Trying to Remain Faceless on Facebook

So I joined Facebook this week - not because I had a deep and burning desire to do so, but because we've created a youdecide2007 Facebook group as part of the support network for our youdecide2007.org citizen journalism Website for the upcoming Australian federal election. Since joining, I've received a good dozen of friends requests from friends and colleagues; people have left messages on my wall; I've been invited to events - all of which are pretty regular occurrences on the site, I guess. (The same keeps happening with my LinkedIn account, which I haven't even logged on to for months - apologies for those who've sent me messages wanting to make contact on that site.)

The thing is, though - I still feel deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I need to be on there for research reasons, which means I need to create an account for myself, but at the same time, frankly, I'm just not that interested in actively using that account for my own professional and personal networking. I'm already embedded in what I think are pretty good online and offline social networks (online using a variety of other technologies from email to blogs), and I don't feel a particularly strong urge to recreate them in yet another sociotechnical environment. Other friends and colleagues may feel differently about this, and that's fine, of course; at the same time, this may easily lead to a fragmentation rather than strengthening of social ties in my circle of personal relationships, and I assume that's true more broadly, too.

There is a certain sense of peer pressure here, at least indirectly - not to participate means to lose out on potentially interesting and useful social and professional opportunities, and not to respond to friending requests and group invitations might seem rude; but to use Facebook is to direct a great deal of ongoing effort towards what is in essence a process of maintaining personal and network data, just because the underlying framework and technology of the site requires this. Time spent here is also time lost for other activities - if, for example, Facebook (as well as Twitter and other such sites) is to blame for the slowdown in updates to the blogs a number of my colleagues, for example, then that would be a real shame.

That said, on a theoretical level, I understand the appeal of Facebook, of course (even if in practice I don't feel the appeal myself) - it's a tool for what in my upcoming book I'll describe as the produsage of sociality:

here, the more or less overt evaluation of peers by peers in the community becomes a core practice, as does the evaluation of peer-contributed content as an indirect means of evaluating peers themselves. A number of key spaces for this produsage of sociality have emerged to public attention in the past years, ranging from Friendster through MySpace to Facebook, from Cyworld to Orkut, as well as to more professionally focused social networking sites like LinkedIn or Ecademy. Additionally, of course, we have already highlighted the strong social aspects of sites like Flickr or YouTube and of spaces like EverQuest and Second Life, and there are significant groups of participants on such sites which use them not predominantly for the purposes of sharing content or playing games, but mainly for building and maintaining social relationships and networks.

So I'm trying to pinpoint the source of my (surprisingly strong) unease about Facebook and similar sites. Perhaps I'm just sad that, frankly, I don't feel the excitement, when many of my friends and colleagues clearly do. But perhaps there's something else, too - what Facebook also represents is the (at least temporary) recentralisation of social networking under a corporate roof, when what blogs had achieved, for example, was a strong decentralisation and diffusion of personal publishing, interaction, debate, and deliberation:

the decentralized network of the wider blogosphere also enables a form of distributed social networking which is maintained through interlinkage and cross-commenting between individual bloggers, highlighting the conversational rather than publicational aspects of blogging.

Compared to my blog, compared to my friends' blogs, Facebook seems awfully restrictive, even in spite of all the content blocks and gadgets I can plaster all over my profile there. I think I'm coming to resent the idea that my social networks, my social interactions, my sociality are reduced to a set of predefined boxes containing my Facebook 'friends', 'groups', and 'networks'; that my friends are reduced to scrawling messages on my 'wall' in order to communicate with me (if indeed I do take the trouble to log on and check the writing on the wall...). And I on theirs, and so on. Seems awfully standardised, formulaic, impersonal.

Is it just me; am I losing touch with Web2.0 developments? Is Facebook simply one social networking site too far for what I can cope with? Or is there hope, and is this just a temporary recentralisation of online social interaction before the inevitable decentralisation which follows, much in the same way that the early centralised leaders Blogger and LiveJournal were ultimately joined by a vast range of alternative blog hosts, and (more importantly) by a multitude of bloggers 'rolling their own', installing Wordpress and Drupal and all manner of other Websites on their own servers? Will people once again break out of the corporate enclosure, and create their own more diffused social networks by enhancing blogs and other stand-alone sites with add-ons that even in this decentralised form still enable the kind of friending and grouping possible in Facebook and MySpace?

Answers on a postcard, or rather, in a comment to this post, please. You could post them on my 'wall' in Facebook, too, but I may not see them any time soon...

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