How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity

http://stevecheney.posterous.com/how-facebook-is-killing-your-authenticity

by stevedc3 • 15 years ago

122 55 15 years ago

stevecheney.posterous.com

tokenadult• 15 years ago

What is the problem here?

jonkelly• 15 years ago

Amen to that. Presumptuous as well, that should have been titled Killing _my_ Authenticity.

pmorici2• 15 years ago

People generally segment their lives. For example you have your work friends, your family friends, your hobby friends. For various people these groups may or may not overlap to varying degrees. Facebook doesn't allow you to segment your friends like most people do in real life, that has consequences for what people say and do and not just in the sense of civility. That's what this article is essentially talking about.

jarin• 15 years ago

Maybe not on comments, but you can definitely segment your friends on Facebook itself.

If you put your friends into groups, you can click the lock next to the Share button and customize which people or groups get to see the status update.

It's a pain in the ass, but it's definitely possible.

getsat• 15 years ago

tl;dr: You will probably act differently when not hidden behind the veil of (optional/partial) anonymity.

> Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.

This should probably refer to your "extended social circle" as you can't actually have 700 friends. See: Dunbar's Number

feral• 15 years ago

That is not the point of the article.

The author specifically writes: "The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life. And even anonymous if necessary, though that’s not at the core of my argument."

The point of the article is that people present different images of themselves to different friends. Binding all a person's online discourse to a single identity forces them to go for the 'lowest common denominator' image.

Regarding your Dunbar's number remark: The author probably meant 'friends' in the sense of facebook friends, which really includes 'acquaintances'.

Besides which, its not a physical rule that you can't have 700 friends. Dunbar's number, as applied to humans, is a fairly crude heuristic extrapolation; its not a hard limit to friendship capacity.

oniTony2• 15 years ago

Sure, it's all gradients, but at 700 "friends" we are getting into an average of "half a day per friend-year" territory. Those don't sound as meaningful relationships to me.

edderly2• 15 years ago

Yep, I saw this interestingly articulated here: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

In essence, the power of Facebook to connect you with your personal friends also makes you re-make how you present yourself to the outside world.

You create a "purified identity", maybe as you see it a better, less controversial character for fear of offending, or perhaps more likely to please your 'friends'.

tedunangst• 15 years ago

Alternate interpretation: Facebook is making you act like the authentic you all the time. If you are unwilling to stick to your principles because of what your friends will think, are they really your principles?

pmorici2• 15 years ago

There's a difference between sticking to your principles and say, not discussing politics at family gatherings. Metering your social interaction based on the audience is just a fact of life. It's not inherently good or bad.

mlinsey• 15 years ago

Metering your social interaction based on the audience is just a fact of life. It's not inherently good or bad.

Based on reading The Facebook Effect, I think that Facebook's change-the-world vision is to get rid of exactly this. It's part of what they mean when they say the world would be a better place if it were more open.

philk• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm not being the authentic me when I don't make dirty jokes to my Grandmother that I would to my friends but I'd view that more as simple respect.

PostOnce• 15 years ago

People aren't one dimensional, they behave differently in different contexts. Facebook takes away that context. People who would normally only see you in one context (professional, respectful, whatever), may now see you outside of that context, which forces you to act in a way that is acceptable in any context.

knowtheory3• 15 years ago

Do my IRL friends or family care about technical debates, or what the latest silicon valley teapot tempest is?

No. probably not.

davros• 15 years ago

Facebook is making you act like the authentic you all the time. If you are unwilling to stick to your principles because of what your friends will think, are they really your principles?

I am authentic in front of my friends, but I certainly act differently if I am also in front of everybody else.

The other really important thing people forget is that not only are you in front of either the whole internet or (merely) every acquaintance you ever had, but you are there permanently. Imagine chatting to your friends - now consider that you know the conversation is recorded and going to be stored where it could be held against you at any time. Would that alter your words? It certainly would affect mine. The non-recorded conversation is the authentic me, the recorded conversation is the careful, on-the-record me. That is why for me this sort of online conversation is never going to replace the real thing.

DannoHung• 15 years ago

Facebook is enforcing that there is only one authentic you.

tallanvor• 15 years ago

You assume that there is, or should be, one authentic you, but that's just not the case for most people.

Everyone has at least three personae. - the one you show to family members, the one you show to friends, and the one you show at work, and you may have more. Each one is authentic, but they're authentic to the specific context that you are in.

For example, I rarely swear at work - I have to be very frustrated or angry to do it there. A few minor words may slip out from time to time when I'm talking to family, but again, they don't hear it from me very often. On the other hand, with some of my friends I swear all the time.

In real life you can usually understand the context you are in pretty easily. Online it also used to be pretty simple - you would have one or more handles that you would use on different sites, and you generally acted appropriate to the image you presented using that handle. But now Facebook wants to combine all of that. They can present it as simplifying things for you - after all, you no longer have to manage all these different accounts right? But it also means that no matter where you are, you have to decide which "you" to present.

This is going to cause problems. --Those of us who understand the consequences are likely to either avoid sites that force you to authenticate through Facebook (this is my option), or start treating Facebook like Linkedin and do your best to prevent anything that may present you in an unflattering light to a potential employer. Young people aren't as likely to get this right away, and I fear that it's going to hurt them in the future.

awakeasleep• 15 years ago

What is authentic behavior?

If you can say something with one group of friends, but need to change or hide that to speak to another group, are you being authentic?

edderly2• 15 years ago

Don't people talk differently depending on the company they are in? I think most people will have different levels of trust in their acquaintances, at the extreme what I might say to my significant other will be different to what I talk about with a work colleague.

The problem with social media is that it is typically a megaphone to everyone.

LiveTheDream• 15 years ago

Absolutely, and it is completely normal. The Japanese even have this concept explicitly ingrained in their language - 'Tatemae' (socially acceptable reality) and 'Honne' (informal, personal reality) [1]. This is essentially the difference between saying "I'm fine" or "Actually, my dog just died" to a random person or to your close friend.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A571565

farlington2• 15 years ago

Contrary to the author's opinion, I think the facebook comment system almost forces a synthesis of various online personae into a single facebook persona—one that's at least based in part on your real-world self. And while that may often increase self-censorship, it's not at the expense of authenticity. I would argue that it encourages authenticity.

One interesting thing that facebook commenting seems to have done is connect people based on mutual interest. Until now, it's primarily been a networking tool based on a map of real world relationships (with the exception of pages, and those are most often not community building but vehicles for one-way, marketing driven communications). It's a pretty radical shift for facebook.

knowtheory3• 15 years ago

People aren't single flat unified personas. People have facets to them, sometimes ones which don't necessarily sit comfortably with each other. You can be a good straight laced business exec, and be a hard core gamer. Your business associates might look down on you for that. You have a right to partition that world off from them, because it's none of their damned business and has no bearing on your dealings with them.

Having a single point of contact w/o the ability to filter or group your interactions scoped to people who you feel comfortable communicating with isn't just lame, it's socially poisonous.

Facebook is doing it wrong.

farlington2• 15 years ago

I wasn't suggesting that anyone has 'single, flat, unified persona'; the concept of persona itself is rooted in a notion of social roles and masks. But the idea of the 'authentic self' being compromised by blurring social contexts is what I take issue with—first, for the concept of an 'authentic self', and second, because the behavior that this encourages is probably more consistent with what we'd term our 'authentic selves' than the more experimental personae of internet anonymity.

I think it's still too early to tell whether facebook is doing anything wrong, but I think they're definitely doing something different and interesting. Not without precedent—cross-site identity systems are nothing new, oauth and disqus, et al—but definitely to a degree and with a scope that hasn't been attempted before.

yuhong2• 15 years ago

Well, I think a lot of the problems comes from stereotypes. Trying to fit into one of them is not authentic at all, and abusing them like this should be considered harmful.

comex• 15 years ago

Don’t believe me? Go to TechCrunch and count the comments on last week’s posts. Better yet, go read the comments. They suck. They’re sterile and neutered.

TechCrunch seems to be pretty happy with the result: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...

The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.

Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. [...] The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life.

But real life rarely includes trolls.

I don't like Facebook comments at all, and as long as TechCrunch uses them I probably won't be commenting, but this article makes too many broad statements, with too little support, for my taste.

phlux• 15 years ago

I'd be more willing to believe that TC is trying to hedge criticism of their non-existent editing and their over-inflated self importance.

TC confuses criticism with trolls.

pyre• 15 years ago

  > Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?

Are you claiming that geeks are the only people that sequester information between groups of friends and/or the general public? Are geeks the only people that may represent themselves one way to one set of people, and another way to another set of people? This seems to me like it's something inherent in the human condition. I'm surprised to hear it referred to as a geek-only attribute...

oniTony2• 15 years ago

so... time to start maintaining multiple facebook accounts?

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

I have a second account which has no friends which I use for "liking" companies in order to enter competitions.

forkandwait2• 15 years ago

This shouldn't surprise anybody who has lived in a small town -- when you are in a fish bowl, you manage how you present yourself differently than when you are in a big urban anonymous situation. I choose not to live in small towns, and I choose not have a facebook persona, precisely because I don't want to have to worry this crap. (I think Facebook has already lost its mojo because of these issues, but that is another story.)

Regarding "authenticity": please, give me a break about the "real you". The part inside you that wants to rip off your clothes and tell dirty jokes is no more "real" than the part, also inside you, that maintains your social persona. Without sociality -- and the maintenance of personas and ethics -- you don't exist, period. Even the idea of "authenticity" is given to us, a (rather lame) invention of the 19th Century Romantics, Freud, and the 1960s.

(Edit: Some of the existenstialists would even go so far as to say there is no "real you", and that the anxiety created by this lack of anchoring is one of the most important aspects of the human condition.)

_delirium• 15 years ago

> Even the idea of "authenticity" is given to us, a (rather lame) invention of the 19th Century Romantics, Freud, and the 1960s.

They popularized a version (and Sartre's idea of "bad faith" is probably the proximal source of modern popularity), but you can find it in basically the entire individualist tradition of Western philosophy. Rousseau spends a lot of time discussing it, for example; in addition to discussing the political effects of social relations, he worries about whether societies produce conformity and reduce people's expression of their genuine personality/autonomy (see e.g. his writing on amour-propre, and his obsession with taking [and writing about] solitary walks).

lists• 15 years ago

Just to keep things clear and accurate, Freud has nothing to do with an idea of being an authentic self. I'd have to ask which text of his you have in mind.

forkandwait2• 15 years ago

It is probably too late, but he did have a lot to do with our placing such a high regard on our inner, immediate emotional life. You are right, he said nothing (that I know of) about authenticity directly, though I think he was very much in the "express your feelings" (whatever that means) line of western thought.

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

I have no trouble being as about as honest as I'd like to be on Facebook.

Of course, the fact that I don't use my real name or anything connected to my professional career there makes it easier.

I shudder for those who do use their names - I also harass them on Facebook for doing so.

Being part of a subculture where anonymity is encouraged helps too.

If anything Facebook encourages me to create a more fake but entertaining me. But I don't mind saying that - on Facebook.

yuhong2• 15 years ago

"I also harass them on Facebook for doing so."

Why?

Bvalmont• 15 years ago

Facebook actually handles this pretty well, I have different groups of people and I can cater my status message carefully to each and every one of them.

This problem happens more to me when I'm on twitter however, as I'd like to tweet about how crazy my weekends were, but my entire network is reading along so I really couldn't.

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

I think they handle this part of their system really poorly. I'd like to log into Facebook, and then click "Friends" or "Family" or "Corporate", and have three completely separate and distinct areas where I can be sure data wont leak between them. As it stands, the only way I can do that is to set up multiple Facebook accounts. But maybe I want to stick my brother in both "Friends" and "Family"...

gaius• 15 years ago

Use the padlock icon on your status to set which list of people can see it.

Swizec• 15 years ago

Nobody is forcing you to friend everyone and their cat. Personally I have exactly 42 friends on facebook. They were chosen carefully to create what I call the "facebook context". It allows me to act stupid and not care.

Quite liberating.

Alternatively, you could argue that we should, collectively as a society, realize that humans act differently in different contexts and that that is awesome. I'm fairly certain your grandma realizes you talk dirtier to your friends than you do to her ... so why can't "real important professional-like" people understand the same?

alienreborn• 15 years ago

2 Simple solutions to this problem.

1. Create fake FB account if you don't want you real identity associated with your comments. 2. Don't bother to comment on sites which asks for fb login.

yason• 15 years ago

You have this same problem in "real" life too.

Eventually, you either twist yourself into someone who turns into a different person each time you see someone you know or stop caring about what other people think of you and be who you feel like to be.

IMHO, Facebook hasn't got much to do with it except possibly lower the bar to be yourself. Thanks to Facebook, when you do have everyone on the same board you can't possibly be everything for everyone anymore: you can either shut down completely or just resort to only being yourself.

RuadhanMc2• 15 years ago

In my experience many of the anonymous comments which are mean, snarky, sarcastic, etc, often have a valid point, but the commenter is too lazy to articulate that point in a way that does not come off as trolling.

Perhaps they don't have enough time or enough patience to properly explain themselves, but if that's the case, perhaps leaving no comment is a better option? It's not as satisfying for the venter, but it's a better experience for everyone else.

Making commenter's use a tangible "real" identity makes them think twice about posting lazy rants.

RuadhanMc2• 15 years ago

The one thing I don't like about using Facebook (or similar sites) for commenting on sites like TechCrunch is that my Facebook friends couldn't give two hoots in hades about my "tech world" blabbering. For them it's mostly irrelevant.

I don't use Facebook as a business networking tool -- I use LinkedIn for that -- instead I just use it on a purely social level and I don't really want the two to mix.

Business and social don't need to mix in order for you to be authentic.

johndlafayette• 15 years ago

I disagree, but I think it depends on the person as well. You can use facebook to do whatever you desire with it. While people try to 'censor' themselves in many social situations, I think society as a whole is moving towards more acceptance. Thanks to the internet, you can always find someone else 'out there' who has the same outlook on life as you. You are also able to see people from every different background and way of thinking, opening yourself up to better understanding and acceptance of them. You can be who you are wherever you are in the world and find acceptance online, even if in your hometown you may be ostracized. Interesting film concerning this: http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/

btipling• 15 years ago

The wonderful thing about real conversations is that they are confined to that moment in time and to the people you have them with, whether they know you or not. If you're in a new bar surrounded by people you don't know having an interesting conversation you can be whoever you want to be for the sake of the discussion or simply for fun. If proponents of 'open' want to destroy that they can go suck it. I deleted my Facebook account last year and more often than not, despite having lost the connection of people of whom I have dear memories, with every new day I become more convinced that my life is better without Facebook.

cletus2• 15 years ago

The (very real) prospect of Facebook owning your online identity is frightening.

I think it's already been well-established that people act differently under the guise of anonymity. This is both the power and the pain of the Internet. So it's no surprise that (effectively) anonymous comments have people acting like jerks.

There are basically two sites on the entire Internet where I will actually read comments: here and Stackoverflow. Everywhere else (particularly reddit), it's basically just noise (often hateful, uninformed noise).

The fact that Facebook comments can effectively wipe out much bad behaviour (possibly taking a lot of good with it; time will tell) makes it highly attractive to site owners. Even on my lowly, largely desserted personal blog, I've basically turned comments to moderated because of spam and general noise.

The fact that Facebook owns your identity in this way is a little scary but I think they'll either come underdone or, in the coming years, the issue will become so important that governments will intervene (this is, in part, why I think the upside to Facebook now isn't all that great; there's only so big you can get).

What Facebook will probably need to combat in coming years is spam int he form of fake profiles. This will probably take some time for the spammers to create profiles that are very hard to separate from the real (automatically I mean) but it will happen (IMHO). What then?

There are already services selling votes on sites like reddit. Why not likes on Facebook? The problem is harder but certainly not impossible.

grammaton• 15 years ago

How exactly could they "own" your online identity?

If you don't like the service, don't use it.

cletus2• 15 years ago

Indeed. Currently you can do that. In my case I simply use Facebook as a photo-sharing site. That's all the interest I have in it.

Sites that require a Facebook login (as some startups create) get instantly closed. Sites that offer Facebook login have that option ignored. Sites that nag you about using that feature (eg tv.com) make me irate.

But comments takes things a step further. What if you get widespread adoption of Facebook comments to the point that you can't comment on most things without logging on to Facebook?

At that point it's getting to the point where either Facebook is your online identity or you have no online identity.

timeuser• 15 years ago

I haven't posted a comment on TechCrunch with the new system, but I do see there is a checkbox for "Post to Facebook." Seems that would solve the problem of your 700 "friends" being exposed to your comments. Unless the comment still really does end up on Facebook in some way which I wouldn't be surprised by.

dbro• 15 years ago

What about looking at this from the perspective of the site owner? Facebook comments can do more for the site owners than the alternate comment systems. Increased exposure through facebook news feeds should help introduce their sites to new people.

Just as important is the back-channel that allows comments to be created and shown in different places (this was mentioned as an "incidental" note in Tech Crunch's article describing the comments system http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-rolls-out-overhaul...). I find it particularly appropriate to bring this up here on HN because I expect Tech Crunch to look with envy or exasperation when comments are posted HERE (HN) about stories appearing THERE (TC). Why shouldn't TC want to have all of the relevant, useful comments appear next to the content they create and host? Facebook comments could help that happen (indeed, so could have disqus if it were used by HN and TC both. Alas, disqus, RIP).

How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity

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