Are we running away from Facebook?

Cory Doctorow, columnist for InformationWeek has suggested that Facebook has built-in self-destructs:

“they make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid”

This is because you used to be able to run away from the school bully, silently pass the clique of blonde cheerleaders in the corridor, but now they can all come back to haunt you because social computing tools make you overtly identify those groups and individuals with whom identify and call friend and those you do not. What’s more, people get a handy search button so they can easily find you.

Doctorow suggests that this is why we’ve seen people run from SixDegrees, to Friendster, to MySpace and now to Facebook. He suggests that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel:

“Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.”

Anne Zelenka suggests that this is because that even while these tools are designed to facilitate social interaction online, “they’re actually unable to intelligently and completely, and in a unified way, represent [actual] social relationships and social interaction”.

In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks. I love the way Doctorow paints a picture of wandering into a co-worker’s cubicle only to discover that the wall is covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.

Is this the actual problem with social computing sites? I disagree. Sites like LinkedIn work very well because they are able to quantify and contextualise the relationships you have with groups and people. It allows the articulation of who your circle of friends actually are and keeps that circle hidden from those who are not its members. This more closely approximates the actual way individuals conceive of their relationships. If LinkedIn permitted you to dissect that relationship bubble further, describe the relationships a little more clearly — my personal friends, my work friends, my drinking friends, etc — and keep these groups separate and distinct from each other, then it would actually represent our actual social relationships and interactions in an intelligent and unified way.

What do we need to get there? Facebook could follow LinkedIn’s use of a closed trusted network open only to its members. Maybe we just need to see it implemented before our ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends finally catch up with us there.

M