Scattered Work

Uprooting the jungle

The Conversation (opening scene in Union Square)

For many years, anonymity on the Internet was taken for granted as the natural state of things. Everyone used cryptic handles, and even respected journalists used these nicknames for attribution; it was considered pointless to try to verify the real identity of someone posting on a message board or commenting on a blog (or, in many cases, even writing a blog). Pioneering social networking website Friendster, struggling to bring real identities online, was overrun by fake user profiles (aka the “fakester insurrection,” shortly followed, of course, by the “fakester extermination”).

Where Friendster failed, Facebook has largely succeeded, ushering in a real name only culture, and bringing us to an inflection point in the nature of identity on the Internet. Nearly everyone I encounter on Facebook uses their real name. The light blue leviathan is now leveraging this victory by exporting identities to other websites. Already, on too many sites to name, you can login using your Facebook account, further cementing its reality and its usefulness as a commodity.

Bill Owens, Untitled (from Suburbia)

I’m convinced this stabilization of online identity echoes the movement from urban centers to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s. Where the city’s core was a chaotic mix of different ethnicities and social classes, the suburbs provided a safe haven: a place where you could have a pretty good idea of the background, value system and income level of your neighbors. To be sure, much of this was driven by racism, which I certainly don’t see in the appeal of Facebook. But I do think that the unwillingness to deal with unstable social groups and unknown value systems has a lot to do with the widespread embrace of both the surburbs and Facebook. Your online community is now made of your friends, whom you’ve carefully selected and sorted over a lifetime.

What’s troubling about this is the amount of control a single website is able to have over the way that our identities are expressed and perceived. What if this safe zone on the Internet eats away at our social and aesthetic variegation as much as the suburbs have? What if the way Facebook chooses to cycle posts, and limit post lengths and resize images, has as much impact on our sense of social space as the way that suburb developers chose to lay out streets and design homes? The bland uniformity of Mark Zuckerburg’s social container should be obvious to anyone who used MySpace (or Tumblr or Twitter or WordPress or…). But the implications go much deeper than aesthetics.

Tags: Facebook, identity, suburbs