Scattered Work

Facebook: The Suburbs of the Internet

After about nine or ten months on Facebook, I’ve become truly disenchanted with the service. Perhaps it’s my own fault for accepting too many friend requests; requests from people I know only vaguely or not at all in fleshspace. It comes down to a problem of over-sharing. These 400+ people are spewing their random thoughts and intimate details, and these trivia are presented by Facebook as “News.” That probably sounds curmudgeonly, but I’m not alone. As Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,”

“Togetherness” is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.

This deluge of minutia is what is driving me away from the social space of Facebook. To the site’s credit, there are lots of ways to share selectively with different groups, and to hide people from your news feed. But the overwhelming tendency is towards the kind of sharing that would be delightful in an intimate, organic gathering of friends and acquaintances, only there are hundreds of people chattering this way at once. It’s an unworkable system, at least to my sensibilities.

In this light, it’s worth considering whether the social networking project has been too idealistic, too much in the heritage of the social planners Jacobs railed against, the planners whose greatest legacy is suburban sprawl. Facebook’s fine-grained settings do nothing to mask the fact that it is essentially an experiment in large-scale, top-down social planning (or more cynically, social engineering). Like the Garden City Movement, the Social Networking Movement lays out strict aesthetics, and shapes social interaction with complex, pre-conceived pathways for interaction. The network does not adapt to the needs or behaviors of its inhabitants, the way urban environments do, and the way that the internet as a whole does.

Luckily, it’s much easier to stop visiting a website than it is to uproot yourself from the suburbs. Just ask MySpace.

Tags: Facebook, Garden City Movement, Jane Jacobs, social networks, social planning