How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity
stevecheney.posterous.com
stevecheney.posterous.com
Regarding "authenticity": please, give me a break about the "real you". The part inside you that wants to rip off your clothes and tell dirty jokes is no more "real" than the part, also inside you, that maintains your social persona. Without sociality -- and the maintenance of personas and ethics -- you don't exist, period. Even the idea of "authenticity" is given to us, a (rather lame) invention of the 19th Century Romantics, Freud, and the 1960s.
(Edit: Some of the existenstialists would even go so far as to say there is no "real you", and that the anxiety created by this lack of anchoring is one of the most important aspects of the human condition.)
They popularized a version (and Sartre's idea of "bad faith" is probably the proximal source of modern popularity), but you can find it in basically the entire individualist tradition of Western philosophy. Rousseau spends a lot of time discussing it, for example; in addition to discussing the political effects of social relations, he worries about whether societies produce conformity and reduce people's expression of their genuine personality/autonomy (see e.g. his writing on amour-propre, and his obsession with taking [and writing about] solitary walks).
In essence, the power of Facebook to connect you with your personal friends also makes you re-make how you present yourself to the outside world.
You create a "purified identity", maybe as you see it a better, less controversial character for fear of offending, or perhaps more likely to please your 'friends'.
Based on reading The Facebook Effect, I think that Facebook's change-the-world vision is to get rid of exactly this. It's part of what they mean when they say the world would be a better place if it were more open.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
That infamous quote may in fact support the hypothesis, but it still doesn't quite feel right.
No. probably not.
I am authentic in front of my friends, but I certainly act differently if I am also in front of everybody else.
The other really important thing people forget is that not only are you in front of either the whole internet or (merely) every acquaintance you ever had, but you are there permanently. Imagine chatting to your friends - now consider that you know the conversation is recorded and going to be stored where it could be held against you at any time. Would that alter your words? It certainly would affect mine. The non-recorded conversation is the authentic me, the recorded conversation is the careful, on-the-record me. That is why for me this sort of online conversation is never going to replace the real thing.
Everyone has at least three personae. - the one you show to family members, the one you show to friends, and the one you show at work, and you may have more. Each one is authentic, but they're authentic to the specific context that you are in.
For example, I rarely swear at work - I have to be very frustrated or angry to do it there. A few minor words may slip out from time to time when I'm talking to family, but again, they don't hear it from me very often. On the other hand, with some of my friends I swear all the time.
In real life you can usually understand the context you are in pretty easily. Online it also used to be pretty simple - you would have one or more handles that you would use on different sites, and you generally acted appropriate to the image you presented using that handle. But now Facebook wants to combine all of that. They can present it as simplifying things for you - after all, you no longer have to manage all these different accounts right? But it also means that no matter where you are, you have to decide which "you" to present.
This is going to cause problems. --Those of us who understand the consequences are likely to either avoid sites that force you to authenticate through Facebook (this is my option), or start treating Facebook like Linkedin and do your best to prevent anything that may present you in an unflattering light to a potential employer. Young people aren't as likely to get this right away, and I fear that it's going to hurt them in the future.
TechCrunch seems to be pretty happy with the result: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...
The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.
Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?
People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. [...] The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life.
But real life rarely includes trolls.
I don't like Facebook comments at all, and as long as TechCrunch uses them I probably won't be commenting, but this article makes too many broad statements, with too little support, for my taste.
TC confuses criticism with trolls.
> Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?
If you can say something with one group of friends, but need to change or hide that to speak to another group, are you being authentic?
The problem with social media is that it is typically a megaphone to everyone.
I think it's already been well-established that people act differently under the guise of anonymity. This is both the power and the pain of the Internet. So it's no surprise that (effectively) anonymous comments have people acting like jerks.
There are basically two sites on the entire Internet where I will actually read comments: here and Stackoverflow. Everywhere else (particularly reddit), it's basically just noise (often hateful, uninformed noise).
The fact that Facebook comments can effectively wipe out much bad behaviour (possibly taking a lot of good with it; time will tell) makes it highly attractive to site owners. Even on my lowly, largely desserted personal blog, I've basically turned comments to moderated because of spam and general noise.
The fact that Facebook owns your identity in this way is a little scary but I think they'll either come underdone or, in the coming years, the issue will become so important that governments will intervene (this is, in part, why I think the upside to Facebook now isn't all that great; there's only so big you can get).
What Facebook will probably need to combat in coming years is spam int he form of fake profiles. This will probably take some time for the spammers to create profiles that are very hard to separate from the real (automatically I mean) but it will happen (IMHO). What then?
There are already services selling votes on sites like reddit. Why not likes on Facebook? The problem is harder but certainly not impossible.
If you don't like the service, don't use it.
Sites that require a Facebook login (as some startups create) get instantly closed. Sites that offer Facebook login have that option ignored. Sites that nag you about using that feature (eg tv.com) make me irate.
But comments takes things a step further. What if you get widespread adoption of Facebook comments to the point that you can't comment on most things without logging on to Facebook?
At that point it's getting to the point where either Facebook is your online identity or you have no online identity.
Of course, the fact that I don't use my real name or anything connected to my professional career there makes it easier.
I shudder for those who do use their names - I also harass them on Facebook for doing so.
Being part of a subculture where anonymity is encouraged helps too.
If anything Facebook encourages me to create a more fake but entertaining me. But I don't mind saying that - on Facebook.
Why?
Quite liberating.
Alternatively, you could argue that we should, collectively as a society, realize that humans act differently in different contexts and that that is awesome. I'm fairly certain your grandma realizes you talk dirtier to your friends than you do to her ... so why can't "real important professional-like" people understand the same?
Eventually, you either twist yourself into someone who turns into a different person each time you see someone you know or stop caring about what other people think of you and be who you feel like to be.
IMHO, Facebook hasn't got much to do with it except possibly lower the bar to be yourself. Thanks to Facebook, when you do have everyone on the same board you can't possibly be everything for everyone anymore: you can either shut down completely or just resort to only being yourself.
1. Create fake FB account if you don't want you real identity associated with your comments. 2. Don't bother to comment on sites which asks for fb login.
I don't use Facebook as a business networking tool -- I use LinkedIn for that -- instead I just use it on a purely social level and I don't really want the two to mix.
Business and social don't need to mix in order for you to be authentic.
Just as important is the back-channel that allows comments to be created and shown in different places (this was mentioned as an "incidental" note in Tech Crunch's article describing the comments system http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-rolls-out-overhaul...). I find it particularly appropriate to bring this up here on HN because I expect Tech Crunch to look with envy or exasperation when comments are posted HERE (HN) about stories appearing THERE (TC). Why shouldn't TC want to have all of the relevant, useful comments appear next to the content they create and host? Facebook comments could help that happen (indeed, so could have disqus if it were used by HN and TC both. Alas, disqus, RIP).
One interesting thing that facebook commenting seems to have done is connect people based on mutual interest. Until now, it's primarily been a networking tool based on a map of real world relationships (with the exception of pages, and those are most often not community building but vehicles for one-way, marketing driven communications). It's a pretty radical shift for facebook.
Having a single point of contact w/o the ability to filter or group your interactions scoped to people who you feel comfortable communicating with isn't just lame, it's socially poisonous.
Facebook is doing it wrong.
I think it's still too early to tell whether facebook is doing anything wrong, but I think they're definitely doing something different and interesting. Not without precedent—cross-site identity systems are nothing new, oauth and disqus, et al—but definitely to a degree and with a scope that hasn't been attempted before.
Apologies if i did not understand your intent in your previous post. That aside, i dislike the notion that the internet is somehow a separate kind of space from the other sorts of social interaction we engage in. There are people who masquerade and are different people IRL just as well as there are online. There are some differences, the sort of transformation and context switch necessary to go between identities/facets is different certainly. But that doesn't change the cognitive/emotional reality.
Besides, who's to say that internet trolls aren't a real part of a lot of people's identities? (I think this is where we agree) Facebook commenting may add a component of IRL social decorum, but imo that has less to do with notions of the self, as just trying not to piss off people who have social currency in your life.
Perhaps they don't have enough time or enough patience to properly explain themselves, but if that's the case, perhaps leaving no comment is a better option? It's not as satisfying for the venter, but it's a better experience for everyone else.
Making commenter's use a tangible "real" identity makes them think twice about posting lazy rants.
> Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.
This should probably refer to your "extended social circle" as you can't actually have 700 friends. See: Dunbar's Number
The author specifically writes: "The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life. And even anonymous if necessary, though that’s not at the core of my argument."
The point of the article is that people present different images of themselves to different friends. Binding all a person's online discourse to a single identity forces them to go for the 'lowest common denominator' image.
Regarding your Dunbar's number remark: The author probably meant 'friends' in the sense of facebook friends, which really includes 'acquaintances'.
Besides which, its not a physical rule that you can't have 700 friends. Dunbar's number, as applied to humans, is a fairly crude heuristic extrapolation; its not a hard limit to friendship capacity.
This problem happens more to me when I'm on twitter however, as I'd like to tweet about how crazy my weekends were, but my entire network is reading along so I really couldn't.
If you put your friends into groups, you can click the lock next to the Share button and customize which people or groups get to see the status update.
It's a pain in the ass, but it's definitely possible.
This does not seem to be true. When I click the lock and choose "Customize" I am given a text box in which I can type the names of individual friends, one by one. Groups don't seem to have much -- anything? -- to do with it.
So, yes, you're right, but I'd revise "it's a pain in the ass" to "it's an epic pain in the ass."