how facebook almost made us into good people: the rise and fall of transparent social networks

Historians will recognize the brief window of time of 2005-2009 was the only time in human history we had transparent social networks due to social media sites. Behaviors changed, accountability reared its ugly head, and it looked like we are all had to play be the same rules or get outed. Then things changed, the software bit back and allowed us to choose who and to what degree people really were our friend. The transparency got hazy again and as we move into the fast future, history will remember those few years with the same idyllic fondness as we do the Brady Bunch, and the glamorous future now looks a lot more like the prickly past. 

Here’s a glimpse of what social networks looked like before social networking sites: John from Accounting leads a complicated, compartmentalized life.  He has three girlfriends (to varying degrees), loathes his job, and has a gambling habit.  And yet, none of his lovers, colleagues, or friends is any the wiser; John could deny his gambling, feign loyalty to his employer, and keep each of his girlfriends far apart.  

Enter social networking: Lady A is one click away from Ladies B and C, John’s boss can read John’s blog entitled “Countdown to Quitting,” and John’s sister worries about the comment from BlackJackGod about the “crazy wad John blew this weekend at the tables… LOL.”  If John, like over 100 million other users, joined the social networking site, suddenly all of his disparate worlds are in intimate visible contact with each other, and John’s behavior needed to adjust dramatically. 

The basic paradigm shift here was that John’s social network had become transparent, which, like transparency in any other medium—economics, language, government—demands openness, communication, and accountability.  “It’s not what you know, but who you know,” has always been the mantra for getting things done, and networking through a series of portal people has remained the norm.  But the architecture of social networking had changed from a portal-based interaction, in which everything passes through a middleman, to a network-based interaction, in which the middleman becomes obsolete.  Never before had our complete social and business networks been able to exist in such a tightly contained and accessible space, which allowed for speedier transactions of whatever kind.  Suddenly your childhood best friend is one click away from your current yoga instructor, or, within a corporate environment, the safety officer in Tucson is one click away from the IT programmer in Akron, without the time-consuming search to determine who to contact.  Whereas before the old, fixed, webmaster-controlled internet (Web 1.0) made information available, now the new, dynamic, user-controlled internet (Web 2.0) makes people available, furthering the dream of e-democratization. 

The more closely we connected our offline lives to our online ones, the more truthful our web interactions had to become.  It’s natural to distrust cyber environments—when the internet first emerged, for example, people worried that it would represent the end of reliable publishing—but the fact is that our evaluation skills simply need to evolve along with the medium.  Ebay.com was first ridiculed as naïve because people couldn’t imagine strangers sending each other money based solely on goodwill and a system of “buyer feedback.”  But sellers quickly learned that it was in their best interest to be honest, and Ebay has therefore become secure.  The process Ebay buyers use to evaluate sellers is in fact similar to the process a Myspace or Facebook user might use to evaluate a friend or colleague, although the criteria on such sites is more complicated, and thus more telling: pictures, comments from others, personal blogs, and, most importantly, a glimpse at that individual’s contacts.  And as we’ve all heard from Mom, “You are who your friends are.”  

So where was this heading?  Well, transparency is the opposite of privacy, for better and for worse.  In that bygone age of transparent social networks, employers, lenders, and landlords might have scrutinize your Myspace (or similar) page before deciding whether to hire, loan, or lease.  Or, you might have used the same inside info to hire your next contractor, dentist, or wedding planner.  Your angry ex-girlfriend might, with one click of a button, have told everyone you know about your bank account balance  or STD.  Or you might, with a quick scan through member profiles, have determined the best local activist club for you, based on actual people you’d like to meet.  The possibilities were endless, and the implications are both intimidating and exciting as transparent social networks began to push us to new levels of living legit. What can’t technology fix? 

And you thought you were such a smart Mom, becoming a friend on your fourteen year old daughters  facebook.com account. Monitoring her behavior and friends just like you did in the real world. But you didn’t know the rules had changed and your facebook.com had allowed your daughter to change the viewing privileges in your profile. You thought she was leaving the house in sweat pants but didn’t realize that she had a mini skirt underneath. Ebay.com stopped allowing for negative feedback. And these sites all stared allowing different people different viewing rules, making transparency a things of the past.

And with the click of a profile in a software upgrade, there went our transparent social networks and all the idyllic and profound changes that might have brought about. Let the old rules rule: gatekeepers, privileges, ability to hide and be multiple self images without accountability. It’s not our fault, 10,000 of genetic programming is hard to re-circuit. So as our social networks become more like they looked a decade ago, just online, remember that time when we were all were what we projected online or feared the consequences.