An Open Letter to My Facebook Followers

Posted Thu, 07/29/2010 - 15:08 by J. Adams

com·mu·ni·ca·tion: noun - A process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior; also: exchange of information.

 
Communicating in the Internet Age results in information that is communicated instantly, pervasively, and permanently. Communication methods, tools, and styles have also grown exponentially as the Internet has made so many new options available to us. In this millieu of communications, Facebook has become one of the primary tools by which people now communicate with one another via the Internet, but its owners think that it is more than a tool. They think it should be THE tool for online communication, which is why I have chosen to begin using it in a creatively odd way to make it just a tool once more.  Keep reading for more detail...
 

A Little Background About Me

The first thing to keep in mind about me as a person is that I could be a much better communicator, relationship builder, and generally just a better husband/son/brother/nephew/friend/etc. in how I communicate with others. Building and maintaining relationships is all about communicating, and I don’t communicate well enough or often enough with those with whom I have a relationship of one type or another.
 
The second thing about me is that I do enjoy trying new things, particularly when it comes to technology, so it was no surprise that when I first joined Facebook I found it to be a somewhat novel and beneficial approach to improving on some aspects of my relationships: sharing photos and videos with one another, quick notes to many people at once, and so on.
 

Facebook’s Follies

However, Facebook kept doing things as a company which continued to intrude upon the way I managed my relationships:
  1. Facebook opened up their website to just anyone with an email address, not just those people with a valid .edu email address. This original policy by Facebook had the effect of excluding one’s social network to only college friends who had such .edu email addresses. This change altered the dynamics of who could be your “friend” on Facebook from college friends to ANYONE on the Internet - your coworkers, friends, family... even your mom!
  2. Companies began joining Facebook. This action began to shift Facebook from a social-only networking platform to something else. Now companies, your slick uncle Rufus, and Farmville were all vying for your time, attention, and MONEY.
  3. Facebook’s layout, sharing settings, and privacy settings began changing periodically causing significant changes to the way most people used the site prior to the changes. These changes weren’t fixes to existing problems. These were changes that fundamentally altered the site.
So here we are today, with Facebook claiming 500+ million users, and since it is a company it does want to make money to pay its employees, reward investors, and maintain profitable operations. That’s fair, but Facebook has taken a particular business strategy approach which I think neglects the reality of the human communication dynamic, which is that Facebook thinks it “owns” your personality (and therefore, your communications with ALL of your communication networks) online - or at least it wants to.
 

How Facebook Thinks

Facebook wants to own your personality (and your communication networks) for obvious reason which is that Facebook employees think that they can be the best at providing this kind of service to people online. However, I don’t see how this is a sustainable business practice.
 
I own my personality, and therefore I choose how, when, where, why, what, and to or with whom I choose to communicate. Facebook can be a great tool to help me do this online, but it is just a tool. So, when Facebook doesn’t allow me to choose who is or is not a part of a particular communication because they think they know best about how and to whom I wish to communicate, they make their tool far less useful to me.
 
The current Facebook assumption (based on how they have so far built their tool) is that if someone is in my network of relationships, and I want to use Facebook to communicate with one person, then obviously I want to share that communication with EVERYONE. (This isn’t entirely true, but Facebook Wall-to-wall posts are only a pseudo 1:1 communication because, generally speaking, other people can still see all of the posts on your Wall.) Sure, Facebook has implemented certain privacy settings to allow us to opt-in or opt-out certain secondary network people (“Friends only”, “Friends of friends”, or “Everyone”) but there are no controls for us to define levels of relationships with people that we have “friended” within one Facebook account.
 
Unfortunately, my thinking isn’t like Facebook’s thinking, and yet it’s still a useful tool for many people with whom I have a relationship. What’s a guy like me to do?
 

The Solution

I have opted to manage three separate Facebook accounts, with three separate friends lists, using three separate styles of communication.
 
I wish it didn’t have to be this way. All Facebook really needs to do, and has been told to do by their users for some time now, is to allow us to create our own subsets of privacy settings per group of friends that are linked to our Facebook accounts. This isn’t a new concept in computer security protocol. This isn’t even a new concept in life. I don’t coordinate social gatherings with my friends by telling my extended family members in other states (or countries) because my family usually doesn’t care or need to know the details about such plans. Likewise, work acquaintances won’t care that I’m carrying on about some inside joke with a family member because there’s no context for my work acquaintance to care about or even make sense of what I say to my family member. In each case, however, I would be sharing such information on a social networking site like Facebook because I want to share that information with a larger audience that will care about what I have to say.
 
However, on Facebook it’s either all or nothing. Since it is very probable that all or most of your family, friends, and coworkers are on Facebook you have to commit what is now considered a major social faux pas by taking one of three possible actions with your Facebook account: reject someone’s request to be friends (which could harm the relationship in real life), post little or no details of importance to Facebook (rendering the site useless as a communication tool), or stop using Facebook entirely. All of these problems exist because Facebook expects people to have one account, linked to ALL of that person’s social network contacts without the means of distinguishing the relationships that exist between different groups of your “friends”.
 
Therefore, I have chosen to go the more difficult, but more manageable for me, route of maintaining three separate accounts on Facebook. (Family, Friends, Everyone else - mostly business) All three accounts will have unique privacy permissions, Facebook “applications”, and friend list setups so that my communications with the people linked to each account will be able to be a bit more unique and specific given the type of relationship I have with them. And for those bits of information I wish to share with everyone I will cross-post across all three accounts, oftentimes using my own blog as the primary tool for such communications. Will this be a management nightmare for me? In some respects, yes, but then again, trying to always think of who might see my wall posts, pictures, or other communications on just one account left me open to more risk of offending someone or of putting some communication online that could easily be used outside of the context it was originally a part of on Facebook.
 

Hope For The Future

Do I have hope that one day this will change? Yes, but I think it will take a long time for change to occur.
 
First, it was many years before we got answering machines and then voicemail and caller ID. Before these new answering service technologies were mainstream a ringing phone was expected to be picked up, but now we screen our calls and let half of them go straight to voicemail to be dealt with a later time - societal norms of behavior with telephones changed and we changed along with them.
 
Second, Facebook has a certain business strategy that I doubt they will deviate from right now because I am just one person amongst a vast sea of users who are all swimming a different direction with regards to how we use this tool called Facebook. The much rumored “Google Me” social network may solve the problems I have outlined here, but given how they rolled out Google Buzz last year to automatically opt-in Gmail users to said service was far too much like a Facebook style feature rollout than a typical Google Beta test service, so my hopes are low for Google Me to get it right either. Eventually someone will get it right and we’ll settle in to using social networking sites in a way that is respectful of one another and makes sense for most everyone, but it’s going to take some time to get there.
 

How To Fix Facebook For YOU!

So how should you apply what I write here to your own use of Facebook or other online social networking sites?
  • BE CREATIVE! Think for yourself and use the tools the way you need to use them. Don’t like Facebook? Don’t use it. Love Facebook and want to be the most transparent person you can be with everyone you know? Go for it. It’s up to you.
  • Realize how the Internet has changed the communications game for all of us. Your parents don’t realize how to use Facebook just as much as you don’t understand some of the repercussions that your foolish actions recorded in digital photo format from the bar last Friday night will have on you 20 years from now. Tread carefully in this new world, but don’t give up on it like I almost did out of frustration with how things aren’t the way YOU expect them to be - maybe they shouldn’t be your way forever.
  • Be a gracious listener. We all do too much speaking. Do more listening. I know I ought to be... that’s why I’m jumping back into Facebook!
 

Additional Resources

  1. Wikipedia: a definition of Online Identity.
  2. Recent Thoughts about Privacy Online (and Facebook) a blog post by college student Sam Jackson.