate, heightening our "presence" online and make our shadowy self there seem more concrete. We fix our identity in a forum of public surveillance, to make it seem more authentic, more fixed. The price we pay for this is that identity becomes delineated by the categories most conducive to digital transmission: Twitter epigrams; lists of our favorite bits of culture; short videos of ourselves; etc.

As we generate more data that is captured and rebroadcast, we seem to take on more substance and become more significant -- especially considering the way in which that data is processed to direct targeted advertising appeals and other forms of recognition from our actual friends our way. It's easy to imagine a scenario when the recognition from the ad groups supplants our interest in friends' approval. Marketers can be better than friends because they will pay us -- as the buzz marketing firms already do to spread idle chatter about products. At Mind Hacks, Vaughan Bell posits the possibility that advertisers will find the most popular people within specifically defined networks and pay them to host relevant ads on their profiles.

You could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie. Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity. Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

So Facebook and like technologies will allow us to leverage our friends into sponsorships, and our sponsors will perhaps become our real friends, when our former friends perhaps begin to regard us as just an extension (maybe useful, maybe not) of that commercial world. And it's worth nothing too -- "better still," as Bell says -- that we will all be in competition with one another to establish our dominance within networks and secure the ad dollars that end up being pumped into it. Maybe this kind of alpha-dog thing happens automatically, but the incursion of commercial interests will make the competition explicit, introduce the wonders of capitalist "creative destruction" to our social lives, which have heretofore been organized around achieving continuity for our self-concept.

The constant updates, according to the sociologists Thompson consults, supply those interested in tracking us with a simulation of "ambient awareness": "It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye." When conducted via online updates (or phone text messages), it requires persistence to achieve this effect; it works cumulatively: No one message is important, no specific thought communicated is important, but the totality presents a character in the round, and engages us, proponents claim, the same way fiction does. "Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel." If all parties are sharing their streams of data, this would seem to convey the reciprocity we presume is necessary for friendship, but the medium may interfere with that, encouraging us to embark on a kind of vicarious intimacy, an intimacy once removed that allows us to inject the drama and fantasy and daydreaming we can indulge in when lost in a novel.

If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

We basically transform ourselves through the technologies into a form of character-driven light programming. To the friends to whom we broadcast our updates, we become a moment's distraction, a breath of novelty, an entertainment channel. Thompson points out that the "ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some." With this sort of audience out there, we can generate our own Truman Shows with the tool available and then we have the opportunity to check our ratings in terms of the online attention we have generated and then adjust the sort of life we live accordingly. The users that Thompson interviews express a sense of achieving a deeper intimacy with those they track:

The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.”

Perhaps, but what is characterized as "raw" here may merely be the effect of the immediacy of the medium on the same surface that friends always present to one another, and the layer that is now being simulated and broadcast. And parasocial relationships become the template for friendship generally; what was once spontaneous and intimate grows more and more caluclated, contrived to produce certain effects, drive traffic, entice readers, supply the simulacrum of intimacy that the medium enables. The habit of Twitter and other digital updates may change the nature of what we think to offer in friendship while eroding the space that once felt sheltered, the personal realm that was autonomous and spontaneous as opposed to designed and self-consciously elaborated. Thompson offers this grim assessment: "participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world."

One of the Twitterers that Thompson interviews relates that "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.” That seems a good thing, but Thompson is rightly suspicious about the changes "friendship" must have undergone to enable non-social to suddenly feel comfortable being social. The technology may allow for introverted or indifferent people to be more interested in the lives of other people, but perhaps only because it lets us be voyeurs and fantasists.

Thompson notes that social networks and microblogs allow people to increase their number of "weak ties": "loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently 'friended' them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist." But the weak ties may come at expense of deeper ties, especially because they are more instrumental, more tangibly useful -- a wide network will yield you helpful information to deal with a broken refrigerator, or a sketchy transmission mechanic, or a wireless router problem or what have you. That is information whose worth immediately becomes evident.

The "usefulness" of friendship, though, is more difficult to assess; it doesn't bear being measured, and in fact may perhaps be defined as precisely that which can't be measured. It's not in the number of texts a person has sent you. Not to get too mystical (or mystifying) but friendship is elsewhere, outside the numbers. It is in the friction of real presence, in the accumulation of pregnant moments shared doing nothing specific, simply recognizing the otherness of the person you are with and committing to hold on to that sense and respect it. Thompson finds that some Twitter users experience it as serial meditation: "The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself,' or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness." But perhaps our problem is a surfeit of self-reflection, a morbid preoccupation with knowing ourselves, making identity. Moments with friends may those moments where we are in a deep mode of self-forgetting, and the last thing we will want is Twitter interrupting, bringing us back to ourselves, forcing us to yet again to express our identity at a remove, alienating us from the present moment and urging us to accept, in lieu of the present, the perpetual archive of mediated utterances we've come up with instead of living.

Face management (15 July 2008)

At Slate, Michael Agger narrates his efforts to put a flattering picture of himself online. This strikes me as a topic that gets more and more depressing the more one thinks about it, because it ultimately forces us to recognize the arms-race quality of self-advertisement.

Remember for a moment how much attention people used to lavish on the perfect quote for their e-mail signature. Now that self-conscious energy is applied to a photo. There's nothing inherently bad about the rise of Web head shots. They just turn what was once a space for burgeoning Cyrano de Begeracs into a space for burgeoning Brad Pitts.

When you expect to be judged by your photo -- in the context of countless other such photos -- and the technology exists to improve that photo, it becomes virtually incumbent on us to deploy that technology, present our visual selves in the most state-of-the-art way. We are forced to see our face as a brand or logo, and we must isolate and reify the qualities that we want to use to market ourselves, and in realizing we are marketing ourselves we must also recognize how we have devised these instrumental means of achieving our particularized goals. We say to ourselves something like, if I capture my face from the right angle, people will think I'm mysterious. If I relax while I take this picture, I might look natural. I might come across as authentic, as "real." Until I get the right photo, I am in danger of being unreal. I don't quite exist. And then you have to think about how sad that is, reducing our complexity to a pinpoint, or a desperate calculation, and having our being reduced to a lighting effect and a camera angle and a set of well-chosen props -- ontology as mise-en-scène.

But it is probably true that how we look forms the basis, the starting point from which people will get to know us, and it supplies the framework into which are actions and behavior are integrated. Managing how we develop social relations online provides a stronger feeling that we can manage the entire process -- provide the flattering picture as the launching point and then carefully groom the online profile to present ourselves as the attractive and appealing product we want to be. But then we are at the same time inviting people to consume us as a kind of reality-TV program, a well-edited entertainment product whose purpose is merely to please them and nothing more. When we objectify ourselves (with online photos and the like) we seem to be liberating others of having to conceive of a reciprocal responsibility toward us -- we want to be looked at and approval rests in that, and when we look back at others, we do it in a different time, with a different mind-set altogether. That is to say, social relations online don't occur in shared time; they are by definition managed, mediated exchanges even when the messaging is "instant."

Agger mentions a new site called Facestat, on which you can post a picture and have people evaluate it through a series of questions that are vaguely research-like.

To date, Facestat has collected 16,818,344 judgments on 126,090 faces. The people behind the site, a group of programmers called Dolores Labs, have played with the data in fun ways. They noted which pairs of tags tend to appear together—athletic and driven, gay and cowboy, old and sour, young and uninterested. They've also built a graphical explorer, with which you can follow the webs of adjectives for an entire afternoon. The promise of accurate "market research" hasn't been totally fulfilled. Looking around the site, I've found the crowd-sourced judgments to be fickle. For every person who thinks you're "not bad," there's another that thinks you're phony—or worse.

This seems to suggest that our efforts at face management are wasted. It may seem like we can better control how we will be perceived online, and it's almost irresistible to make the attempt, but other people will see what is useful for them to see anyway. So it may be that the illusion of control is the lure of posting photos online, and it ultimately has nothing to do with the results the picture yields. This may be true of social networks in general; they let us pretend we are controlling something that is inherently slippery and fluid. They allow us to forget about the contingencies of friendship by making specific friends and whatever specific response they are having to you beside the point. The trick works because we are able to prevent ourselves from seeing how the pools of eyes in the networks we construct for ourselves become mirrors.

Random friends (9 July 2008)

In a post from a few days ago, I wondered whether the automated friend-matching component of social networks would eradicate the more spontaneous and seemingly irrational friendships that sometimes spring up unexpectedly in real life. A recent German study detailed here (link via Rob Walker) seems pertinent to this question.

One year after they met for the first time, 52 college freshmen were asked to rate their relationships with each other. By a significant margin, the first relationships they made were often the closest.
"In a nutshell, people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number," conclude the authors.

Maybe it would be a good thing if Facebook randomly dropped total strangers on your "People You May Know" page and urge you to invite them to become your friend. Maybe the resulting friendship will seem cosmic and meant to be, and Facebook could then recede into the heavens as a kind of divine intelligence.

Anyway, the study suggests that attempts to rationalize friendships in advance may fail to capture what makes friendships work, which may in part be an ineffable spirit of coincidence, hanging over and enchanting everything the friends do together. And even more so, a feeling that the friendship is authentic precisely because there is no good reason for it and no calculation went into it.