Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

  There are still places where role-players get to put on various personalities and digital bodies. But in one sense, this ability has become mainstreamed into the many social platforms people inhabit. We have online profiles at many different sites, each of which is engineered around a specific set of information about us. We’re often finding ourselves choosing which platform is best for a particular picture or personal moment, or choosing which of our identities to use for making a comment somewhere, as shown in Figure 18-7.

  And these choices matter. For example, LinkedIn doesn’t ask what my favorite bands are or what five things I would take to a desert island, or what sort of people I want to date. It asks for business-related information such as work and education history—its context as a career-oriented place is largely defined by the semantic categories it gathers from us.

  Figure 18-7. Blogspot gives users the ability to log in using one of a number of net-defined “identities” to comment on a post

  So, LinkedIn defines the role one plays on LinkedIn, and in turn, that’s the identity one has when visiting there. The same goes for a dating site, or a personal journaling platform. Even an e-commerce site provides constraints for our role and identity; for example, Amazon, where the information categories constrain my role to being a consumer among other consumers, is a place where I can engage in conversations and self-expression, but always about products that I and others might consume.

  What has changed since Turkle’s writing in 1995: there’s no longer a neat division between “real life” and life “on the screen.” Screens are now everywhere, as apertures into the pervasive, networked information dimension. There is no stepping away from the computer to live in “meatspace” versus “cyberspace” anymore.[355] These other contexts are always-on and invariantly available. It’s hard to think of any networked experience that is still a fully walled garden; they all have tendrils working their way into syndicated feeds, email alerts, live chats, and other channels.

  Sometimes, a service is polite enough to ask if we want to connect one context to another, which is good. But these connections still come with complications.

  For example, lately, Google has been nudging users to consolidate their profiles, sweetening the encouragement by showing you how much “better” your identity will look and sound if you combine them, as is shown in Figure 18-8. Sounds fine on the face of it, but notice the disclaimer in the figure: “Links to your channel will still use [your YouTube username].”

  Figure 18-8. Google suggests I merge my personal Google account and the Google Plus account I have from my employer’s Google Apps platform

  One problem with an environment made of names is that you can’t easily just shirk one and move on to another. Then how will my identity be nested if I say yes to this? In which ways will it be merged and in which ways will it not? It’s not clear.

  I’ve wrestled with a similar issue just within Google’s Gmail platform. As Google grew its services portfolio, I created a new “Google Apps” identity so that I could use Gmail with my own andrewhinton.com domain; however, when I did, I already had years of email archives and history with my existing email address at gmail.com. Then, I joined a consultancy that was using Google’s Apps for Business service. Google has integrated all three of these into its Plus social platform, but I’ve found no useful way to merge or coordinate the three identities. Even in the Google ecosystem, I am represented by at least several different profiles. On the Internet, it’s a challenge to be represented as a single object, with a single label, even when you want to.

  My Facebook identity is another version of me online; and around the time of the Beacon experiment, I realized my Facebook identity was being recognized on other sites, far beyond Facebook. That’s because Facebook recognizes me through embedded code in websites—such as online retailers or magazines—that have nothing explicitly to do with Facebook. So many places I go, I see my face or the faces of Facebook friends embedded out of context.

  When I first encountered this pattern, it was disconcerting because it wasn’t clear if my face was something other people were seeing or if it was just showing up for me (see Figure 18-9). It’s one of those things that took explicit, reflective attention—and repeated exposure—to accept this new pseudo-presence of my “self” in all these other places. Even now, though, if it’s embedded in some way new to me, it can still take me off guard.

  This contextual cloning and splintering of my online self is happening far beyond Facebook’s many connections. For example, my American Express account is embedded in the digital context of my accounts at Amazon and Delta Airlines. These digitally formed places are not merely supplemental to our identities, because we rely on them as primary infrastructure for our social contexts.

  Figure 18-9. How is it that my Facebook profile is integrated into Microsoft’s Bing? The rules make sense to the network, but not to me

  In one interview, a teenager explains the consequences for a friend of hers, not for a “social network” site, but a phone texting channel:

  Not having an iPhone can be social suicide, notes Casey. One of her friends found herself effectively exiled from their circle for six months because her parents dawdled in upgrading her to an iPhone. Without it, she had no access to the iMessage group chat, where it seemed all their shared plans were being made.

  “She wasn’t in the group chat, so we stopped being friends with her,” Casey says. “Not because we didn’t like her, but we just weren’t in contact with her.[356]

  At one time, having a listing in the phone book was an essential bit of semantic information, providing an interface between a person or business and civic life. If you weren’t in the phone book, you were disconnected from a huge dimension of social infrastructure. But now we need an account in every digital place where our friends, family, or customers expect us to be. If we aren’t represented in those places, we don’t exist in them.

  These places can become so necessary in our lives that they can actually go from being pleasant to oppressive. As the currently reigning Übernetwork, Facebook serves again as a good example. Although Facebook’s user numbers have continued to increase, many people are finding that if they keep an account at all, it’s only out of necessity. They are afraid of disappearing entirely from the place where so much of what defines them and their community happens, but they consider it more of a chore than a delight.

  One recent study found many factors in play for why Facebook has become a contextually complicated place. The report finds that teens can’t freely express their identities with their peers the way they might otherwise, because so many parents, teachers, and other adult community figures have joined Facebook, as well.[357] But even among peers, “looking good, both physically and in reputation, is a big deal.” There’s pressure to uphold a positive image, in part because there’s pressure for one’s shared information to be “liked” in order to know if it’s valued or appreciated by peers. Everything can be “watched and judged.”

  Many teens are finding respite by creating accounts in other platforms, such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or Reddit. For many, there’s a clear awareness that it’s because those places have different architectures through which they can express themselves with less restriction and oversight, and with less pressure to comprehensively define so much of themselves for consumption by every “role” they play in their lives.

  For example, Tumblr has exploded recently as a teen social platform. One teen in the study said he uses it more because, “I don’t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I don’t have to interact with people I don’t necessarily want to talk to.” That is, Tumblr is a different kind of place whose structures are less demanding about defining oneself or compelling a user to take so many actions to be part of the system.

  Like Twitter, Reddit, and other less-demanding platforms, one benefit is you’re not compelled to identify your real name to viewers. You can experiment with what you’re interested in
culturally and socially, and only tell trusted friends your username. A common usage pattern on Reddit is the “throwaway” username: users will create a temporary login just to ask a single embarrassing or private question, often actually putting some version of “throwaway” in the name itself. Reddit makes it easy to do this, or it wouldn’t be so common. The rules of the environment shape the behavior of its inhabitants.

  A principle we keep returning to is that we’re part of a nested, evolutionary ecology. We are the way we are largely because of the structures and affordances of our environment. So, if that’s the case, all the stuff that makes up our identities—personalities, social connections, personal history, and so on—work the way they do with the assumption that the world around us works in a particular way, as well. Facebook has grown, in part, by providing mechanisms for every facet of our social lives. It sounds like a fine goal, until we realize that Facebook—in trying to be so many different places at once—disrupts our cognitive ability to distinguish what sort of place we are in, which in turn disrupts our ability to know which side of ourselves we should be presenting to others.

  As other social platforms continue to innovate and expand their scope in order to grow their user base, they create similar disruptions. This social dissonance is not just in our heads but is directly coupled with the dissonance of structure in these environments. Our identities are coupled, for good or ill, with the structure of place. Unstable or collapsed context architectures result in unstable or collapsed identities.

  Collisions and Fronts

  The way social structures can collapse or be unstable isn’t a sign that we’re disingenuous or duplicitous; having these sides of ourselves is just how we are. Erving Goffman, one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, argued that we naturally put on “fronts” that we use to control the way others perceive us in various facets of our lives. He framed these personas in theatrical terms: we have a “back-stage” self that is more relaxed and personally open, a “front-stage” self that is more controlled and cultivated for public or professional interaction, as well as a “core” self that is mostly internal, the way we relate to ourselves. And, of course, there can be various facets of each, depending on the situation one is in.

  I suspect these fronts are natural adaptations to the complexity of human relationships. We’re usually not conscious we’re doing it, because it’s not something we plan to do; it’s just how we behave. This dynamic works just fine as long as our fronts align with the environment we’re in—acting in one way when among our best friends, in another way when at work, and in another when visiting elderly relatives. When in each of those contexts, there is unambiguous information specified in the environment informing us who we’re with, and where.

  When Facebook’s Beacon was causing waves, sociologist and ethnographic researcher Sam Ladner explained that what was going wrong with Beacon (referencing Goffman’s concept) was what she calls a “collision of fronts.”

  Facebook’s Beacon didn’t work because it forces people to use multiple fronts AT THE SAME TIME. If I tag a recipe from Epicurious.com, but I broadcast that fact to friends that perceive me to be a party girl, I have a collision of fronts. If my boss demands to be my friend, I have a collision of fronts. If I rent The Notebook on Netflix, and my friends think I am a Goth, I have a collision of fronts.[358]

  Imagine if all the places you thought of as important places in your city or town were somehow merged into one place: at a smaller scale, it might be your bedroom, kitchen, and front porch; simultaneously, at a larger scale, it could be your workplace, your home, your gym, and—in a weirdly timeless way—your high school reunion, one that doesn’t last only a weekend, but goes on and on as you try conducting the rest of your life. In its need to grow without boundaries, Facebook collapses contexts by creating many doorways that feel as though they will take us to separate places, but they all drop us into the same big place at the same time.[359]

  Soon after Beacon, Facebook added tools for creating and managing “groups,” but they weren’t especially good for privacy. A few years later, they overhauled what the platform meant by “groups” entirely, to allow more private management between smaller clusters of friends, but the settings for them (as well as for all the privacy controls) are hard to find and understand, in spite of Facebook’s almost-annual attempts to improve their usability. As late as 2012, Consumer Reports was calling Facebook’s privacy controls “labyrinthian.” Changing the rules so often only further confounded users.

  For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, the labyrinth hit close to home in 2012 when his sister Randi discovered that a photo from her personal Facebook status feed was shared with an audience not only outside her own Facebook page, but on Twitter—outside of Facebook entirely.

  Ms. Zuckerberg complained to the Twitter user (named Callie Schweitzer), saying that sharing her photo in such a way was “way uncool,” to which Callie responded as depicted in Figure 18-10.

  Figure 18-10. A Zuckerberg brouhaha[360]

  But according to the Buzzfeed article about this brouhaha, Ms. Schweitzer more likely saw it not because she was subscribed to Randi’s feed, but because she’s friends with Randi’s sister, who was tagged by name in the photo, which made the picture show up in the sister’s news feed, as well.[361]

  There was a hearty round of schadenfreude among web dwellers when this occurred; people frustrated with the platform’s convoluted privacy controls were more than happy to see a member of Facebook aristocracy suffer from the same contextual collision that had vexed the common folk for years.

  The problem arose in part because Facebook’s environment uses names in ways we don’t use them in regular conversation. When typing a name into a status or photo post, Facebook automatically looks for names in your friends list that match, and provides an auto-suggest-and-complete interaction. Facebook also makes it a default setting for users to allow being tagged in such a way, and for items tagged thusly to show up in the news feeds of friends of the tagged person—and it’s hard to tell that the tagged person didn’t post it herself.

  A similar issue occurs on Flickr: the system publishes any pictures tagged with your name as a primary place in your profile. In the mobile app (Figure 18-11), tapping the Photos Of button reveals a gallery of such pictures; in my case, because I never get around to tagging pictures of me with my own name, these are nearly all pictures made by other people.

  Figure 18-11. Flickr’s mobile profile presentation

  Someone new to Flickr could easily assume the Photos Of area is actually curated by me—after all, I’m the curator of the other structures: Sets, Groups, Favorites, and Contacts. The convention in most social networks has been that the user controls what represents him in his profile. Adding to the confusion, these icons are all presented as if they are similar in kind—apples with apples—even though one is not like the others.

  So, even though social platforms claim to be giving users ways to manage context, the walls and windows keep shifting; the rules are so slippery, we environmentally learn that we can’t trust key structures to be invariant. Like some of the teens studied by Pew, one way users have combatted this confusion is to just create multiple accounts, one for their “front-stage” self, and another for their “back-stage” persona—a practice Facebook actively condemns. According to Facebook’s official policies, multiple profiles can cause you to be exiled from Facebook:

  On Facebook, people connect using their real names and identities. We ask that you refrain from publishing the personal information of others without their consent. Claiming to be another person, creating a false presence for an organization, or creating multiple accounts undermines community and violates Facebook’s terms.[362]

  What this policy misses is the fact that people are not just one thing in all places and all times, among all people. Real “community” leaves room for the multiple fronts of one’s identity. It’s only because Facebook has created such a mudd
le within the shell structure of a singular profile that people have given up on making sense of it, and decided instead to create their own separately defined contexts for their social fronts.

  The Ontology of Self

  What we’re witnessing in social software platforms is a clash between different definitions of the self and what an identity actually is, not to mention what a “friend” is. Recall that the word ontology can be used in two different ways: first, it means the conceptual, human question of being, and what something “is”; and, second, it means formal, technological definition of an entity (what attributes does it have that define what it is in the system?).

  Digital logic leaves little or no room for the tacit nuances of organic, nondigital life. To achieve anything even close to the rich complexity of natural human meaning is one of the most challenging things computer science can attempt—hence the still-awkward interactions we have with voice-controlled computers, or the erratic usefulness of “natural language search.” Those capabilities require many expensive layers of artificial intelligence, which is still far from being consistently reliable outside of narrowly defined use-cases.

  Facebook puts a lot of the work on users’ shoulders to figure out how to make the many dimensions of one’s identity fit the very few “slots” provided by its data models and controlled vocabularies.

  For example, Figure 18-12 shows the top portion of Facebook’s form for gathering one’s “Basic” profile information, as it stood circa 2012. I’ve exposed the selections in two of the drop-down menus to illustrate how Facebook was using a limiting ontology of identity.