Thursday, September 16, 2010

Facebook as an Imagined Community

Yesterday’s class discussion on how Facebook shapes our perception of reality has led me to seek a more critical understanding of my own choice not to participate in this online community. The use of this networking tool is so pervasive that it is quite unusual to meet someone of our generation who is not a registered user. I have withstood considerable peer pressure to join, rejected numerous offers to create an account for me, and responded to incredulous questions such as, “You’re not on FB? Are you a real person??” and “We’re not really friends until we’re Facebook friends.” While I appreciate the convenience with which you may form and maintain contacts, I view the majority of these connections as being contrived. Most of the “friends” in your network are not people whom you keep in touch with regularly on a more personal level (if at all), and many of them are simply acquaintances who upon further consideration, may not even really be considered a friend. My standpoint is that an online medium such as FB is not necessary to affirm relationships. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always believed that the people who are important to you are worth the time and effort to make more personal connections, rather than indiscriminately and impersonally broadcasting news and salutations to everyone in your network. My choice not to participate on FB is a way of filtering and limiting news of myself and others only to people whom I have a genuine interest in maintaining relationships with.

Our class discussion led to an interesting conversation with a classmate about the way in which FB has changed the nature of our interactions in regards to what relationships and news we perceive as being “real” and salient. My classmate admitted feeling a stronger sense of community with people she is connected to on FB than with someone she has interpersonal interactions with on a weekly basis, simply because FB allows one to know other people’s business even if you hardly have any direct contact. In essence, FB has had such a profound impact on the way that we connect with others that for some people, random acquaintances online whose business you know seem more real and have a more salient presence than someone that you interact in class with on a weekly basis. There is a sense of satisfaction derived from knowing other people’s personal information, such as relationship status – even if it’s not really your business – such that for our generation, things are not considered “official” unless it’s stated on FB, and any changes are immediately speculated about and blown out of proportion.

Our perception of our connections to others has been radically altered from what it was 50 years ago, or even presently in a less-developed part of the world, where interpersonal communication is the primary form of communication. We can understand the Facebook phenomenon that has gripped American society through the concept of the “imagined community,” as coined by Benedict Anderson. He views a nation as being a community that is “socially constructed, [and] imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.” This community is described as being imaginary because it is not and cannot be based on interpersonal interaction. Members of even the tiniest nation will never know most of their fellow citizens, but they are bound by images of their affinity. Many of these tenets are true of Facebook networks as well. Our reliance on an online medium in order to affirm relationships is very telling. The sense of communion that one derives from their FB connections is for the most part imaginary because of the lack of actual direct contact with the majority of people in your network. A feeling of belonging is engendered by knowing others’ business, regardless of the impersonality with which the information was obtained. Because of the ease with which we can maintain connections through social networking tools such as FB, I fear there is less incentive to make more genuine, personal connections with old and new contacts.

I hope nobody reading this will be offended and view this blog post as an attack on FB, MySpace, etc or their users. These thoughts have been brewing for the last 6 years since FB first came to my college campus, and I find this forum a stimulating one in which to explicate my thoughts.

4 comments:

  1. Actually, I totally agree with Steph. I started to use FB three years ago when i was in an intern in China with some college students from the States, i knew FB from them and started to use it because i did not want to be regarded as old-fashion or out-of-date. After i came here, the number of my FB friends is building up very fast. Some of my friends have more than 2,000 friends on Facebook. It is really a very efficient way to develop social network, i commit. However, how many FB friends are really "friends", who ppl talk to and involve in their daily life? Some of the friends on FB ppl even hardly can recall when and where they met each other before. FB provides a platform for ppl to connect, but definitely not a perfect way to know and understand each other.

    Another important point here is that website like FB is not a very good way to protect privacy. I had a personal experience. There is a website in China which is similar to FB. My ID and some personal info were stolen from that website by someone and he/she created a weird blog with my ID which is really bad. So now, i have very complicated feeling about FB.

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  2. I respect your choice regarding Facebook, and also admire your resistance to peer pressure. I think you are right that sending out blanket status updates, for everyone in your network to see, does not constitute a relationship in itself. However, it is true that Facebook allows me to feel more connected to friends across the world than to some people I see on a weekly basis. This is not necessarily negative.

    For a period of time, some of these far-away friends were the people that I was 'interfacing' with on a daily basis. The reason I value Facebook, is that it allows me to carry on the same relationship dynamics whilst being over 6000 km away with 6 hours of time difference. Regardless of how motivated I am to maintain those relationships, I probably will not make a transatlantic-call, or send a daily email to everyone I know that doesn't live in the same town as me, just to find out how each of their days went. But, I will definitely check one centralized location- Facebook- and I might learn that Angelique "had the best croissant ever for breakfast" or that Ilaria is "stuck in traffic," and I can leave a comment, then they can reply etc. Thus, we are not excluded from the daily banalities of each others' lives, which we would have shared in person had we seen each other.

    I consider this a successful example of Weber's notion of "community without propinquity" where distance becomes less relevant in maintaining networks. I also think that Facebook is subject to the meaning that we give it in our lives, as individuals. I would not agree that "because of the ease with which we can maintain connections through social networking tools such as FB... there is less incentive to make more genuine, personal connections with old and new contacts." This presupposes that online communications cannot be genuine or personal, and I actually find the internet a very useful tool in re-connecting with old contacts. In my experience, it seems that rather than replacing other kinds of interaction, social-networking either presents an opportunity to connect where there was not one before, or simply adds another medium through which to communicate with people that you were going to communicate with anyway, one way or another.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I respect your choice regarding Facebook, and also admire your resistance to peer pressure. I think you are right that sending out blanket status updates, for everyone in your network to see, does not constitute a relationship in itself. However, it is true that Facebook allows me to feel more connected to friends across the world than to some people I see on a weekly basis. This is not necessarily negative.

    For a period of time, some of these far-away friends were the people that I was 'interfacing' with on a daily basis. The reason I value Facebook is that it allows me to carry on the same relationship dynamics whilst being over 6000 km away with 6 hours of time difference. Regardless of how motivated I am to maintain those relationships, I probably will not make a transatlantic-call, or send a daily email to everyone I know that doesn't live in the same town as me, just to find out how each of their days went. But, I will definitely check one centralized location- Facebook- and I might learn that Angelique "had the best croissant ever for breakfast" or that Ilaria is "stuck in traffic," and I can leave a comment, then they can reply etc. Thus, we are not excluded from the daily banalities of each others' lives, which we would have shared in person had we seen each other.

    I consider this a successful example of Weber's notion of "community without propinquity" where distance becomes less relevant in maintaining networks. I also think that Facebook is subject to the meaning that we give it in our lives, as individuals. I would not agree that "because of the ease with which we can maintain connections through social networking tools such as FB... there is less incentive to make more genuine, personal connections with old and new contacts." This presupposes that online communications cannot be genuine or personal, and I actually find the internet a very useful tool in re-connecting with old contacts. In my experience, it seems that rather than replacing other kinds of interaction, social-networking either presents an opportunity to connect where there was not one before, or simply adds another medium through which to communicate with people that you were going to communicate with anyway, one way or another.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Facebook and other social networking tools are increasingly the object of scholarly research.

    ReplyDelete