suburban neighborhood.
Facebook is the Suburbia of the Internet
(And I don’t mean that in a bad way.)
Back in 2007, I wrote a blog post entitled “Not All Suburbs Are Soulless,” in response to a series of posts by Douglas Rushkoff and Steven Johnson that were dismissive of the quality of life outside of city centers. It wasn’t the first time I’d made that argument—I’d written about the same topic three years earlier, as well, in my response to a conference presentation by Molly Steenson.
Recently I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the arguments I made there…not in the context of geographic neighborhoods, but rather in the context of social network neighborhoods. So when my friend and colleague Amit Ray pinged me the other day to ask if I’d seen any interesting writing on “tech elites and network shift,” I decided maybe I needed to write up some of what I’ve been thinking about this.
When Michael Brown was shot last month, I saw a number of posts from social media scholars bemoaning the fact that while Twitter was full of news and information about what was happening in Ferguson, Facebook was instead dominated by low-content posts. One of the social media researchers I most respect, Zeynep Tufekci, posted this on August 18 :
I saw a similar claim again the following week, after the Napa Valley earthquake hit. This tweet, which a friend of mine retweeted, is a good example:
Here’s the thing…I didn’t hear about either the events in Ferguson or the Napa quake on Twitter, which I check quite infrequently. Instead, I saw it on Facebook. Did I see posts about Robin Williams on August 13th? Yes, I did. Most of them combined with thoughtful commentary about personal experiences with depression — a non-trivial topic, and one that’s worth surfacing and discussing. Did I see ice bucket challenge videos in my Facebook feed on the morning of the quake? Yes, there were two. One from one of my students, which reminded me that they do in fact think about helping others, and one from Orlando Jones, who dumped a bucket of bullets over his head to bring attention back to Ferguson. But within the first ten posts in my newsfeed I also saw three different updates from close friends and former students in the Bay Area talking about the quake.
It’s true that Twitter can be a much better source of information on breaking news, so I immediately shifted over there to see what else I could find. On my personal Twitter feed there were one or two posts about the quake, but far more unrelated items about a wide range of topics. And the vast majority of what I saw in my feed was not original content, but rather retweets and links to news coverage. Granted, if I followed more people from the Bay Area on Twitter, I’d probably have seen more in my feed. But that’s really the point—our social network feeds are a product of the networks we choose to build and the people we choose to follow.
I wasn’t particularly surprised, when I came to Medium to start this essay, to find Matt Haughey’s piece “Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook” featured on the home page. Here’s how he ends that essay:
I like my current social circle of friends and their thoughts, jokes, and ideas they share each day on Twitter. I know I’ll be delighted with new information on Twitter, interesting articles to read, breaking news, and jokes about those. Twitter is a steady stream of mostly joy and makes my life better. Facebook is filled with people I barely know, chain-emails and disaster news about the sky falling that reminds me of my own past as well as my “friends” at every turn. The Internet is here today and all about tomorrow, and I prefer my social media to reflect that, and that’s why I love Twitter.
Leaving aside Haughey’s somewhat troubling celebration of ahistoricity, I’m disappointed by the confusion of tool with community in that piece. My Twitter network is mostly people sharing news and tech industry commentary, with little emotional engagement; my Facebook feed is filled with people whose daily lives I’m deeply connected to. That’s because I’ve chosen to cultivate my Facebook network and populate it with people and content that work for me—I haven’t put that same effort into Twitter. That’s a choice I’ve made, based on where the people I care about (family, colleagues, students, alumni) are most likely to engage with me. There isn’t one Twitter experience, or one Facebook experience; the choices we make about who we connect are critical to shaping those experiences.
In July, I attended a panel discussion about the Facebook emotional contagion study controversy in which one of the study’s authors acknowledged that he had not realized just how emotionally attached people were to their news feeds, and at the time I remember being somewhat incredulous that someone who focuses on social media research could have missed that. But I’m increasingly concerned that members of the social media research community, along with many tech industry elites, have relegated Facebook to the status of soulless suburbia or Walmart nation — dismissing it as a bland and undifferentiated space, and failing to acknowledge the variety of experiences within that broader space.
Just as my suburb doesn’t match the typical urbanite’s stereotypical idea of what suburbs are like, I’m fairly certain that my Facebook news feed doesn’t match the Twitter power user’s idea of what Facebook is. Just as my suburban neighborhood has more history and diversity than most city dwellers give it credit for, my Facebook news feed has more depth and richness of content. Because I rely on Facebook more heavily than Twitter for news and conversation, and regularly engage with people whose opinions I value, the people and posts that get algorithmically surfaced typically include quite a bit of relevant news and political content. And unlike Twitter, Facebook supports the creation and nurturing of groups, which is where much of my Facebook interaction happens. Some of those groups are indeed based on shared history rather than contemporary professional ties, it’s true—like the international group of moms who “met” on Usenet 18 years ago when we were pregnant, and have migrated our community across platforms until we landed there. Others, like the group that’s formed recently to support and encourage my stepfather during his battle with leukemia, bring together people who share few ties with each other, but rather are connected through their varied relationships with him. In contrast, to me, Twitter feels painfully ephemeral and shallow, offering little opportunity for building community and conversation.
I know that my Facebook experience isn’t necessarily typical—but neither is it terribly unusual. And I understand and respect the fact that many people I know prefer Twitter for their social interactions. My hope, however, is that the people who are most responsible for building and studying online environments will not continue to dismiss the spaces that others inhabit as undifferentiated and uncultured.
As for me, just as I’m happy with my suburban life (supplemented with regular city visits), online I’ll continue to dwell primarily in my Facebook neighborhood. I enjoy visiting Twitter, but I’m not sure I really want to live there.
