Figure 18-12. Facebook’s previous gender and relationship choice lists
First, note gender. In the twenty-first century, much of the world has come to realize that we are gendered in ways that are far more complex than the binary setting of male or female, and that gender is (like identity itself) largely constructed by cultural and social context. It’s good to know that a few months after I first drafted this section, Facebook changed to a more inclusive approach for gender specification: the menu choices are Male, Female, and Custom; selecting Custom reveals additional fields, as demonstrated in Figure 18-13, with even the lovely nuance of pronoun choice.
Figure 18-13. Facebook’s updated Gender selection interface
Also note the drop-down selection for Relationship Status in Figure 18-12. The choices present a list of mutually exclusive categories that don’t accommodate the complexity of actual relationships. For example, what marriage isn’t “complicated” in one way or another? The list also infers that there is a sort of linear progression to a romantic relationship: from Single to “In a relationship” to Engaged and then to Married. (Let’s set aside the unsettling feeling we get if we extend that implied line through “It’s Complicated” and the rest.) But the truth is, a real romantic relationship doesn’t move in a linear fashion through these clearly defined states. Not to mention the more legally specific constructions, many of which are defined differently from one municipality to another.
And yet, for anyone who has dated and had even a semi-serious relationship in the age of Facebook, this drop-down list can be vexing. Why? Because Facebook has become an official part of how couples define their relationships. The changing of one’s relationship status has become part of the prevailing cultural environment, as much as wearing a partner’s varsity-letter jacket in high school or offering an engagement ring in a marriage proposal. Because there are already culturally conventional markers for engagement and marriage, those selections are somewhat less problematic than others. But the really difficult one is Single versus “In a relationship”—at what point in one’s dating life does an individual (or a couple) switch from one to the other? In analog, semantic life, this is a tacit inflection point that emerges uniquely for everyone. But here, it has to be a clearly defined signal—a flipped switch.
This issue seems trivial at first, but Facebook is such a major factor in how others in the world understand who we are that this choice has a great deal of pressure on it. I personally know people who have stopped dating because of arguments over this tiny semantic choice.
There’s an obvious question underlying this entire issue: Why does the platform require answering this question with a selection from a defined list? Why can’t there just be a free-text field, with perhaps a list of suggested phrases, the way Facebook added the Custom field for gender?
The answer is probably because the information isn’t only for regular users. The collected data needs to be structured as attributes for data-mining advertisers. Facebook is asking us to identify ourselves within the definitions of a map that is partly not intended for us. In doing so—as we rely more and more heavily on infrastructures such as Facebook to mediate our identities—they structure what and who we are to one another.
So, on Facebook, filling out your personal profile isn’t just about telling other people about yourself on Facebook. It’s also connecting you with semantic information categories that can be structurally searched and analyzed in ways that would not occur to you. And why would it? It’s happening in an abstracted process outside of your perception.
Now that Facebook has introduced what it calls Graph Search, all those public factors are fodder for analysis to identify you in whatever ways searchers wish to interpret the data. People can use that information to profile users based on religion, gender, age, and even sexual orientation.[363] And because “Big Data” can be used to find patterns we would never dream of, these factors are discoverable through triangulation, even if users haven’t made those fields in their profile explicitly public.[364] It’s not just Facebook that’s using this sort of shadow-of-yourself analysis to target messages. The Barack Obama election campaign used these techniques with such skill that they had a better sense of how individuals would vote than the individuals had themselves.[365] And big-box retailer Target can accurately market baby products to people who don’t even know they’re pregnant yet.[366] Keep in mind, these last two examples aren’t driven only by web behaviors, but by data gathered from many other now-publicly-available sources. The information modes we’re familiar with—our everyday semantic utterances and bodily activities—are increasingly tethered to digital-information data stores, ready to be harvested.
Digital theorist, futurist, and philosopher Jaron Lanier has railed against such misappropriations of personal information. In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Vintage Books), Lanier reminds us that the Shannon construction of information (as discussed in Chapter 12), by its nature, creates limitations in how we describe ourselves and our environment:
Recall that the motivation of the invention of the bit was to hide and contain the thermal, chaotic aspect of physical reality for a time in order to have a circumscribed, temporary, programmable nook within the larger theater. Outside of the conceit of the computer, reality cannot be fully known or programmed.
Poorly conceived digital systems can erase the numinous nuances that make us individuals. The all-or-nothing nature of the bit is reflected at all layers in a digital information system, just like the quantum nature of elementary particles is reflected in the uncertainty of complex systems in macro physical reality, like the weather. If we associate human identity with the digital reduction instead of reality at large, we will reduce ourselves.
The all-or-nothing conceit of the bit should not be amplified to become the social principle of the human world, even though that’s the lazy thing to do from an engineering point of view. It’s equally mistaken to build digital culture, which is gradually becoming all culture, on a foundation of anonymity or single-persona antiprivacy. Both are similar affronts to personhood.”[367]
Lanier is pointing out the ways in which the digital mode of information can influence and ultimately warp the way we identify ourselves. Of course, a business is a business, and advertising is what drives revenue for Facebook and many other social platforms, which wouldn’t exist but for that revenue. So, the answer isn’t to vilify the business as a business. A good start would be doing a better job of providing transparency around user information, ideally giving users some level of agency in how their information is being used, other than having to leave the platform altogether.[368]
As designers of these inhabited, living maps, we need to realize how deeply we are affecting the lives of people who use what we make. The defined attributes we wrap around people (as well as objects, events, and places) that we might assume are only supplementary can easily become fundamental in their effects. Facebook is only one obvious example of these issues; they’re just as important when designing a corporate intranet or a patient database for a healthcare system.
Networked Publics
Digital places, structured by systems of labels and rules, are not just something we visit as an optional distraction anymore. And, when an environment becomes more of a requirement, it’s more about civics than mere socializing. Author and professor Clay Shirky states in clear terms how the structures and rules we create in these places affect our lives:
Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we’re supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters.[369]
We are co-inhabiting digital governance structures legislated by software engineers, counseled by marketers, advertisers, and corporate board members.
In her
dissertation on social software, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, social media scholar danah boyd (her capitalization) explains that there is not really just one “public.” Rather than saying “the public” it’s more accurate to refer to “a public” among many. She states, “Using the indefinite article allows us to recognize that there are different collections of people depending on the situation and context. This leaves room for multiple ‘publics.’” She explains that publics are not necessarily separate from one another: they overlap, and are nested with smaller publics inside larger ones. (From a Gibsonian perspective, this might suggest that people group together in an overlapping, nested way similar to how we perceive the environment; this would make sense, given that people are part of the environment, as well.) In addition, boyd mentions that there are also emergent collectives working against the grain of the status quo, referred to as “counterpublics.”[370]
Publics are shaped in part by how they are mediated, and boyd argues that “networked” publics are different from the “broadcast” and “unmediated” publics that came before; she says the proper frame for the structures and rules we put into the networked environment is architecture: “Physical structures are a collection of atoms, while digital structures are built out of bits. The underlying properties of bits and atoms fundamentally distinguish these two types of environments, define what types of interactions are possible, and shape how people engage in these spaces.”[371] In fact, citing William J. Mitchell’s City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, boyd explains:
Mitchell (1995) argued that bits do not simply change the flow of information, but they alter the very architecture of everyday life. Through networked technology, people are no longer shaped just by their dwellings but by their networks (Mitchell 1995: 49). The city of bits that Mitchell lays out is not configured just by the properties of bits but by the connections between them.[372]
The way we use semantic function to make environments adds up to a sort of urban planning and architectural practice, and not merely in a metaphorical sense. This is architecture that we literally live in together.
To elaborate, boyd lays out four “Properties of Networked Publics” that make them different from the other sorts of mediated publics:[373]
Persistence: Online expressions are automatically recorded and archived.
Replicability: Content made out of bits can be duplicated.
Scalability: The potential visibility of content in networked publics is great.
Searchability: Content in networked publics can be accessed through search.
Additionally, “the properties of networked publics lead to a dynamic in which people are forced to contend with a loss of context.”[374]
In ecological terms, these are new invariant properties of our environment that don’t behave in the way in which our embodied perceptual system expects. As anthropologist Michael Wesch explained in Chapter 2 about the experience of looking at a webcam and trying to understand what sort of social interaction one is experiencing, we don’t have any gut-level grasp of what expression means in such a disembodied, wide-scaled context.
For an online environment like Facebook or Google’s Buzz and Plus, there are no intrinsic physical structures for us to rely upon for knowing where we are, or where the objects we create are (such as photos or status updates), and who can see them. The system has to simulate those structures for us, not only with graphical simulation of surface structures, but semantic relationships of labels.
It also has to build in structures for giving us a sense of others’ behavior, or attempts to meet or learn more about us; but such structures struggle to behave like physical social life. On LinkedIn, for example, there are mechanisms for knowing who looked at your profile (Figure 18-14), if you allow others to know you looked at theirs; it’s something that wouldn’t really exist outside of digital information.
Figure 18-14. Checking who viewed your profile in LinkedIn
Just because anything can be linked to anything doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. The environment might make perfect sense in its requirements and its engineered execution, but it isn’t truly habitable until, in the words of information architect Jorge Arango, it “preserves the integrity of meaning across contexts.”[375] It must make sense not just to the map itself, but to the people who live in it.
* * *
[344] Marshall McLuhan famously posited that “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT Press).
[345] Thanks to Tanya Rabourn and Austin Govella for permission to bring this exchange into the book.
[346] SMS is actually the most widely used data channel on the planet; for much of the developing world, SMS is their equivalent of the Internet.
[347] Clay Shirky makes this and other surprisingly still-relevant points in his 2004 essay, “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software,” (http://bit.ly/1uzVZOZ).
[348] Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008:17.
[349] It means we talk about “content” more than we used to, because it’s semantic material that’s so easily detached from the origin. This means that we must explicitly plan and manage how that content is governed and published, as in the practice of Content Strategy.
[350] Hall, Edward T. “A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior.” American Anthropologist October, 1963; 65(5):1003–26.
[351] Some details gathered from the Wikipedia article on Proxemics (http://bit.ly/1t9Hl4c).
[352] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_Space.svg
[353] Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1976.
[354] Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1995:14.
[355] Turkle, in fact, came to see this, as well, and the point is part of her argument in her later book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She sees it as part of an unhealthy corrosion of human communication. Personally, I see it not as necessarily corrosive, but a sort of phase transition from one mode of community to another.
[356] “What Really Happens On A Teen Girl’s iPhone.” Huffington Post, June 5, 2013 (http://huff.to/1wiaBWx).
[357] Madden, et.al. “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy,” Pew Research Internet Project, May 21, 2013 (http://pewrsr.ch/1w3flBK).
[358] Ladner, Sam. “What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon: the collision of ‘fronts’,” Posted at copernicusconsulting.net November 30, 2007 (http://bit.ly/10iKhAW).
[359] “Facebook & your privacy,” Consumer Reports magazine June 2012. (http://bit.ly/ZELYHC).
[360] Screenshot by author.
[361] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/mark-zuckerbergs-sister-complains-of-facebook-pri
[362] https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/
[363] van Ess, Henk. “The Creepy Side of Facebook Graph Search” PBS.org Mediashift January 24, 2013 (http://to.pbs.org/1AoOYYV).
[364] Green, Jon. “Facebook knows you’re gay before you do,” Americablog, March 20, 2013 (http://americablog.com/2013/03/facebook-might-know-youre-gay-before-you-do.html).
[365] Issenberg, Sasha. “A More Perfect Union: How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 1.” MIT Technology Review December 16, 2012 (http://bit.ly/1wwD6AN).
[366] Duhigg, Charles. “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” The New York Times, February 16, 2012 (http://nyti.ms/1CQFQsQ).
[367] Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage Books, 2011:201.
[368] The question of whether people must agree to give up their personal data in order to participate in the platform is related to a bigger question: at what point does something like Facebook become a kind of monopoly utility, to which people have a right to access?
[369] As reported by Nat To
rkington in his notes of Shirky’s talk (http://oreil.ly/1t9HBA9).
[370] boyd, danah. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics Dissertation; University of California, Berkeley. 2008, p. 18
[371] boyd, p. 24
[372] boyd, p. 25
[373] boyd, p. 27
[374] boyd, p. 36
[375] Arango, Jorge. “Links, Nodes & Order: A Unified Theory of Information Architecture,” (http://www.jarango.com/blog/2013/04/07/links-nodes-order/).
Part VI. Composing Context
Making Room for Making Meaning
If semantic environments are the maps we live in, and they help us make sense of the other modes of information we encounter, how do we go about creating them? Is it different from the way we’re used to making applications and websites, services and strategies?
The good news is this: context isn’t made of mysterious ether; it’s a result of bodily engagement with the language and objects of an environment. In other words, context depends on stuff we can touch, create, shape, and arrange—elements that we can compose.
Understanding Context Page 34
