I enjoyed reading danah boyd's piece on social network sites, and while it focused primarily on MySpace, she makes some relevant points that should be considered in a discussion of Facebook (since MySpace is practically dead for everyone who isn't in an indie-band). She raises a lot of important issues but I found the "Why There?" section most interesting. The question basically asks why do teenagers flock en masse to these social network sites - and the answer seems to be: because we've kicked them out of every other public space and those that they are allowed to participate in are adult-regulated. There used to be spaces (malls, rollerskating rinks, etc) where teenagers could enjoy the company of their peers in a relatively unregulated, public place, but as boyd points out these places have either fallen off the grid (e.g., rollerskating rinks) or restricted access to teenagers (e.g., malls and movie theatres). With nowhere left to turn, teens have flocked to the internet and populated online communities.
There were some interesting commonalities between these spaces and their digital replacements. A heavily modified profile and online persona isn't unlike the teens who would bring a change of clothes to the mall that their parents wouldn't let them leave the house in. While these places were commercially-oriented, they did provide a relatively accessible space wherein groups of friends could be themselves with one another for a period of time without the explicit pressure to conform to the structures inherent in the institutions (e.g., groups of friends could walk around the mall for hours without buying anything, and once you paid to get into Skateland, you could just sit at a table and talk for three hours). Likewise a social component to a dieting site allows likeminded people to talk about television shows and parenting tips. In the end, it doesn't matter where you are but who you are with (and who is watching).
What interests me, however, is not the similarities but the differences between online and these "physically-oriented" communities. Who you hung out with at the mall or which friends you invited skating could create a significant amount of drama at the lunch table on Monday. At the time when boyd wrote this article, that kind of tension existed in social network sites (e.g., MySpace's top 8 friends). But as Facebook and Twitter have clobbered all other social networks, they've eliminated a lot of those politics. boyd talks about teens maturing through trial and error on these sites the way they would have in physical spaces before - but I wonder if the stakes are really as high. Comments can be deleted, profiles can be changed, and what is private and public can be changed with a click.
This gets into something I'm working on for my independent study regarding frictionless online experiences. In sum, the heavy hitters in the digital world want to make online experiences as "frictionless" (their word) as possible - significantly reducing the kind of resistance that real-world experience might offer. At the most basic level, for example, writing happy birthday on someone's wall is significantly easier than buying and sending a birthday card (and rather than watching a calendar, Facebook will notify you when a birthday is coming up). This kind of friction-reduction allows a user to maintain far more relationships than one could hope to cultivate offline. So my question is: does this kind of community or public space really offer the kind of trial-and-error-experiences that boyd suggests are so important in teenage maturation and socialization? And what about the explosion of adult participation in Facebook? Eventually going to Skateland became uncool - but largely because I had other things to do. But with the ease of accessibility and the integration with commonly used tools, will a person who started using Facebook in high school decide it isn't cool six years later? I'm "friends" with enough Facebook users entering into proper adulthood to suggest otherwise.
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