Facebook, Discourse, And Identity

The question of Facebook comments disguises a number of deeper issues, but is also in and of itself interesting. Many have reported that the number of blog comments has gone down with the introduction of Facebook comments on various well-trafficked blogs. This may be a good thing, reintroducing social scale to forums that had grown too large, and as a consequence had seen a decrease in civility.

Mathew Ingram notes that involvement trumps numbers in comments:

Mathew Ingram, Why Facebook Is Not the Cure For Bad Comments

[…] the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines the quality of comments is whether the authors of a blog take part in them.

Working at a pioneering blog network in 2004, I coined the term ‘the Conversational Index’ which we discovered as a means of predicting the future success of blogs. It was defined as

Conversational Index = (comments + trackbacks) / posts

I guess nowadays we’d have to include references from Twitter and Facebook, but you get the idea. Successful blogs generated a lot of commentary, and they did so from almost the very start.

And it wasn’t a function of publicy: there was no effort involved to have people use their legal names. It was a function of involvement on the part of the authors.

Regarding the deeper issues underlying comments, Robert Scoble went apeshit yesterday, after reading Steve Cheny’s piece, How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity, that I also commented on (see The Facebooking Of Identity). Here’s some of what Robert wrote:

Robert Scoble, The Real Authenticity Killer

These “authenticity is dead” people are cowards.

See, where I ONLY post opinions I’m willing to sign my name to, lots of people are actually cowards and just not willing to sign their names to their mealy-mouthed attacks.

Don’t give me that horseshit that you won’t be able to whistle blow at work.

It is hard to summarize Scoble’s rant, but in essence he is making the case that the web’s natural structure channels each of us toward using a single identity — for example in comments, or blog posts — and we should embrace that, and not attempt to subvert it.

I think this is a bit simplistic, at the least; principally because it leads to overtly conservative strictures on discourse, and not just for whistle blowers.

How many people have been fired in recent years for blogging, for example? And how many untold thousands have held their tongue or suppressed their own potentially unpopular opinions for fear of various sorts of retribution, or just being left out of the discussion?

Lastly, we are moving into a new era, principally opened by the rise of web culture, where a post-modern identity is a possibility. We can potentially involve ourselves with very different social scenes, with different ground rules, different purposes, and starkly different values, all at the same time.

Through involvement with such diverse groups we grow and learn very different perspectives. In a sense, we can  shift from a unitary identity to a network of identities, where the various nodes connect with each other in asymmetric and uneven ways: we may even have elements in a multiphrenic personality that are in conflict with each other.

This infuriates a lot of people, and whenever I present this concept there are fireworks. Some argue that such an identity is immature, illegitimate, and possibly immoral. I have been accused of inciting others to have false identities, when in fact I am really just observing a shift in societal mores.

Just as our society, politics, and business benefit from increased diversity — different views that possibly conflict — I think the same is true for post-modern identity.

Who among us is certain about everything? Who has no doubts? Who never wonders about choices made, or paths not taken? Who never sees multiple sides to an argument?

Scoble obviously has no doubts about identity: you are the you that the most open social context says you are, and that’s that. You should accept it, and if you don’t you are a coward, or so Scoble says.

But I have a different perspective, one that is more accepting of our search for self and the relativity of identity, and less demanding of certainty in an uncertain and rapidly evolving world.

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The Facebooking Of Identity

Steve Cheney takes aim at the Zuckerberg Fallacy — that we each should have a single uniform identity across all social scenes — and points out why big media is playing along with Facebook’s attempts to convert us to his overly simplistic view of the world:

Steve Cheney, How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity

Last week a bunch of massive sites across the web, including TechCrunch, adopted Facebook commenting. The integration of the formatting and fonts is so strong that when you’re reading comments you actually feel like you are on Facebook, not a tech focused vertical site.
 
This latest push by Facebook to tie people to one identity across the interwebs is very troublesome.

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.

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

In the beginning, Facebook catered to this instinct we all have. But FB in its current form, a big graph of people who may or may not know anything about one another, does not.

And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

[…]

Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me why this is happening. The carrot here for content sites is clear: even with a lower volume of comments, the potential viral effects and CTRs are something parent sites like AOL are surely extrapolating, based on their recent manifesto to boost reach, drive traffic, and maximize page views (though I’d argue they would perform much better on mainstream sites like HuffPo or TMZ than a niche vertical like TC, which your friends are less likely to be aware of). 

There’s a pretty straightforward reason why FB is valued at an astonishing $75B, and it’s all about them forming a reciprocal feedback loop between Facebook.com and other sites so that you can be targeted. 

But for such a massively social company, Facebook’s insistence that you have one identity across the web is both short-sighted and asinine, and people I talk to are starting to realize this.

But the media companies see us as page hits, not people, just a way to make money.

The stripmalling of the web is in full swing, and Facebook is the worst of the new chain stores. It has all the charm of Starbucks, and the same ersatz sameness in every part of the business. Facebook personalizes in the most trivial of ways, like the Starbucks barristas writing your name on the cup, but they totally miss the deeper stata of our sociality. But they don’t care: they are selling us, not helping us.

The students who had edited their profiles during the three minutes felt the highest level of self-esteem. “Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves,” Hancock told Cornell Chronicle. “We’re not saying that it’s a deceptive version of self, but it’s a positive one.

- David Zax, This Is Your Brain on Facebook

I am not so certain of the notion of an ‘ideal self’ —I read the research and that theoretical construct was not tested — but is is clear that being able to edit your profile does lead to higher self-esteem.

This line up with other theories, such as Goffman’s Social Actor theory, where people choose their stages and props, and also — to some extent — their audience:

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

In interactions, or performances, the involved parties may be audience members and performers simultaneously; the actors usually foster impressions that reflect well upon themselves, and encourage the others, by various means, to accept their preferred definition. Goffman acknowledges that when the accepted definition of the situation has been discredited, some or all of the actors may pretend that nothing has changed, if they find this strategy profitable to themselves or wish to keep the peace. For example, when a lady who is attending a formal dinner—and who is certainly striving to present herself positively—trips, nearby party-goers may pretend not to have seen her fumble; they assist her in maintaining face. Goffman avers that this type of artificial, willed credulity happens on every level of social organization, from top to bottom.

Intertemporal Selfishness

It turns out that we have widely varying levels of psychological connectness to our future selves, and the ‘me’ of today is more likely to defer rewards to the future if there is a belief that the ‘me’ of a distant tomorrow will be very like today’s. 

Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky explore this intertemporal selfishness, by setting contexts where experimental subjects are led to believe that their future selves will have changed drastically. In such cases, the subjects are much less likely to defer rewards, and more likely to consume them in the near term. This is explored using the idea of discount rates: subjects’ willingness to discount rewards by comsuming them in the near term increases as their sense on connection to a future ‘me’ decreases.

Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky, On Intertemporal Selfishness: The Perceived Instability of Identity Underlies Impatient Consumption

We will argue that our understanding of what constitutes a reasonable discount rate (or, more generally, prudent vs. impatient choices) has been limited by the implicit assumption that people should maximize the utility of a constant self over one’s lifetime. An alternative position, proposed by Derek Parfit (1984), is that a decision about consuming now or later should depend not only on the temporal distance between events, but also on the perceived continuity between one’s present and future selves. In this view, the degree of concern one has for one’s future self should be scaled by the degree of “psychological connectedness”— overlap in personality, temperament, major likes and dislikes, beliefs, values, ambitions, life goals, ideals, etc.—held between one’s current and future self. These properties have been proposed to define the mental ties between selves that comprise identity over time (Lewis, 1983; Perry, 1972; Unger, 1991).

We employ the notion of psychological connectedness—drawn from a literature in which there is an ongoing debate over its specifically normative implications (Parfit 1984, and see Dancy 1997 for an entire edited volume of dissenting views)—to test a descriptive account of people’s intertemporal choices.  In our view, the greater the perceived connectedness to the future self, the greater people’s willingness to defer benefits to the future self, all else equal. Conversely, feeling disconnected from the future self will undercut the general motivation to preserve resources for the future self, causing a reduction in patience that is distinct from other factors that affect valuations of present and future outcomes. 

Across four studies, we will show that connectedness contributes to differences in impatience across people and can be systematically manipulated to induce different degrees of impatience in subsequent choices. In Study 1, we show that being exposed to information about how one’s identity will or will not change over time leads to either more or less impatience in monetary tradeoffs. In Study 2, we replicate these results using both an actual life change which has the potential to result in decreased connectedness (college graduation) and choices with real outcomes. In Study 3, we show that merely increasing the perceived difficulty with which a participant could conceive of her identity as stable over time led to more impatient purchase decisions and more discounting. Lastly, in Study 4, we show that participants’ naturally occurring degree of connectedness predicts choices made three weeks later, and we examine the influence of connectedness along with several other time-varying processes that have been shown to affect impatience.  Specifically, in Study 4, we provide evidence that the role of connectedness in intertemporal preference cannot be explained by the perceived stability of one’s tastes and preferences (e.g. projection bias, Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, and Rabin 2003), future anhedonia (Kassam et al. 2008), subjective time perception (Zauberman et al. forthcoming), and is not confounded with standard individual difference indices of reward responsiveness and non-planning impulsiveness (Carver and White 1994; Patton, Stanford, and Barratt 1995). 

I suppose that the sense of connectedness with future groups — families, communities, nations — plays an important role in our willingness to defer rewards for their benefit. So actions like buying life insurance or putting land into a trust would be tied to a sense of connection to the group that would benefit in the future. But this sense of connection to a future self is a new wrinkle for me.

Relative to the future of work, it follows that business has an incentive to fostering a strong self of future self-connectedness in its workers. They would be more likely to accept future rewards for today’s work — in stock options, or pensions — than those with a low sense of future self-connectedness. In essence, such an approach would decrease the need for near-term payout for services rendered — a short-timer’s mindset — with a long-term association with a future self, perhaps working decades later at the same firm.

However, much of the economics of recent years can be explained by the opposite mindset: business leaders do not feel a strong connection to their future selves, so they contort the economics of business for short-term payout, thereby proving their lack of connection to themselves, the workers, and the shareholders, all of whom might do better in the opposite scenario.

(via James Warren)

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(Source: underpaidgenius)

Zuckerberg Doesn’t Get Publicy

One aspect of online identity, especially in the open web, is that people can have multiple identities: I am a somewhat different stoweboyd on Last.fm than I am on Twitter than I am on Tumblr. This is normal and sensible, since identity is strongly influenced by who we connect with and increasingly tied to the affordances that these services provide.

Michael Zimmer is reading the new Marshall Kirkpatrick book on Facebook, and pulled this out:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Zimmer goes on to dissect Zuckerberg’s pronouncement:

Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed. Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends. I might present a slightly different identity when I’m at a church meeting compared to when I’m at a football game. This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives. It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.

I go even farther, and argue that our identity is increasingly becoming a network of partial identities, linked together by the overlap (if any) between different communities’ constituencies and the princieples that they stand for.

We are not defined by any single profile or membership in any group. We are each more transcendant than that.

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Xen Mendelsohn on Xellular Identity

 

Apropos of yesterday’s post on people self-identifying so much with their cell phones that they want to be buried with them, I have stumbled on a new voice, Xen Mendelsohl, a woman based in Israel who comments frequently on mobile culture in her Xellular Identity blog. She recently reported on cellular identity at the other end of the age spectrum:

[from Hey Doll, Bratz is Calling

The other day I was reading Darla Mack’s post on the new Bratz mobile phone. The makers of Bratz have joined forces with Ztar Mobile to launch a new MVNO targeting young girls. It’s a full-featured Sony-Ericsson T290 handset which has an exclusive Bratz content.

Bratz is a great example of how consumer brands have found a new way to distribute their branded merchandise through the most personal channel – the consumer’s mobile phone. This enables the consumer brands to have a close relationship with their customers. Not less significant, the brands gain customer’s loyalty as well - girls don’t change their mobile handset at the same tendency they change branded dresses, t-shirts or accessories. There is an added value for the operator as well; the operator gains diverse and unique content for its customers. This way, the operator positions itself as having high value for its end-users.

From consumer’s perspective, there is no difference between branded mobile and its unique content to other branded merchandise (clothes, gadgets, cars… you name it). Yet, whatever brands we own in real life we’ll probably want to have on the mobile as well. What some don’t realize is that the only reason to buy Diesel instead of an anonymous pair of jeans is to express our taste, lifestyle and personality. The hell with the price, bring me my Gucci to the mobile!! :) And, we don’t use only one accessory for that purpose; we build the message of “who we are” from the total look, which includes all the accessories available. For girls, it is only natural to want to have the Bratz mobile, the Bratz T-shirt and the Bratz school bag as well. All together would make her girlfriends “wow” and want to be around her cause she has the coolest stuff ever.

I wonder what my Sony Ericsson S710a says about me?