The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one’s own and others’ lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.”
It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet’s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to “stake their claims as unique individuals,” users enumerate personal information: “Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.” Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites “vast celebrations of solipsism.”
Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naive or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. “One cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be,” Carnegie Mellon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross “detected little or no relation between participants’ reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood” of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacy—the ones who worried about “the scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived”—about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.
This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC’s Dateline featured a police officer posing as a nineteen-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the impostor quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.
There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal home pages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that “40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook.” Yet college students’ reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and “64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.”
This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when one’s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.
In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “protean selves.” Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces “mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor.” (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that “23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.”) Also, Lifton argues, “the emotions of the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target.” So, too, with protean communities: “Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating,” Lifton writes, “removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence.” This is precisely the appeal of online social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship....
We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact—and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates—why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.
activists
Excerpted from Born Digital (pp. 255–67)
JOHN PALFREY is Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. Along with coauthoring with Urs Gasser Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008), Palfrey is the coeditor of Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering (2008). He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School.
URS GASSER is executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He has published and edited many books and has written more than sixty articles in books, law reviews, and professional journals. Recent publications have included a study on ICT interoper
ability and eInnovation, an article on search engine regulation, and an extensive comparative legal study on anti-circumvention legislation.
IMAGINE A DEVELOPING country that is starting to get some economic traction, with a growth rate of 6 or 7 percent per year. The president, up for reelection, faces a stiff challenge from a popular opposition leader. The challenger, a charismatic tribesman with a wide following, campaigns hard. The election is extremely close. After the vote, the president arranges for a quick swearing-in and abruptly declares himself the winner. Supporters of his opponent cry foul. Violence erupts across the country. The major city is thrown into turmoil. The country’s main port shuts down.
During the election, a group of citizens used the Internet and their cell phones to tell the story of what was going on through firsthand accounts. These activists, some of them Digital Natives, took photographs of events as they broke and posted them to the Web. They critiqued the formal accounts coming from the government and from the mainstream press. They organized their opposition over cell phones and in e-mail, in the process connecting people who never before would have found one another and orchestrating meetings and rallies in far more efficient ways than they could have without the technology.
In the aftermath of the election, activists on both sides of the dispute continue to chronicle the violence and to tell the story of what is taking place for a global audience. The world’s press relies, in no small part, on the most reliable of these firsthand accounts for the articles that people outside of the country read in their local papers in London, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.
This story is no mere hypothetical. In Kenya in early 2008, a period of violent political unrest followed a contested election.1 Skilled political activists, taking advantage of Kenya’s partially networked environment, provided firsthand accounts of the election and its aftermath that helped to shape what people in Kenya and others around the world came to know about what happened in those heady days.
In Kenya, Internet and cell-phone penetration is relatively low by global standards, but the country’s elites are online. Just as important, there is a large diaspora community of Kenyans who use the Internet as a primary means of communication. Within the wired subpopulace of Kenyans, there is a growing, vibrant community of people who are writing and posting digital media to the Web in highly sophisticated ways, geared toward having a political impact. Young people played a leading role in the election narrative. But Kenya is not the only developing country where the Web, and young people, are beginning to influence the course of important events.2
The new mode of activism, made possible by the use of networked digital tools, leads to benefits for citizens of established democracies, countries in transition, and authoritarian regimes alike. First, as the Kenyan example demonstrates, it is possible to harness the Internet’s power to render more transparent the actions of a specific government. This transparency matters both in times of crisis—in an unruly election, for example—and in times of orderly governance. Second, the Internet can provide a means for ordinary citizens to participate in the way that public events are told to others, set into context, understood by people far and near, and remembered for posterity. The traditional hierarchies of control of news and information are crumbling, with new dynamics replacing the old. These new dynamics will lead to a more responsive politics.
The ability of networked activists to transform politics in some countries could prove to be the single most important trend in the global Internet culture. The early signs of a culture of civic activism among young people, joined by networked technologies, are cropping up around the world. If these early signs turn into a bigger movement, politics as we know it is in for big changes.
Presidential campaigns have drawn a lot of attention to the role of Digital Natives in politics, but these campaigns are only the very beginning of the story. Howard Dean’s presidential primary run in 2004 is the paradigmatic example. Led by campaign manager Joe Trippi and visionary organizers like Zephyr Teachout and Jim Moore, the Dean campaign used the Internet to harness grassroots energy, to pull new people into the campaign, and to raise a great deal of money online. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign has done all that the Dean campaign did, and more, online. Participation in electoral affairs is a starting point and has led to a lot of hype, but it is also not the most important aspect of how Digital Natives are participating in civic life.
The Internet has not fundamentally changed the nature of political action, nor has it brought millions of new people into civic life. The Internet provides tools that empower people, young and old, to have a greater level of direct, personal participation in the formal political process—if they want to. No new technology is going to make someone have a conversion experience. What the Net provides is an increasingly useful, attractive platform for those who are predisposed to be active in civic life. The Internet makes possible new and occasionally astonishing things for a set of highly empowered individuals. Young people can gain access to far more information than ever before. They can reach out to other people far more efficiently. With huge ambition, one or two people can establish a news operation that can put huge pressure on mainstream news providers, offer alternative viewpoints, and reach a global audience on a modest budget.
That said, we must acknowledge up front that our argument about the political potentialities of the Internet is not data driven. The data do not support the argument that Digital Natives, or anyone else, are, in large percentages, using new technologies for purposes of civic activism. The story of the effect of Internet use on politics is just now breaking; these issues are playing themselves out, right now, in different contexts around the world. The terrain is unsettled. The scholarly field studying these issues is nascent. Empirical evidence is more or less nonexistent. Our interviews and focus groups suggest that the percentage of Digital Natives doing new things online in the activist realm is modest, at best. Most studies that others have conducted regarding the levels of participation have confirmed what we found. The fault lines in the relevant debates are becoming clear, but there’s no consensus as to the likely outcome or impact. Though our instinct is to be hopeful, our frame of reference needs to be skeptical.
It is also important to recognize that the story of civic engagement online is not solely about Digital Natives. It can be, and should be, a story about people of all ages. The single best thing that could be accomplished online would be a connection across generations, especially one that is geared toward taking advantage of the networked public sphere in the public interest.
New technologies are transforming certain aspects of politics. The fundamental rules still apply, but the way the game is played is changing. Digital Natives are, in many cases, leading the way. The big impact will occur if the rest of their generation around the world follows suit.
Digital Natives have been at the forefront of the movement to change politics through use of digital tools. Though the Internet doesn’t change everything when it comes to politics, in a few instances use of new technologies has made a notable difference in terms of how campaigns are conducted. Examples where the netroots have made a difference include South Korea in 2002, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005, and the presidential primary elections in 2004 and 2008 in the United States.
The use of the Internet to deepen the participation of individuals in formal political campaigns comes at a welcome moment in history. Over the past twenty years, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the purported decline in voting among young people in the United States. At the same time, there has been a recent increase in other kinds of civic involvement that point to opportunities that Internet-based activism could exploit. This divergence suggests that it isn’t that kids are apathetic. It’s just that they are interested in changing the world through ways other than voting. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century the youth vote fell precipitously. In 1972, fully half (50.3 percent) of all eligible Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four v
oted in the election that gave Richard Nixon his landslide victory over George McGovern (the percentage for all age groups combined was 55.2).3 In 2000, only about one-third (37.3 percent) of eligible young Americans voted in the excruciatingly close general election between George W. Bush and Al Gore (this time, the percentage for all age groups was 51.3).4 The decline among young voters occurred even though the voter-registration process had become dramatically easier—through motor-voter, same-day registration, aggressive registration drives, and ubiquitous registration forms. This is not just an American phenomenon. Youth in the United Kingdom were also less likely to vote in elections than older citizens.5
But by other accounts, many young people demonstrated that they are more engaged than ever—just in ways other than voting. During this same period, young people got involved in public service outside the political sphere more extensively than ever before. Young volunteers stepped up the time they spent helping out in AIDS hospices and homeless shelters, teaching in Head Start centers, providing disaster relief in developing countries, and doing other good works. So while the number of young Americans voting in the presidential elections declined between 1972 and 2000, increasing numbers of young people were participating in public service before they graduated from college.6
Although these trends were emerging even prior to 9/11, that event—and the consequent outbreak of war—meant that a lot of people, particularly young people, were galvanized in ways that the Internet was poised to take advantage of. Some were nudged into political activism by a sense that America was increasingly becoming isolated in a post-9/11 world at precisely the moment when we should be drawing closer to other cultures.7 Others—particularly youth outside the United States—were stirred to action by the reaction of the world’s lone superpower to the terrorist crisis. The polarizing effect of a world divided between sharply differing ideologies at the start of the new millennium created an environment that drew people into the debate, including youth.
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