http://openbook.org/ Oh the lulz!

ANONYMOUS IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

A social psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram wrote a very good book once called The Individual in the Social World. In it, aside from tricking people into thinking they’d helped murder a stranger he did a lot of good work about the difference between city and rural life. One of his better hypotheses therein is “urban overload”. Simply put we are bombarded by so much information in the city that we must employ a whole bunch of time saving processes, called heuristics, in order to deal with it all. A lot of these heuristics result in some pretty unpleasant interactions between city dwellers. Mostly it comes down to cutting out the people around you so you don’t have to process them, even just recognising a face is a big cognitive task.

The range of the effects of urban overload would bore both of us so I’ll just give you the example of Kitty Genovese. A young woman who when attacked one night in New York, surrounded by apartments full of people, cried out for help. Everybody looked but nobody went to help, nobody even called the police. This bystander effect comes from two attitudes; that somebody else would do something and that it was none of any one individuals business. This irrational contradiction applies to all sorts of altercations, have you ever weighed in on a public, inappropriate argument between a couple? Obviously these are slightly extreme examples but the fact stands that in the city we don’t get along as well, it’s not our fault it’s the cities.

An idealistic solution to this problem I like to indulge sometimes is if we all just up sticks and lived in the countryside, it is lovely after-all. Unfortunately that’s a completely ridiculous proposal. The fact is cities are as much a part of world now as the countryside, and their proliferating. Urbanisation is a result of a bunch of things not the least of which is globalisation.

Another theorist, this time a sociologist – there’s a difference – noticed independently from Milgram that people’s social networks were disintegrating. His book Bowling Alone, talks about, among other things; the decline in American bowling leagues but an overall rise in the number of people bowling. Like urban overload this degradation of “social capital” – Putnam’s term for the visible effects of social networks – leads to a whole bunch of negative consequences. Less social interaction and community involvement unfunnilly results in less political participation and general civic engagement.

Like most sociologists Putnam is quite boring and his work seems if not obvious, irrelevant. He gets a mention here because he somehow managed to inform a lot of the research social scientists are doing into social networks, facebook in particular. This semantic coincidence has generated lots of academic literature where researchers compare Putnam’s social capital index against peoples facebook. Unsurprisingly the correlation is usually negative meaning the social networking site facebook fails as a social network.

This isn’t facebook’s fault, or the researchers, or yours or anybodies really. It’s just this problem people, particularly academics, seem to have of not being able to think about new things in new ways. It’s a bit of trend in social research that deals with the internet to assume that things online are just reflections of something in the real world. And so with this thinking we get “facebook is a social networking site, it must be a social network”.

Now I’ve tried facebook out and discovered it wasn’t for me. I also don’t think it’s a social network the way Putnam meant it. Partly facebook doesn’t work for me because I’m not very good at putting myself out there but I also feel that between google and X-box live I have enough creepy corporate influence in my online interactions. The new “people centric” ads, the ones that let you share your favourite ads with your friends – peer pressure ftw! – sent me running and that worrying page you have to go through before you can deactivate your account sealed the deal.

Just because facbook isn’t for me doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I actually think it’s very clever and maybe has some useful potential, I’m just not arsed looking into it. Where facebook’s use may lie is in overcoming some of the disconnect we’re experiencing while we’re getting connected.

I like to think of individuals in society as blobs, and all of our needs, desires, means and motives protrude out from our blobby selves. Now some blobs will fit together and others won’t, that’s where we get harmony and conflict. Sometimes some protrusions have to be suppressed for an easier existence, that’s where we laws and norms. Facebook as way of communicating over the internet is like splatting your blob onto a webpage. It’s there for all to see and sometimes it might not be fully representative of your whole blob. But if you had a place where you could extend just one of your protrusions, maybe into a place designed to fit those exact protrusions well you’d only encounter others like you. And if it’s just that one protrusion you don’t have to worry about your other protrusions coming into conflict. Places like this exist online for free, you just have to look for them.


One of the positive things Milgram found in his work on the city was that the lack of involvement and relative anonymity means that people in cities feel much freer and are better able to express themselves, publicly at least. facebook on the other hand tells everybody everything, that’s why frapeing is so funny! You don’t have to worry about walking down O’Connell street in a funny outfit as much as you have to worry about a photo of you in a funny outfit getting onto facebook. I’m not trying to turn anyone away from their social networking sites I just wanted to make people a little aware of the alternatives and the value of those alternatives considering all of the above. I’m sure I could be more specific about these alternatives but it’s generally better if you discover these things on your own.