Facebook: Where More is Really Less

Facebook and Communication Formats:

An Anti Sound Bite Manifesto

Fred Allebach 1/1/11, update 3/17/13

I’ve sat on the sidelines of the ascendancy of Facebook and the social networking craze periodically asking: what it is so compelling about this? I initially rejected e-mail but am now an initiate. Should I do the same with Facebook? I see parallels with Facebook and the evolution of communication formats in general. Ultimately I have yet to see any good reason to go for Facebook other that everybody else is doing it.

Why is everybody doing it? Probably because it is a one stop shop, one password conglomeration of all the new digital formats that have arisen in the last 20 years. Facebook is a multi-media fusion of technologies among which communication can take place but is also in large measure entertainment and voyeurism.

Facebook is an extension of various technologies: video games, cell phones, internet, email/ mass mail functions, blogs, chat rooms, virtual communities, digital video, photography and music. The sum total effect has been to make communication easy and near instantaneous. A dial-up modem seems hopelessly primitive at this point. I remember when Windows 95 was practically a miracle! Wow.

Since communication has gotten so fast, people have accepted this change in speed (and the whole evolution of formats) as a creeping normalcy. Short attention spans are now normal. Rude cell phone behavior is now normal. Phrases such as “quick twitch” are emblematic of increasingly sound bite type of messages.

E-mail shortened the formatting of written communication, resulted in clipped sentences, uncapitalized letters, no introduction or sign-off and this led the way to the even more depersonalized formats such as texting. The sense is that you are actually present in a conversation, a virtual conversation. The fact it is being written and that it must be fast, mixes the rules, changes the rules of older formats. You are at once more and less present. This kind of clipped interaction is part of Facebook as well. What you get is an accumulation of short comments, a running commentary, not a running dialogue.

Writing letters to communicate and paying bills by mail has fallen by the wayside. The rise of digital has taken down the Postal Service along with it. Paper and the technologies that generate it are less and less prevalent. The typewriter is gone thank God, hopelessly primitive! I can’t believe I went through college with a typewriter. Two things have happened: one, actual communication has been made easier and faster by word processing, computers and two, mass access has increased the ability of public participation. Now a million knuckleheads have blogs and Facebook pages, you are your own pundit and public too.  The medium is indeed the message.

This has all come with a hidden cost and exposure: We’ve become dependent on electricity and digital formatting to say anything. Ease has trumped effort in the same way technology always outstrips old formats and methods. However, ease leaves one exposed with no hard skills should the undergirding go away: take away Safeway, who knows how to get food? Take away matches and lighters how do you make fire? Take away metal pots and pans and how do you cook? Take away electric well pumps and how do you get water? Take away the cell phone and the laptop, who knows how to find information at a library? (The card catalog is gone!) With no knowledge of spears how do you keep the bears off?

Technological ease domesticates us and makes us soft. We are like a monoculture, ubiquitous and robust but only within certain well-defined parameters. Take away those parameters and the wheat will soon be separated from the chaff.

The alphabet externalized our memory and left oral tradition in the dust. The printing press homogenized languages and left regional dialects to go extinct. In the same way Facebook is having its consequences: things will be lost as the glittery new is welcomed wholeheartedly. Just what we are losing may not be clear until it is gone.

We went from a written/ typed letter format where time, effort and attention were necessary to formats with progressively less time and effort needed. E-mail was just a step on the way. What it amounts to in the end is a rapid evolution of communication formats of which Facebook is the current highest expression. The mass mail function of e-mail, personal web pages and blogs allowed a sort of depersonalized communication to emerge. You could share announcements, pictures, Xmas letters etc with many all at once. With Facebook you get all that plus you view others public presentations without even the necessity of communicating with them. “Friends” become homogenized as something to collect and post to rather than to actually have. On Facebook you craft a public image out of a proscribed range of features designed like a spider web to snare you and your associates in.

What I see is that Facebook combines mass mail, web pages, blogs, digital technology and the Internet to make a proxy for more genuine communication and by creeping normalcy this has evolved into the current default format. But this is really not communication; it’s more of an anonymous personal public display, an advertisement if you will, that has taken over the space where actual communication once existed. Everything is now equivalent to an Xmas letter, it’s all gone third person.

Loss of privacy is a clear downside. The mass harvesting of people’s personal information to be sold to advertisers and to aid in who knows what other type of Orwellian schemes is super creepy. Employers and stalkers can now view everything you say, all your pictures and music. Privacy settings are changed unannounced under your feet. Since it is free, there is no accountability; there is no paying consumer to have any rights. No one is available to call to ask why? People haven’t stopped to think that all the posting might mean trouble. Lack of privacy is normal. The sheep follow down the garden path while wolves have other purposes in mind. There is a hidden cost and downside: loss of privacy and a potential type of Chinese state/ or corporate control over communication and personal information. It’s the combine, the Matrix, the machines; it’s all coming true.

How is it that Facebook is worth billions and billions and the arch Master of the Universe, Goldman and Sachs is buying super shares and the people whose information is being bought and sold don’t even get to charge for it? Man, the wolves are having a field day on the sheep. How is it that billionaires can donate millions anonymously, as a right, but little fish have no rights to privacy from advertisers?  

OK, back on track: Facebook has made it easy to not really communicate and this has become normal. Along with texting and Tweeting what we have is Communication Lite. Given that the bulk of people don’t converse or communicate anyway, i.e. what you get is people talking to themselves, not listening and making announcements of their opinions anyway. Facebook just capitalizes on a basic instinct of Narcissistic self-absorption and marries that with new technology to create a format where people can construct monuments to themselves, not really communicate and be voyeurs into the lives and cleavages of all their anonymous “friends”.

This lack of substantial communication is not contingent on Facebook. Facebook is just the cumulative expression of many precursor trends. The physical mobility of post WW2 economic boom baby boomers has scattered the US population to the four winds. Friends and associates no longer live in the same area and are forced to communicate long distance one way or another. As well, people have their interests, preferences and fluencies and these get hardened by age; life sweeps us away and the vigor of youthful communication is pruned back. The inherent disembodiment of digital communication coupled with physical separateness adds up to a dying off of face-to-face communication in the present. The first person has defaulted to the second and third. Friends are now disembodied; community has taken a new form; face-to-face has evolved to keyboard-to-keyboard, textpad-to-textpad. If your real friends are not present there are plenty more virtual ones to take their place.

Virtual friendship takes no messy work or risk of rejection when all communication stands as private, anonymous postings in monuments to ourselves in cyberspace. Somebody is an asshole or ruffles your feathers? Delete them. It’s all at once more stimulation with less risk of actual investment.

Without common ground and common format there gets to be no ability and hence, no desire to share. Black sheep start to stand out. People are attached to their preferred communication formats and if these aren’t shared, then the people won’t meet, simple as that. No cell phone, text or instant message, no Facebook or Twitter, no contact. Sayonara to those who don’t buy in. That’s me.

I really like having no TV, no cell phone, no Facebook; my texture as a person feels more genuine, more centered in my actual humanity. I do have e-mail and use a variety of Google products (but not Google +): Google Earth, Picasa, Panoramio, You Tube, blogspot, maps, and I can tell you, I’m about as isolated with all that as with letters. I guess what Facebook does is allow people who don’t really feel like communicating to have the ease to appear to be doing it.

For those buying in, the synergy is great, same as the initial alphabet and the printing press. Groups can find each other, meet and create virtual communities that float their boats. Bands and groups can popularize and advertise. More voices can be heard. Yet now there are so many voices, who’s got time to sift all that? In the end, the political freedom to be heard is still limited by governments; China and Iran both show that quick, mass communication can be blocked and that any will of the people is still stifled and manipulated by state and/or corporate power. Even in the US, say there is a huge virtual community against bovine growth hormone; if that’s all it is, voices and no real power, industry will keep loading up the cattle with it. Hot air and opinion is still just hot air against corporate/ governmental collusion.

We get the printing press around 1440 as a fusion of technologies and that eventually takes communication to a whole new level. Were there those who felt it was no good at the time? Probably so. Yet a quantum leap in format like that is going to catch on like it or not. Technology advances are like this: they drive change all on their own, they hybridize and take over like invasive species and people seem helpless in front of it; those who go for it are the vanguard and those who don’t get left behind, or stay centered in former comfort zones. Here we see the real roots of what it means to be liberal or conservative. Technological changes latch on for good or ill, nuclear, oil, machines, chemical, electro-magnetic and it all seems like a mixed blessing if a blessing at all. The point being: people go for new technology like lemmings and then reap the consequences later. It’s a deal with the devil. That’s how it is. I don’t see Facebook as an irresistible advance in technology on the level of metallurgy, the car or tractor; it has downsides like anonymity, lack of attribution and responsibility, lack of privacy, superficiality and besides, legitimate and adequate forms of communication still exist. Facebook is not a revolution; it’s a fusion of current digital/internet applications. It capitalizes on social instincts but leaves only the taste of meat with no real chunks to chew on.

The printing press was a clear advance. It opened the playing field in a similar way to how the Internet and digital communication have broadened access. The printing press format served to homogenize and concentrate languages and other information. Information, communicative access and expressive power were diffused to more people yet at the same time these people were funneled into and bounded by the new context and the content that happened to be printed. Wolves always figure out how to manage new style sheep. As a result of the printing press, previous linguistic diversity fell as people consolidated into speech communities, language identities and nations. Styles caught on just because they happened to be disseminated in the popularization of the new format. In the same way Facebook is funneling and consolidating people into formats that at once represent an apparent gain yet at the same time are an actual loss. By broadening the denominator for entry, the denominator becomes lower and the sheer volume of voices makes it so while people are empowered to speak and learn, the quality of it all diminishes. And so people become circumscribed by the new context of the new speech community/ format and it all starts to seem normal. Basic human behavior asserts itself no matter what the technology or communication format.

Plato found a similar feeling to the then new alphabetic format: “It will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from inside, themselves by themselves: you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. To your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it; having heard much, in the absence of teaching, they will appear to know much when for the most part they know nothing, and they will be difficult to get along with, because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself”. (1) The taste of meat only indeed. This is my same feeling about Facebook.   

The sound bite type of communication first opened by e-mail and then intensified by texting, cell phones, Twitter, Facebook is a devolution; there is none of the substance supposedly characteristic of the higher intelligence of humans involved in simply contacting each other with mindless short nothings. So what if you just had spaghetti or if Johnny got cheese in his hair?  This insistent messaging is like monkeys constantly touching each other to reinforce social bonds. It’s a primitive type of social reassurance. It capitalizes on an instinct, but turns it virtual rather than real. This is what you call more apparent then real.

Beyond Facebook, the Internet provides mass access to everything under the sun but this does not change how people go about collecting and owning information. People still read and accept only that which supports their initial premise, same as with oral, hand written or typed information. In-formed has cross-over meaning with parochial no matter what the format. Like I said, people are still people.

Part of the new format gestalt is an on-demand, fast twitch, short attention span phenomena driven by the technology; first video games, then Internet, then cell phones/ texting/Twitter, now Facebook. The sound bite, on-demand phenomena has become normal, the rudeness of public or private cell phone interruptions is now normal. Real people are less important and necessary; virtual contact brings the elevator to the top floor, only the metaphorical top is lowered from what to used to be, only seeming to be the top floor. We end up settling for less as the technology pushes this way and that.

What I see is the over-all trivialization of communication and those who favor substantive interactions in old (or new) formats are left in the dust. Technology marches on, people follow like lemmings and that suffices for evolution. People now value more their gadgets than the person in front of them. The cell phone ring is kind of Pavlovian, “oh, it’s ringing, I must answer…”.

People post involved monuments to themselves on Facebook yet they can’t take the time to share any of it in person. The format has seduced people away from actual communication and left as a proxy, digital representations of themselves for public consumption. People are too busy being swept away by modern life to say anything personal. Is it really evolved to be stressed and preoccupied to the nth degree? Lack of genuine engagement is certainly not contingent on Facebook or short twitch communications, but the new formats are certainly conducive to it.

I could be conflating the current state of technology with the fact that later mid-life has drawn my associates and their families farther and farther away so as we have grown apart in time and space, the lack of actual face time results in a natural social pruning and estrangement. After a while, in the vast Interstate Highway American diaspora, it’s fumes from your twenties you’re living on as any kind of social glue. Hence a technology emerges perfect for a society of alienated mobile individuals living apart yet sharing common histories in childhood, college etc: presto! Facebook, you get face time across 3000 miles, it stimulates the social belonging chemicals and it represents a perfect fusion of technology, the need for being connected and the actual estrangement of a society of mobile, un-tethered individuals.

What we end up with is community and communication at the virtual, disembodied, make-believe, alienated level. Is this really different from the very beginning, of papyrus, alphabets, writing, print, in that technology at once enhances and then changes what we have going and brings it to new unpredictable levels? It may appear we are commanding more information but is it actually less?

In part ways, following the alienation and estrangement implicit in a society of mobile individuals, mass mail and Facebook represent a type of R selection strategy, by trolling for as many “friends” as possible, maybe some will result in a substantial communication and it becomes a game of numbers, some must pan out, out of so many. This is how John Forbes Nash, Jr. of A Beautiful Mind fame figured out how to pick up girls at the bar. This is how digital photographers can always get a good shot. Behind all this technological voodoo, natural impulses still reside, asserting themselves somehow, love, communication, we have to find a way through it as the formats come and go.

I know I hope that a mass mail might result in a substantive reply from somebody. In a world of mongrel digital communications seeing mass mail means that someone doesn’t really care enough to send a personal note and what Facebook does is legitimize your not caring. Maybe a friend of a friend might reply and thus you can have the illusion that someone cares. Maybe it is like monkeys after all in that it is not what is said but just that something is said to let you know you belong. The message is the message. The medium is just the march of technology, as we generate it and it generates us. We accept the eases of technology without question as good but in important ways it leaves us poorer, more exposed to nature by being cut off from hands-on skills and traditions that allow us manage our own affairs.

(1) p. 87 The Axemaker’s Gift, A Double-Edged History of Human Culture, Burke, James and Ornstein, Robert, 1985 Grosset Putnam, NY