“Just because we can, doesn’t mean we do.”
I find myself saying that a lot when people get overly enthusiastic about the power of technology. Per my previous reflections on Ethan Zuckerman’s TED talk and as a tangential homage to Malcolm Gladwell’s ass-kicking of the technotopians in the New Yorker this week, I came up with a research question that might make a dent on the whole conflation-of-Internet-architecture-with-human-activity.
Sure I have 900 friends on Facebook. But that is because I was too polite to blatantly reject someone’s friend request in the early days of Facebook’s opening up to the non-collegiate user base and now I’m too lazy to do the infamous, if absolutely necessary “purge”. It might also have something to do with the superficial high I get seeing that I know that many people, even though our ‘friendship’ is predicated on the click of a button. But as I mentioned in a guest post for Gorditamedia, I’ve stopped caring so now I don’t hesitate to click “ignore”. And I realized that I primarily interact with people in my immediate surroundings (i.e. grad school peers) and the folks that really matter to me (my best friends from high school and college). Now doesn’t that sound more like how we ‘manage our friendships’ in the real world?
Looking at my own experience, I very much don’t conform to the ideal of mass hyperconnection that makes phenomena like the (terminologically-contested) ‘Twitter Revolution’ possible. Mostly, I use these miracle technologies to, surprise!, reinforce the relationships I already have. I have to say, organizing an event through Facebook has actually made me into somewhat of a party planner. This coming from someone who balked, nay, went into hiding in the distant peaks of the Himalayan mountain range at the thought of throwing a party. Ah, but therein lies the problem- Facebook is perhaps too personal a tool for most users to complicate with their politics. But seeing the kind of links being posted left and right, it’s safe to say users aren’t too shy about wearing their ideological hearts on their sleeves.
But before I fall into the trap of narcissistic theoretical induction, there are definitely people out there who shamelessly promote themselves or their causes. I’ve “liked” a few of these myself. But I don’t really count that as meaningful political action (and I haven’t gone to any Facebook event rallies either). Gladwell was completely on point when he said “It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” This study is meant to see how prevalent online networking induced social/political action actually is, versus the current proof cited by the technotopian adulators: because it is built into the architecture.
Methodology has always been my weak suit but I imagine something like getting volunteers to allow their Facebook behavior to be observed for a X amount of time and show track the frequency of Facebook contact with all those populating the user’s friend list and cross-reference it with geography, real world interactions. Who would sign up for such a thing? Broke college students who watch ‘MTV’s Real World’ and ‘Jersey Shore’ (their shot at 15 minutes!). I’m just saying. But obviously this still needs a lot of thought.
This could work for Twitter too, probably to deliver an upper-cut to the kumbayahs about the Iranian “Twitter Revolution”. Jack Shafer details some of this in his Slate article, citing Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman via The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle. As for how to measure this, maybe the algorithms developed over at Indiana University’s Truthy Project can help. It’s a project that studies how memes propagate through the Twittersphere.
PS. If you’ve heard of or have seen a study like this, please send it my way! I’m neck deep in tying corporate influence on foreign policy with human rights and the political muscle flexing of ICT companies to think of the proper search term for it on JSTOR.
* – I put “hard” in parentheses because while I live and breathe the world of the social sciences, I share the physical science’s bias towards chemistry, physics, geology etc as ‘real’ science. Statistics is so useful yet so… mutable. Yet it’s what makes PageRank and Google Translate possible. I swear lit a candle for all the cognitive dissonance I tolerate within my own brain, I could, er, waste a lot of wax.
the project for sustained mental stimulation 