Why the Facebook Nation Lacks a Narrative
Posted: December 14th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Collected Thoughts | Tags: Design, Facebook, Narrative, Twitter, Virtual Worlds | 5 Comments »Renny Gleeson posted an interesting article in which he considers the metaphor of Facebook as a country. He dismisses it arguing that Facebook lacks a narrative or mythology to unite its users like a country unites its citizens. It is worth asking what a narrative looks like in a social network. Where do narratives grow online? What is preventing Facebook from creating that narrative?
First, what does a narrative look like in a social network? While they aren’t perfect, I believe virtual worlds have something of a narrative. How else can you explain a 11.5 million member subscriber base and the level of detail on wowwiki?
In World of Warcraft, there are multiple levels of narrative. There is the surface or game narrative crafted by Blizzard. It is full of conquering demons, racial alliances, seasonal festivals. Believe it or not, it has spawned books. Then there is the meta-narrative: forum debates about changes to the game, in game movies and music videos posted to YouTube and Machinima. Finally there are personal narratives: characters meeting in game and performing quests, friends forming guilds, characters growing in experience (and offline personal lives and health often falling apart).
I don’t have much experience with Second Life, but I imagine it is closer to a nation-building narrative, something of that settler on the digital planes mythos. There is the possibility to meet new people and build new things.
Facebook’s only narrative is meta-narrative with users discussing site redesigns and privacy policies, however, unlike a virtual world, there is no navigation of three-dimensional space, no risk or possibility of encounter. You are consigned to your social circle. You can learn more about a friend by reading their profile and looking at their pictures—but even this is Facebook Stalking and does not build a relationship like speaking to a person would.
In order to have a mythology or narrative, you require characters and conflict. Facebook presents a world with no conflict or challenges internal to itself. Its largest conflict is the challenge of establishing a functional social network—a meta-narrative available to a select few engineers, social media gurus, and facebook afficionados. It is a narrative written on Techcrunch. As for characters, Facebook presents no venue for naturally meeting others, which limits possibility, connection, and enjoyment.
Perhaps the most compelling social network narrative in recent memory is the story of Twitter. Its true naissance occurred this summer when asked by the Department of Defense to suspend network maintenance during the unrest in Iran, so that Iranian stories, 140 characters at a time, could flutter out. Conflict and real characters: Twitter had found its creation story.
Facebook must find its own story and in order to do so it must invite conflict. With its 350 million user-base, it can become the world’s open, social space.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
Sure, you are more than welcome to quote this post and you can find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/blakehinckley.
I’d have to disagree with the absence of possiblity of encounter, conflict, and the inability to meet/discover new people on Facebook. In fact, in the past year or so I’ve had to physically restrain myself from engaging in political battles, sometimes with friends, often with friends of friends, that come about as responses to someone’s (intentionally or not) politically charged status update, posting, etc. In the shared forum of a friend’s “wall” or maybe (to a lesser extent, in my experience) on “group” or “fan” pages, you are able to identify those who have things in common with you, and those who don’t. Comments on your own wall may be limited to those in your social circle, but there is plenty of chance of encountering “outsiders” if you take the risk of commenting on someone else’s wall. In fact I feel like I’ve made “enemies” of people who continually would take the opposite side of an issue being discussed on a friend’s page, or who seemed to me to be an aggressive or contrary type in the things they posted. Similarly, I feel like I “know” people that I don’t, because of the way they interact with my friends on my friends’ pages. So in this way, and also, I would argue, through the dialogue that takes place with your own facebook friends, you are establishing and building relationships just as in anything else. Obviously it is not a substitute or the same thing as seeing those people in “real life,” but I certainly have become closer to people (or more alienated from them) due to our interactions on facebook, and this in turn affected our real life interactions.
Hi C,
Thank you for your perspective. Since writing this post, I have shifted a bit in my thinking but I still rebel against the feeling of a closed system within Facebook. On reading your post I wonder if it is perhaps self-imposed, due in large part to the fact that Facebook is organized around sharing personal information. Maybe. Also since writing this post, we have seen Chat Roulette take off, which I believe is due to that very desire for encounter (albeit often of the disturbing, even explicit kind). If people are willing to undergo that much indecency simply to talk to a new face, I think Facebook still has room for improvement, but I agree that it does a great job of keeping you connected, and there is clearly more conflict on Facebook than I represented in my post. Thanks again!
Best,
Blake
“Perhaps Facebook is less a nation than a giant transnational movement—comparable to the Red Cross or the Catholic church—which has an overarching aim and can speak to governments on something like equal terms,” writes The Economist in a recent article entitled, “Social networks and statehood: the future is another country.” In it they delve into the impact of facebook achieving 500 million users and its similarities and dissimilarities to a nation-state. Well worth a read, you can find it here: http://www.economist.com/node/16646000.