The Essence of Pleasure
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The Essence of Pleasure
Posted on: June 14, 2010 11:43 AM, by Jonah Lehrer
The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written an excellent new book, How Pleasure Works, that I had the pleasure of blurbing. The book elegantly refutes the idea that our pleasures are mere sensations, or that our delight can be neatly reduced into some ingredient list of superficial perceptions. Instead, Bloom emphasizes the importance of essentialism, which is the instinctive belief that everything in the world has an underlying reality, or true nature, or essence.
We are all natural essentialists. Frank Keil, a psychologist at Yale, has done some interesting work that captures this tendency at work. He begins by showing his young subjects a variety of visual transformations: a tiger that's been dressed in a lion suit, a porcupine that has been turned into a cactus, a real dog that resembles a toy. Not surprisingly, the children dismiss these transformations as irrelevant and superficial. The porcupine is still a porcupine. The dog is still a dog. The tiger is still a tiger, even if it looks like a lion. It was only when Keil told the children that the transformations also took place on the inside - their internal essences had been altered - that the little kids were convinced the animals had changed categories. The tiger was now a lion.
What does essentialism have to do with pleasure? Consider the deliciousness of a particular wine, which turns out to have little to do with the taste of the wine. In How We Decide, I describe a recent experiment led by neuroscientists at Cal-Tech:
Twenty people sampled five Cabernet Sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the people were told that all five wines were different, the scientists weren't telling the truth: there were only three different wines. This meant that the same wines would often reappear, but with different price labels. For example, the first wine offered during the tasting⎯it was a cheap bottle of Californian Cabernet⎯was labeled both as a $5 wine (it's actual retail price) and as a $45 dollar wine, a 900 percent markup. All of the red wines were sipped inside an fMRI machine.Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better. They preferred the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 Cabernet was far superior to the $5 plonk. By conducting the wine tasting inside an fMRI machine⎯the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes⎯the scientists could see how the brains of the subjects responded to the different wines. While a variety of brain regions were activated during the experiment, only one brain region seemed to respond to the price of the wine, rather than the wine itself: the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is believe to "integrate" sensory information with our expectations. In general, more expensive wines made the medial orbitofrontal cortex more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of this brain region shifted the preferences of the wine tasters, so that the $90 Cabernet seemed to taste better than the $10 Cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine.
What's causing this silly behavior? Bloom argues that essentialism plays a big role. We automatically believe that more expensive wine has a tastier essence, and that belief alters our sensory expectations. Those expectations, in turn, alter our perceptual interpretations, so that what we experience conforms to what we expect to experience. The essence of the thing has thus been confirmed: more expensive wine tastes better, even if the expensive wine is really Gallo Hearty Burgundy. This helps explain why so many food advertisements focus on the "essence" of the product, whether it's Coors being brewed from Rocky Mountain spring water, or Evian coming straight from the French Alps. The marketers know that the easiest way to increase our pleasure isn't by telling us how pleasurable the product is: It's by weaving an engaging story about essences.
Bloom illustrates this same principle with a great anecdote:
As the founder and CEO of Perrier North America, it was important for Bruce Nevins to convey to people how good his product tastes. It was a bad day for him, then, when he was on a live radio show and asked to pick out the Perrier from a selection of seven cups of water. He got it on the fifth try.There is nothing wrong with his taste buds. In blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperature, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between tap water and luxury bottled waters.
I would bet, though, that once Nevins left the radio show and went back to his life, he still thought that Perrier tasted really good - the radio test didn't prove otherwise. If so, he would be right. That is, someone who prefers the taste of Perrier to other waters but fails a blind taste test is not dishonest or confused. Perrier does taste great. It's just that to appreciate its great taste, you have to know that it is Perrier.
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Comments (11)
1Although I think it is pretty accurate in pointing out how our expectations can be used to alter our perception of things, the wine tasting experiment still suffers from the artificiality of the setup - you don't sip wine through a tube, you sip it from a glass shaped to capture and concentrate the aroma.
Also, all this talk of essences cannot help but get me thinking about the fallacy of homeopathy.
Posted by: Mozglubov | June 14, 2010 12:54 PM
2Essentialism seems to play a role in our lives in many ways, and I'm sure we could go into not just wines and foods but even cars and art or just about any other activity that provides humans with pleasure.
There are, however, often people who really do know how to break down wines and various food flavors into their component parts and distinguish the qualities that others cannot perceive or understand. And there are people who really do know a thing or two about art and cars too. So the issue of essentializing probably applies far more to the average person who just has not or cannot develop the skills needed to know wines or cars or art rather than to those who have taken the time to know these complicated areas of pleasure within our culture.
When evaluating art, people often "see" much more in the pieces that have famous names or high price tags attached to them. Maybe that has something to do with expensive wines being served at art openings, but I am not sure at this point. No matter.
It seems people cling to notions of what is essential when they are afraid of their own ignorance. They can see the beautiful and the sublime in a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh as long as the name is present at the same time as the painting is. Instead of acknowledging their ignorance and learning about aesthetics, they cling to the trappings that come with a well known name.
Areas of refined expertise, such as wine tasting and art appreciation, often have steep learning curves and require a level of training most people just do not have the time for. I just think we need to become more comfortable with being ignorant. In fact, I would consider myself something of a connoisseur of cheap beers and my own stupidity.
Posted by: Gopherus Agassizii | June 14, 2010 12:55 PM
3I have not yet read this book, but am skeptical about essentialism. Even though perception may be a series of emergent qualities, there is a poly-molecular truth which which is not relative. There is in fact a difference in wines and waters, whether at a given moment that is accessible or not. The wine experiment was false, as stated above, because tasting requires too many processes running in parallel. Understanding the parallel processing seems to me more important than writing it off under a new title of essentialism.
Posted by: Matthew Putman | June 14, 2010 2:45 PM
4Perhaps when you pay a lot of money for a bottle of water, you have to tell yourself it must taste great because otherwise you have to tell yourself you're stupid.
Posted by: royniles | June 14, 2010 3:56 PM
5Expectations also tell you that the way it's gonna taste is the way it's supposed to taste. Like the first time I ate broccoli. Hated it anyway.
Posted by: royniles | June 14, 2010 4:24 PM
6I find this whole topic quite fascinating.
If you penetrate this rhetorical formulation, you have a dimly obscured invitation to nescience which the world of advertising exploits to the max.
The medial orbitofrontal cortex which supposedly integrates sensory information with our expectations would seem to provide the "essence" of most decision-making.
The emotional and mental hype that we assign to our preferences do not, necessarily, diminish their quality; however, they certainly set the stage for the individual's Procrusteanized realities.
As the lyrics to this Eric Clapton tune illustrate, the "essence" of love relies heavily on expectation and how someone makes us "feel".
"I can still see your face
But I know that it's not real
It's just an illusion
Caused by how you made me feel."Perhaps the reason for such a high divorce rate.
LOL!
Posted by: Debrah | June 14, 2010 9:52 PM
7Why do the psychologists get credited by name while the Caltech neuroscientists get shortchanged? They're quite decent folks: Hilke Plassman, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel.
The paper is "Marketing Actions Modulate the Neural Representation of Experienced Pleasantness" in the January 2008 PNAS.
Posted by: Dan | June 14, 2010 10:47 PM
8I have no problem with 'essentialism' as a neuropsych concept except in being offended by its name: Essentialism. The neuropsych effect is the opposite of what is essential: 1. The intrinsic or indispensable properties that serve to characterize or identify something. 2. The most important ingredient; the crucial element. 3. The inherent, unchanging nature of a thing or class of things.
We are not finding the essence of the thing (ingredients, genetics, molecular chemistry, etc), but are influenced, instead, by the non-essential factor(s): price, market conditions, status, packaging, reputation, presentation.
It is, therefore, not an essentialist effect, but a superficial effect.
Posted by: David Kincheloe | June 15, 2010 10:12 AM
9If you really want the kick of consumer a luxury price, but cannot afford the top line, there is a compromise: pick a lower priced item offered by a luxury manufacturer. It's probably the basis on which much of the perfume and wine business is already run--not to mention the fashion industry.
Can't afford that pricey Chateauneuf by a renowned Vintner, you know, the one who got the high Robert Parker score? Then select the Cotes du Rhone from the same brand for under $15.
Posted by: Alan | June 15, 2010 6:00 PM
10Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, MIT has shown that placebo works, and that a more expensive placebo worked even better. So we know that the brain is being affected by the set up, the question is "how". It would be impossible to measure the number of variables in the wine test; had the person every tasted a $100 bottle of wine before? In the water tasting, however the results make sense, water pretty much tastes like water, and paying for an "essential" beyond the benefits of the water itself is superficial. So, is pleasure, as we perceive it superficial as well? It probably is. What is pleasurable to us may be the same as the question, "Is the glass half empty or half full." Daniel Kahnman, a Nobel Prize winner, would add to this the idea of a pleasurable experience vs the memory of the experience. His work suggests that a happy experience is often clouded in the memory of the experiences.
That said, I will read Paul Bloom's new book.Posted by: Ted Hoppe | June 16, 2010 11:16 AM
11It is interesting to consider the equivalence between Bloom's concept of essentialism and that of imagination. Especially in light of recent evidence that imagining pleasurable events seems to engage the brain's reward centers: http://ow.ly/1gYQ9.
Posted by: Leah | June 16, 2010 10:33 PM
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FCC gives Hollywood control over your home theater
After almost two years of deliberation, the Federal Communications Commission has granted Hollywood and cable companies permission to shut down analog streams to HDTV equipped home theaters. The geek term for this is "selectable output control" (SOC)—until now forbidden by the FCC. The Motion Picture Association of America requested a waiver on the SOC ban in May of 2008, arguing that without it, Hollywood studios could not securely offer consumers pre-DVD released movies on television.
"We conclude that the service that MPAA proposes would serve the public interest and that providers of first-run theatrical content are unlikely to offer the service absent the ability to activate SOC," the agency's Order, released on Friday, explains. "While a waiver of the SOC prohibition will prevent consumers who rely on unprotected audiovisual outputs from accessing this service, we are convinced that in the absence of a waiver the service will not be offered at all."
That "unprotected audiovisual outputs" bit means that it's tough input jacks for consumers who bought early HDTV systems that didn't include digital connections like HDMI. The studios want to limit output to digital because the scrambleable streams are less easy to illegally copy. So analog only HDTV systems won't be able to get in on this early run movie action.
But the FCC did add some conditions to this waiver on the SOC ban.
Strings attached
First, these waiver windows will only last for 90 days after the first activation of the analog stream block, or until the retail release of the movie on some form of prerecorded media (such as DVD or Blu-Ray)—whichever cut-off date comes first. The MPAA actually asked that the deadline "not include media formats comparable to the new Services, such as prerecorded media with restrictions on output to protected digital interfaces." The FCC saw this for what it was—in effect a request for a limitless waiver as new video viewing systems (such as Blu-Ray) replace DVDs.
"As DVDs are phased out and retired as a source of prerecorded media, this could lead to the unintended consequence of allowing an SOC waiver to continue in perpetuity," the agency noted.
Second, the SOC waiver will only apply to CableLabs approved digital outputs for cable, direct broadcast satellite, and IP video systems. "We must ensure that MVPDs [multi-video programming distributors] do not develop a preference for an output that would discriminate against retail devices in favor of proprietary devices," the agency's Order warned. "No commenter has suggested that protected outputs like HDMI provide inadequate protection for high-value content"—HDMI being the popular digital connector for HDTVs, DVDs, DVRs and other devices.
"This output certification process must be based on objective criteria that the Commission can consider on appeal, if necessary," the Commission adds. And non-MPAA member studios can also take advantage of the waiver.
Third, the studios and their cable partners must offer instructions on how people with hearing disabilities can access closed captioning while watching these early run movies.
Finally, the FCC reserves the right to review the impact of the waiver, requiring MPAA members to submit a report every two years advising whether SOC "has been an effective tool in combating illegal copying of these films during the early release window."
Reactions
So there you have it: 90 days, HDMI, a two year review, and some help for people with disabilities. None of that's making the reform group Public Knowledge a happy camper. Strongly opposed to the MPAA's request, PK and the Consumer Electronics Association both argued that an SOC waiver would effectively disable millions of home theaters. PK even managed to convince the previous FCC Chair, Kevin Martin, not to support a waiver on the SOC ban.
Looks like that influence didn't extend to this regime.
"We are disappointed that the [FCC's] Media Bureau has succumbed to the special-interest pleadings of the big media companies and ignored the thousands of letters from consumers," Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn told us. The order "will allow the big firms for the first time to take control of a consumer's TV set or set-top box, blocking viewing of a TV program or motion picture."
"At no point in this proceeding did any of the content companies make the case that any ‘piracy' was occurring because material was sneaking out of the back of a TV set onto the Internet," PK added.
The FCC's Media Bureau clearly didn't see it this way:
"We disagree with Public Knowledge’s (PK) assertion that MPAA has failed to provide specific evidence of illegal copying through unprotected outputs. While it would be impossible to demonstrate specific evidence of illegal copying for a service that does not yet exist, MPAA has provided specific evidence that illegal copying exists, and that unprotected outputs on the set-top box have led to unauthorized rebroadcast of content. For example, MPAA points out that unauthorized copies of television shows are online so quickly that copies that air on the East Coast are available before they air on the West Coast. Furthermore, a pay-per-view boxing event was broadcast online without authorization simultaneously with its airing on pay-per-view. MPAA argues that if the Video-on-Demand ('VoD') release window is moved earlier, illegal copiers will focus on the earlier VoD release."We've been pretty skeptical about an SOC waiver ourselves, contending that consumers who spent big chunks of money on early HDTV systems have the right to access major new services—especially this one, which will immediately become the most valuable offering on pay TV.
We're also wondering how quickly sports and dramatic series programmers are going to ask to get in on this, and how the FCC is going to explain that a waiver on the SOC ban is good enough for Hollywood, but not good enough for them.
Feds report 700 seizures of bootleg Cisco hardware
The Department of Justice has released a summary of the fruits of the government's ongoing campaign against bootleg network hardware. The bottom line: 700 grabs of phony Cisco Systems devices worth over $143 million, and 30 felony convictions of its shippers and sellers.
The announcement comes with the requisite stern warning from the feds. "These cases involve greedy businessmen hocking counterfeit and substandard hardware to any buyer—whether it could affect the health and safety of others in a hospital setting or the security of our troops on the battlefield," declared John Morton, Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security. "They pose a triple threat to our nation by stealing from our economy, threatening U.S. jobs and potentially putting the safety of our citizens at risk."
Blame it on Tony
But boilerplate crime-doesn't-pay language aside, fake label network hardware sold to the United States also poses a security threat. "Counterfeit components can provide the 'back door' that external parties need to access a user's personal information or monitor their communication," warns Cisco's 2008 Annual Security Report. "They are also extremely difficult to detect and can be costly to address. While software can be patched, counterfeit components must be removed one machine at a time."
That's why the Thursday sentencing of Ehab Ashoor for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco products bears scrutiny. A Saudi citizen living in Sugarland, Texas, a federal jury convicted him of buying bogus Cisco Gigabit Interface Converters over the web from a vendor in China. Evidence at the trial suggested that the plan was to sell the gear to the Marine Corps, which hoped to use the equipment for coordinating troop movements, storing intelligence, and running security operations for a military base near Fallujah, Iraq. The court sentenced Ashoor to 51 months in prison. On top of that, he must pay $119,400 in restitution to Cisco.
And last year Robert and Michael Edman of Richmond, Texas pled guilty to selling fake Cisco gear to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The customers for their "Syren Technology" company included the Marine Corps, Air Force, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Energy. When confronted by the FBI, Robert Edman told agents that he regularly bought Cisco equipment "from an individual in China who goes by the name 'Tony'."
No vetting
But these cases may be only the tip of the router when it comes to faux Cisco network equipment winding up in unbeknownst use by military and civilian federal agencies. Several years ago various blog sites leaked a Federal Bureau of Investigation PowerPoint presentation revealing how concerned the agency had become about the situation. The presentation reported fraudsters selling routers, switches, interface converters, and WAN interface cards to the federal government at bargain basement prices. Example: $1,375.00 for a legit router, $234.00 for a counterfeit.
Buyers of this tainted equipment included the US Naval Academy, the Naval Air Warfare Center, the Naval Undersea Warfare Academy, an air base in Germany, the General Services Administration, the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration, top defense contractor Raytheon, and the FBI itself.
And the problem, from the presentation's perspective, was much bigger than small crews of baddies siphoning phony machines in from China. The government subcontracting process, it disclosed, had become so cutthroat, byzantine, and laced with third-party involvement, that it could easily be penetrated by bootleggers and cheats.
You get the idea from this slide:
Highly specialized
The report faulted Cisco for not offering direct sales (with the exception of "high specialized equipment sales"). It also criticized various high-profile buyers for sloppy procurement practices. In the case of a purchase by Lockheed Martin of over $250,000 in counterfeit Cisco equipment, the defense contractor did not go through a GSA IT vendor or an authorized Cisco reseller. Eventually the company discovered duplicate serial numbers on Cisco switches.
The presentation mapped out the typical purchasing hierarchy as so: "Government or Govt. Contractor -> GSA IT Vendor -> 1st Subcontractor -> 2nd Sub-Contractor -> 3rd Sub-Contractor --> Counterfeit Equipment Distributor."
All these latest seizures and busts come under the rubric of "Operation Network Raider," a campaign run by the FBI's Cyber Division, the Department of Justice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection. Nine individuals face trials and another eight were convicted and await sentencing as a result of this campaign.
The Justice Department's announcement also says that collars of bogus Cisco equipment dropped by 75 percent between 2008 and 2009. But it also acknowledges that over 50 counterfeit shipments seized were labeled as military- or aerospace-grade devices.
Techcafeteria Blog » Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
Big changes are happening at Facebook, and they mean that what you do and say, on and off of Facebook, is now being more heavily tracked and more broadly shared. If you think that your Facebook data is somewhat private—e.g., shared only with friends and people you specify—you are wrong.Facebook announced dramatic changes in their service at their annual “F8” conference on Wednesday. Facebook used to be a network where you could establish semi-private communities with family, friends and like-minded sets of people. Now it’s an internet-wide info-sharing platform that can keep your friends, and the businesses and advertisers that Facebook partners with, fully briefed on all of your internet-based activities and opinions.
The biggest announcement was the introduction of the Open Graph and the new “Like” buttons for the web at large. Yesterday, you could only “like” or “fan” something that appeared on Facebook’s web site. Now you can “like” things anywhere that the social graph and like buttons are implemented. What you “like” will be shared with Facebook, your Facebook friends, and all of the applications you subscribe to on Facebook, and, depending on your Facebook privacy settings, the world at large.
Also this week, and all of a sudden, despite what you might have confirmed a few months ago when Facebook started this paradigm shift, your likes, interests and job history are now Google searchable. That’s right: even if you went in and flagged them as private, your only way to protect this information, as of yesterday, is to remove it (and wait a month for it to fall out of Google’s cache).
Online privacy is a relative concept
Much of the Facebook privacy that we lost wasn’t real privacy to begin with, because any time you add an application (such as a quiz), that application’s developers have complete access to your entire Facebook profile. Worse, anytime a friend invites you to use an application, that application gets access to your profile. You don’t have to lift a finger to have data that you’ve marked as private shared with strangers; you just have to have friends on Facebook who aren’t thinking that, by inviting you to compare movie favs, they’re telling a complete stranger your gender, age, birthdate, job history, sharing all of your photos and publishing your wall to them.
Why “Love it or leave it” is unfair
I have friends who are somewhat blaze about all of this. After all, nobody put a gun to my head and ordered me to join Facebook. I just got so many requests from friends and family that I caved. And, once I caved, I connected to a bunch of “blast from the past” friends, extended family, former co-workers and current associates. So, now have a real investment in Facebook as a social connector. Sure, if I don’t like these changes, I can just delete my account and be done with it. But I’m throwing away far more than just a social network profile—I’m tossing out my connection to my communities of friends, family and professional associates, who are now expecting me to be on Facebook with them.
I could decide that I don’t like the policies of my local utility company, too, and just cancel my service. But the services they provide enable other services that I want/require as well—such as light, heat, computing, communication. Leaving Facebook wouldn’t be as extreme as canceling power services, but, with 40 million users and climbing, Facebook is like a utility in many people’s lives, and it supports services in such a way that relationships beyond our relationship with the service provider are centered there.
Change Management
This is what is so dishonest about CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assertion that Facebook is only following the direction of the Internet as an open sharing platform. He is right abut the trend. But this is the equivalent of saying that the trend is now for baggy pants and see-through tops, so all of your clothing has been swapped out in accordance with the trend. The internet is all things to all people, and there are plenty of places on it where privacy and closed community are the norm. Just because the internet is becoming more open, it doesn’t mean that Internet users need to be dragged into this new era.
It all boils into “Opt Out” vs. “Opt In”, and respecting rather than walking all over your customers. Facebook began with an assumption of privacy; changes in that assumption should be acknowledged by each user before they are enacted. Facebook could have easily developed their platform in ways that give users the choice of having open or private profiles. Instead, they’ve simply switched our private data to public without asking if that compromises our security, reputation or preferences. And it doesn’t escape my notice that there’s great money to be made in having more personal info about what I like and who I share that information with.
What you should do if this concerns you
If you went in and verified/altered your Facebook privacy settings a month or two ago, you should make another visit ASAP. Facebook has turned it around. Beth Kanter has a good write-up on what has changed. If you have any custom Facebook Pages, look out there as well—even if you’ve set profile data to private, if you link to any of your profile info from a Facebook page, it will default back to public. Whatever you do with your privacy settings, most of your basic profile data is now public and there is no option to make it private. So review your employment history, “about” and likes sections to make sure that it only has data that you don’t mind sharing with Google searchers and every advertiser on earth.
It all boils down to this
Facebook is now like Twitter and Google, with even less options for privacy than those big public networks offer. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it’s just a very different thing, and the crime here is mostly that “F8” and “social graph” are not terms that the vast majority of the 40 million Facebook users are paying any attention to. If you’re reading this, you know better, so you can set your profile up with information that you don’t mind being in the public domain, and you can decide if you’re willing to “like” things on the internet and, thereby, expose yourself and your Facebook community to the demographic analysis and actions that will ensue. I won’t be abandoning Facebook over this, but I’m very restrictive in my use of it, and will continue to approach it with great caution.
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What You and Your Nonprofit Should Know About Facebook Changes
A couple days ago, Facebook announced some major changes in its platform that will make the entire web more social:
"We're building toward a web where the default is social. Every application and product will be redesigned from the ground up to use a person's real identity and friends. Facebook calls this new social paradigm the "Open Graph," and Zuckerberg called the shift "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the web."
The one that caught immediate attention was the switch from calling "fans" to "like" and addition of the "like" button all around the web. Pete Cashmore, in an article on CNN, explains that this lays the ground work for social search.
A "Like" button that's set to appear all around the web. Click the button, and the Web page is shared with your friends. What's more, every "Like" you submit ensures Facebook (and its partner sites) can deliver a more personalized experience to you.
Robert Scoble offers detailed meta analysis of the implications from a technical, marketing, and individual user perspective. I haven't fully digested what everything means and I think we're going to see it evolve.
Implications for Web Presence
One point he made is perhaps relevant to nonprofits who have set up public Facebook Fan pages - it provides a way to turn their web sites into a Facebook Fan Page. Scoble explains.
It lets Facebook minimize the need for a “public” fan page, like mine. Inside Facebook explains more in detail why this is true. Mostly because they’ll spit all those bits over onto my blog, if I add the code to my blog (which I’m pretty sure I will).
Scoble predicts that we’re going to become addicted to Facebook’s new features. He goes onto say that website that doesn’t have Facebook “likes” on it will seem weird sooner than we think.
Scoble also describes the Facebook Social Graph and how much simpler and powerful it is so that developers can build Apps. The API will allow you "like" something on a web site and all of your friends will get updates to that effect. For example, if the Humane Society had an action alert on its site and added the code for the "like" button and I liked it, all my friends would get updates to that effect. And I would also be able to see if any of my friends looked at other areas of the Humane Society site. This, of course, may not be such a bad thing?
I'm not sure whether or not this is related, but Joe Solomon points out that the Facebook Events page no longer has the ability to message out to people who responded. He's not happy about that but I wonder how these changes on Facebook will impact the way nonprofits interact with their stakeholders.
Privacy Implications
Scoble talked about privacy and public trust issue and how Facebook has the potential to become a utility.
I told Zuckerberg that he now has the modern-day railroad in his grasp and challenged him to both win our trust and not abuse the major power he’s going to aggregate. So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.
There are some user personal privacy issues and PC Mag has a good analysis here. According to the article, in the past, you were asked if wanted to share your personal information with each app that wanted to access your profile. This has now changed. Make something "public" in your privacy settings and it won't just appear on Facebook, but throughout the Facebook ecosystem.
Ironically, through one of my friends, Howard Greenstein, I discovered that there had been an addition to the privacy settings, "Instant Personalization." It shares data with non-Facebook sites and it was automatically set to "Allow." I decided to switch it off by unchecking it because I wanted to understand the trade off between the value of personalization and personal privacy. You can also control what your friends can share about you on other sites as well.
Granted, there are only three sites right now where that can happen, yelp.com, docs.com, and pandora.com. But, who knows when others will be added and if the default will be allow.Here's how they defined instant personalization:
The partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections. To access any non-public information, the website is required to ask for you or your friend's explicit permission.
Facebook's Graph API makes it possible to pull all sorts of personal data directly into third party sites. If you want to know what you are sharing, http://graph.facebook.com/scobleizer and add your name instead of Scoble's name. I was surprised to see the personal data that Scoble was sharing, including birth date and home address. But he's opted into that. I decided to my mine much less revealing. http://graph.facebook.com/beth.kanter
I see this as being a problem for those who aren't aware of the privacy changes, those who aren't careful about what they share in the first place. I've decided to be cautious until I fully understand what the implications are. And a lot of my colleagues have expressed similar opinions.
Nicole Lazzaro shared some of her thoughts:
At the heart of the matter, it's only scary if the data means something or sharing it causes harm. In the way that Facebook devalued the term "Friend" and are about to do the same with "Like" these privacy clauses will make common knowledge things like birth dates and who my friends are.Have you changed your privacy settings or are you wide open? Why? It's all personal preference, but you should make an informed choice.I wonder what new information will we horde about ourselves to keep private to fill in this place? Or will privacy become an outdated concept, because keeping information private does more harm than good.
It's very hard to know what the new norms will be. But it used to be VERY scary to write down a thought, put one's photo and real name next to it and hit "send" for the whole wide web to see. Maybe privacy will not be important in the future. Still is scary to me today! :)
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Personally, no matter how great the tool is, I'm just not interested in sharing my identity with sites across the web so that a private company can make a cool buck. And, imho, given that they chose an opt-out strategy instead of an opt-in strategy, it's clear that they're more interested in making this tool appealing for the brands who pay big money than for the users who (generally) don't.
I'm somewhat concerned too about a single private interest having so much influence on the entire web ecosystem.
Posted by: Stacey | April 23, 2010 at 02:56 PM
Beth,
Once again I think you have done an amazing job distilling the complexity of this issue down. As a privacy advocate it's still a scary thing for me personally. As someone in the public eye (as you and I are both) it could be a reputation mgmt issue. However we are both technical users.Think of the (literally) millions of people on Facebook who are too busy playing Mafia Wars to notice this privacy change. Those are the people I worry about. The low tech users. I am very interested to see how they use, adapt or even notice these massive changes.
Posted by: David J. Neff | April 23, 2010 at 03:07 PM
Thank you again, Beth
Thank you for taking the TIME to look into this and then share what you learned. You continue to show that we must share our understanding, resources, etc. because we are all in this together.
Thanks for letting us know where to look to watch our backs!
Best,
Billy
Posted by: Billy Connelly | April 23, 2010 at 03:24 PM
I agree with both comments so far.
I changed my privacy settings instantly to opt-out of the newfangled stuff.But there are so many people who don't pay attention. I can't count the times I've seen one friend or another post a status message freaking out about some privacy issue that I've known about for more than 6 months. If they're truly that concerned with their privacy, how can they be so complacent that they don't notice major changes to how their data is used for so long? I don't think it's necessarily only the low tech users who are at risk here - it's also those who are either unobservant or lack the knowledge to see what the changes mean to them.
(As a thought, Facebook, if they were interested in individuals, rather than big business, could go so far as to provide examples of what the privacy settings mean, i.e., "If you choose to allow x, everyone will be able to see. . . " and include screenshots!)I am friends with a couple of the museum's past interns on Facebook, and I sometimes cringe at what they post, and I do worry about their privacy settings.
Posted by: KLandon | April 23, 2010 at 03:41 PM
Beth! Great observations.
I'm a marketer, social media enthusiast and follower of emerging technologies. But there is so much about Facebook's approach that makes me uneasy as an individual. Even more, the fact that 100's of my friends and more of the general population have NO context to what's going on in the back end of all this is really troubling.
Facebook is taking an interesting and provocative stance to "push" people to openess. But unlike google culture, it's much more based on the technology and business they want to build and less the user utility, user experience or genuine steps to help people understand and have context for the decisions they make.
As an uber social media user in my work, client efforts and life I step back and am a bit surprised by my own discomfort and lack of clarity in of all this. That's even more troubling, given if I don't get it, everyday users probably aren't engaged enough to want to know more. They have no real reason to question as Facebook opts to make thier public info a default setting and pokes + prods folks to make more info available in unclear ways.
I dunno.. but I'm guessing Facebook aids it's own undoing. And I find myself pulling away from the platform. Mostly because they are in no way a people centered culture that innovates around what human beings want and need and they are losing my trust. They in the end are technologists that are pushing people to use their "gadget".
More here (Danah Boyds FB and Google Privacy Discussion at SXSW):
http://bit.ly/a4OQ1j..and a fun, if not dystopian fictional account of the open-info future:
http://bit.ly/aGDbvD
Posted by: Andy Hunter | April 23, 2010 at 03:51 PM
Dear Beth,
I agree with Dana. Facebook is doing some very sneaky things. Thanks for drawing our attention to them and making it clear how these will affect us.
This new setting will make nonprofits even LESS in control of their fans, who now are just their "likers." And not letting them send out messages to remind about events is even worse. DISLIKE!
At least on LinkedIn you can still email your group members, send out reminders, and so on, and nothing is "shared" without your permission.
This new setting, while making some great opportunities for LOLs at failbook.com, still doesn't add value to the facebook platform.
This is why Facebook doesn't get my eyeballs anymore.
Mazarine
http://wildwomanfundraising.comPosted by: Mazarine | April 23, 2010 at 03:59 PM
Thanks for the heads up Beth. This could turn out to add value to FB users, brands, and everyone on the internet. It could also be incredibly evil (see: Stacey's concerns).
The trouble I have is similar to Dave's. I think it's really weird that Facebook didn't choose to tell us they're sharing our information without our permission. Is this opt-out tact even legal?
Until I know more, I've unchecked the "allow" button.
Posted by: Wendy | April 23, 2010 at 04:37 PM
I too just learned about the new setting and unchecked it last night.
If I could choose which sites share an action on Facebook I'd be more likely to show my support for a nonprofit ("Barb just registered for Bike to Work Spokane--you can too at www.biketoworkspokane.org") than any of the commercial activities I might engage in online. But it has to be organization-specific, not the blanket approach Facebook appears to have taken.
Everything they've changed so far on my settings has been in the direction of opening it first and telling me later. They need to borrow Google's slogan: Don't be evil.
@BarbChamberlain
Posted by: Barb Chamberlain | April 23, 2010 at 05:18 PM
Echoing the crowd here with thanks for this post. I am the founder of a small nonprofit, http://5forFairness.org and resist spending a lot of time on our facebook page because they seem to change the rules at will and it is too hard to keep up while staying focussed on our core mission.
Posted by: Anna | April 24, 2010 at 10:33 AM
Doesn't it seem like all this voting and "liking" fuels tendencies toward groupthink and intolerance? I don't want to vote on every site I see, nor would I know what to make of anonymous votes on any of my sites. Without knowing the source of an opinion, what has been learned? Say a bunch fascists were to decide as a block to "like" your site. Surely, that's an endorsement you could live without...
The categories of "like" or silence (implication:"not liked") is bizarrely thin. No gray areas there. And all this "sharing with friends" business - really, why? Why do my friends need to know - or I need to know - such levels of minutia? It's factoid fast-food and I am pretty sure we're going to learn it's not so good for us.
Social network tools that promote information sharing and discussion - LOVE them. But this? What is this?
I am baffled...
@TrackerNews
Posted by: J.A. Ginsburg | April 24, 2010 at 01:25 PM
Like you, I have my FB privacy set at the maximum. I want to determine where my personal data will appear on a case-by-case basis. So I have Instant Personalization turned off. And yet I'm considering putting a FB "Like" button on my web site (as you've done). I'm trying to reconcile my desire not to share my likes freely with my desire to have others do the opposite.
Posted by: Robert Weiner | April 24, 2010 at 01:58 PM
In the past year or two, my views about how much about ME (personally) I want to share online have changed drastically and moves like the one made by Facebook only confirm why I think it's the right thing to do to be mindful of how much we share and control it as much as we feel we should. I posted about this on my blog a month or so ago:
http://askmanny.com/2010/03/privacy-how-much-is-enough-or-too-much/Posted by: Manny Hernandez | April 24, 2010 at 08:14 PM
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Online Status Anxiety : The Frontal Cortex
« Marijuana and Divergent Thinking | Main | Personal Narratives »
Online Status Anxiety
Posted on: March 15, 2010 2:12 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.
What I'm most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful. We've taken the natural nebulousness of social interactions - I might know you're important, but I don't know how important - and made them explicit. The end result is that our online relationships are shadowed by power relations.
Here's an example of what I'm referring to. I was recently talking to a twitterer with a very large number of followers. (My least favorite thing about Twitter is the use of "follow" within the platform, with its weird connotations of subservience. I don't want to "follow" a person, I just want to "listen" to them.) He complained that one of his frustrations with the platform was the sheer amount of feedback from all of his tweets. He said much of the feedback was genuine (and sometimes critical), but a lot of it also struck him as inherently "phony," in that it was written just to get a reply or retweet from him, which then might lead to some new "followers" for the lesser twitterer. In other words, his power within the social network warped the nature of his online social interactions.
The primatologist Robert Sapolsky has done some marvelous work on how our position within the hierarchy shapes our behavior. Here's a fascinating description of the effects of testosterone on monkey aggression:
Round up some male monkeys. Put them in a group together, and give them plenty of time to sort out where they stand with each other - affiliative friendships, grudges and dislikes. Give them enough time to form a dominance hierarchy, a linear ranking system of numbers 1 through 5. This is the hierarchical sort of system where number 3, for example, can pass his day throwing around his weight with numbers 4 and 5, ripping off their monkey chow, forcing them to relinquish the best spots to sit in, but, at the same time, remembering to deal with numbers 1 and 2 shit-eating obsequiousness.Hierarchy in place, it's time to do your experiment. Take the third-ranking monkey and give him some testosterone. Inject a ton of it into him...give him enough testosterone to grow antlers and a beard on every neuron in the brain. And, no surprise, when you check the behavioral data, it turns out that he will probably be participating in more aggressive interactions than before.
So even though small fluctuations in the levels of the hormone don't seem to matter much, testosterone still causes aggression. But that would be wrong. Check out number 3 more closely. Is he now raining aggressive terror on any and all in the group, frothing in an androgenic glaze of indiscriminate violence. Not at all. He's still judiciously kowtowing to numbers 1 and 2, but has simply become a total bastard to numbers 4 and 5.
I don't meant to suggest that Twitter is just like a primate dominance hierarchy, or that an injection of testosterone would lead people to abuse those with fewer followers. Instead, the elegance of Sapolsky's experiment is its demonstration of the all encompassing influence of the social hierarchy itself. Even a massive injection of hormone can't alter the way we experience the pecking order, which is why we talk differently to our boss than to our assistant, or why we're more solicitous of a rich, powerful friend that we are to an unemployed friend. I hate myself for even writing that sentence, but it's all too often true: we're a craven species, obsessed with status for the sake of status. And that pursuit of status shapes so many of our interactions, both in person and online.
Now here's where the digital social platforms make a bad situation even worse. Because they exquisitely measure our place within the network, we know exactly who the powerful people are; it's like high-school, except on a massive scale. (Reading the comments on many popular blogs reminds me the sycophants who surrounded the popular kids in 9th grade. It's all applause and affirmation, with every criticism shouted down.) Furthermore, the quantification of our social world inevitably inspires a certain kind of social anxiety. We want to be moving upwards, to have more friends and more followers and more connections. (Such are the burdens of being a social primate.) It's a ridiculous endeavor, of course, and I chastise myself every time I check my twitter count, but it's also a deeply seated instinct. I'm just a male monkey with broadband.
One last point: Because these online tools collapse the space between people - we can experience a kind of intimacy with perfect strangers, learning about their breakfast routines and airport delays - we bring ourselves into "competition" with a far larger group. We're suddenly comparing ourselves with people we've never met, and never will. While this pseudo-closeness can be fun, I think it also comes with some anxiety inducing side-effects. David Hume, in A Treatise on Human Nature, makes a really important point:
It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.My worry is that our online social platforms both magnify our hierarchies (by measuring our friends, followers, links, etc.) and erase social distance, so that we suddenly find ourselves in the same monkey cage with a far larger number of monkeys. And that's why I wish there was a popular social platform that didn't measure anything. I doubt such a platform will ever exist - we clearly want the explicit hierarchies, even when they drive us crazy - but it sure would be a relief.
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Comments (50)
1You make some really good comments. I really admire your perspective and knowledge of philosophy. I hope you check out my blog at ... and follow my tweets at ...
But seriously, nice job tying Hume, the effect of testosterone within a social structure, and social media in one post.
Anecdotal example: I was chastised by a leading member of my loose twitter community. It really upset me for several days.
Posted by: Colin Matheson | March 15, 2010 2:36 PM
2I could give you a ballpark figure for how many facebook friends I have, but I've never found it a source of pride or shame. I couldn't tell you then # of friends of any of my friends, although when I see someone with very few, who is just starting out, I do think about connecting them with others, so I guess I pay some attention.
I think twitter lends itself to this though. I like that I have more followers than people I follow. I don't know what that says about me, although I can second the wish it said "listeners" rather than "followers".
I never thought of it as about hierarchy, although it is, in some senses. But I'm not as highly attuned to hierarchy as some, and much of what I do pay attention to is the result of being badly burned.Posted by: becca | March 15, 2010 2:52 PM
3I have been an early adopter of many computer, digital and www phenomena but have avoided the social networks (though I did use some internet dating / mating sites a few years after my husband died).
I prefer real live interactions with others, and stretch those via emails; I have been a letter writer since the 70's. I appreciate the advantages of the social (including family and work aspects as well) networks but wonder HOW LONG will people be able to maintain the tremendous number of connections they make.
My long term friendships have been sustained by something different from daily activity reports... indeed, I once commented that friendship is what remains when time and space are no longer shared. Interestingly, I travel quite a bit and reportedly have stories to tell, yet wonder who really needs to know. Perhaps no one needs to even read this comment.Posted by: Elizabeth Nolan | March 15, 2010 3:23 PM
4I suspect that it's probably weirdest for people in the middle of these public/private hierarchies. (Okay, that may not be true, but that's where I am, so that's what I'll talk about.)
These effects aren't just quantitative. For example, I write for what you'd probably call a midlist blog that occasionally gets picked up by much bigger blogs. Sometimes my Twitter links get picked up by these blogs, too. Sometimes, though, for stretches not much happens -- I don't get linked to or retweeted, I don't get new followers or "follow friday" links. It can be pretty shocking how dejected you can feel, to be ignored by complete strangers, whether "above" or "below" you on the status/fame/follower hierarchy.
The other issue which periodically pops up is the gap between a user's in-network status and their status IRL (in real life). I'll find myself following-back a user who is Professor of This or Editor of That, only to discover that they're a really terrible social-network user: either absent and vapid or grouchy and self-absorbed. Or, to be less critical, Interesting people who just are not adept at the medium. Yet you can find yourself reluctant to drop them (even though, thankfully, Twitter and FB, etc. don't notify you, "X is no longer your friend"), because you might benefit from the association with their status in real life. It's not purely transitive (and doesn't seem really to work at all the other way), but it's close.
Posted by: Tim Carmody | March 15, 2010 3:30 PM
5I agree that this should be cause for concern. Not enough consideration is given to the social consequences of how status information is stored and made available.
But what can we do to flatten hierachies if the way information is stored and made available conforms to genetic and biological traits that evolve much slower than culture, much less friendships? Becoming more conscious of these influences is a first step. Publicly committing to particular cultural norms that relate to how status is communicated is another.
...and in fact nearly every informal institution -- from fashion to country club membership -- can be understood in these terms.
One particularly important norm to cultivate in a world with perfect (digital) memory of past relations -- forgivness.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin | March 15, 2010 3:31 PM
6Thanks for this. We talk so much about the affordances of the digital landscape, but -- with the exception of the occasional moral panic -- don't talk nearly enough about the way in can reproduce, deploy, or amplify existing structural determinants and criteria of value/power. Especially considering that it's precisely the tension between the affordances and the limitations/dangers that make the space interesting.
Your piece also bring focus on the sort of unexamined problem at the center of all this, which is that the digitization and display of our network fundamentally privileges the quantifiable aspects of our social relations as the markers of their quality and value.
Posted by: Xiaochang | March 15, 2010 3:33 PM
7I'm not sure how I fit into your suppositions, but I am someone who not only doesn't care how many "followers" (yes, unfortunate word) or "friends" someone has, I am if anything suspicious of those with high numbers. It doesn't prove anything valuable to me in the slightest. In fact, I automatically feel an instinctive affinity for anyone I come across who has a "real-life" number of Facebook friends (say, 50 to 100), while feel distance and lack of interest in someone (not a public figure) with hundreds more than that. As for Twitter, numbers are ludicrous. If one has 6,000 followers and follow 6,000 people, what exactly does that mean except that one has spent an inordinate amount of time clicking one's mouse?
Posted by: Jeremy | March 15, 2010 3:38 PM
92chan,4chan and other imageboards don't measure anything. It can be liberating, if you're interested in wading in images of cats, dogs and giant robots.
Posted by: Nat Thomson | March 15, 2010 4:07 PM
10Specific hierarchies serve their specific purposes. Judge the importance of your place in any particular hierarchy accordingly. For instance, how important is a high perch in the hierarchy of purposeful twits?
Posted by: royniles | March 15, 2010 4:52 PM
11Don't forget the subtle stress and anxiety from NOT using social network sites. I hear a lot about Facebook, Twitter, and the like, but am completely baffled as to why anyone would spend so much time & energy using them. The ratio of usefulness to time spent seems way off to me, almost insane. That said, I find myself feeling more like a loser/space alien for not being a part of these high-volume, intensely hierarchical personal update collectives, even though I actually lead a rather happy, loving, successful life.
But there's still sense that at 35, I've been left behind. Like I'm stuck walking as them new-fangled auto-mo-biles are zipping by. That my measly handful of REAL friends somehow doesn't amount to much in the New World Order.
Posted by: davidavid | March 15, 2010 5:15 PM
12Part of the problem is what you have in most social networks is systems designed to get you to spend more time using them, rather than supporting the kind of social network you want to have. Further, you have people making decisions about the course of these social networks who have dogmatic views about the nature of social networking and what would be "good" for their users. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, with his initially unpopular innovations that serve to make more and more information available to your friends.
I feel similarly ambivalent about some of the social networking, but I don't think that the problems you mention are necessarily endemic to social networking, but rather the particular social networks we have. For example, I think facebook and twitter could actually be much more sophisticated in applying (or letting you apply) what they know about how you interact with your friends. Facebook knows a lot more than who you are friends with (frequency of contact, direction of contact, liking, comments, etc) (see http://www.facebook.com/data for some of their work). Facebook has made a few decisions to make it a lot harder for you to make a structure to your "cage", but they could make it so that you could make it resemble a "village" where you put your actual friends closer, so you hear them more often, and have a set of "fences" between other neighbors. Instead, it insists that we should value all our "friends" equally. I would think that for most of us, rather than thinking about social hierarchies, we have social circles (work, family, school friends, hobby friends). We are likely not in the same place in the social hierarchy in each of these places, and so we would like to change how we interact in each in the virtual world, just as we do in the real world. As it currently stands, we don't have that capability, so we get the lowest common denominator of conversations from most people, most of the time.Posted by: Cedar | March 15, 2010 8:50 PM
13Dear Jonah, I like your observataions and especially your personal feelings on this subject. Just to add, there's good news in our genes as well. We have an equally strong instinct to link as well as rank. I don't mean link in a faceless way on the internet. My definition of linking includes love, but milder stuff as well: It is the desire to be near someone (from sometimes to often), get to know more (or all) about them, and meet their needs IF you can. (And the internet is used for that too, fortunately.)
If you go back and watch primates, they spend equal amounts of time grooming each other and hanging out together, and grooming pairs are often not equals. Same with any other social mammal. Some individuals are extraverts, some introverts, some highly sensitive, some not, but social animals need and like to be affectionate.
It starts with Mom. (What makes us mammals are those mammmaries, and oxytocin, what makes the milk to flow, is as powerful as testosterone in its way.) We start our life and live it in groups of at least two (with a few exceptions like tigers, who need to spread out to find food). There's a hierarchy, sure, but what stands out is the attachments, the linking, as I define it. (Note linking is one instinct, about "special" others, and altrusim is another--Sober and Wilson, Unto Others.)
The fact is, however, that ranking only makes those on top feel good. So here's to more linking in our lives!
Anyway, your blog was pointed out to me by someone reading a book of mine that just came out, The Undervalued Self. Naming my book here is said in a spirit of linking,really, not ranking. It's all about just that, ranking and linking--an important element being that we will always be vulnerable to defeat and "low" (compared to who?)self-esteem when we are stuck in ranking mode. Here's to linking. Elaine
Posted by: Elaine Aron | March 15, 2010 8:51 PM
14With all this worry, simple question with X thousand followers, friends, RSS feeds everywhere, email explosion, Web sites to view. Why do we have "IRL" any more. You sadly have no analog life if you truthfully attempt to follow this digital torrent. Oh an watch out if your boss finds out you may go bye bye...so you better hope they have no WebSense product in house documenting an aggressive case of online induced ADHD
daviddaivd sums it up for many but folks should stop the worrying they aren't missing much. Likely a single really good friend (or significant other) can outweigh follow count numbers any day of the week. They tend to be the one who is really there for you, bails you out, loans you their truck, etc. I consider playing with kids is worth 1000s of followers...better use of time likely produce a better outcome for the kids too...but if you still care http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Buy+twitter+followers problem solved. :-)
Posted by: Thomas Powell | March 15, 2010 9:15 PM
15Everyone uses these social networks differently, if at all. I have no use for Twitter -- tried it and found it singularly uninformative and annoying.
Facebook is different. Before commenting I did a quick computation and found that 86% of my Facebook friends are people I know and at least occasionally interact with IRL. Of those, the least likely ones I will interact with are the 5% who are old HS acquaintances I've found on Facebook. Of the rest, 59% are relatives and 21% are close friends of family.
For me, the most disturbing thing about Facebook is that it seems a majority of my relatives are hooked on Farmville.
Posted by: Donna B. | March 15, 2010 10:40 PM
16I hear you on this. Yet I think in some ways Twitter, anyway, is actually more egalitarian, for it seems that it's far easier there for people who lack high status in the regular world to connect and become influential with higher status/better connected people mainly through the quality of their communications. On Twitter, people tend to come to one's attention via the cleverness, originality, or other value of their tweets (and yes, via the status of whoever RT'd them to your attention; still); they gain a certain value meritoriously before you take the time to check them and see how well or poorly they're connected. (I'm not really this mercenary, just adopting the terms of your scenario. We ARE all social, hierarchical primates, after all...) A smart undergrad tweeting from some backwater has a far better chance to win the attention and favor of a prof or CEO or Big Geek or whatnot via Twitter than through the real world. And as they do, their Twitter stock will rise.
So while I share your unease with how blatantly status is quantified and measured in Twitter, I think perhaps status is a more fluid, accessible thing on Twitter, and, in a relative sense, perhaps more based on merit and contributions (in a very limited realm, but still) than in the Real World.
Posted by: David Dobbs | March 15, 2010 11:52 PM
17"Reading the comments on many popular blogs reminds me the sycophants who surrounded the popular kids in 9th grade. It's all applause and affirmation, with every criticism shouted down."
At the risk of sounding like aforementioned shit-eating sycophant trying to curry favor with the top dog: this is absolutely true! It's exciting to stumble across this, as it demystifies a phenomenon that has irritated me to no end.
So many online communities are nothing but a circle-jerk of fawning supplicants, all trying to feed off the power and popularity of the resident alphas.
In communities that orbit around prominent personalities, any sort of critical idea is shot down with irrational fervor by the minions, in a bid to ingratiate themselves by defending the alpha and to preserve their place in the social hierarchy.
It's a shame, because often the personality around which the cult forms is a decent person with good ideas--they're just surrounded by social parasites.
I don't experience this as much on Facebook, but I limit my network there to people I know IRL or otherwise consider a close and personal friend. There is little jockeying for position--it's mostly a forum for staying in touch and sharing ephemeral thoughts.
But the hierarchical behavior is certainly the norm for interaction with communities of strangers. I've been on the receiving end, too--it's depressing to feel like people are only commenting or otherwise acknowledging you in some attempt to climb up the ladder.
What's funny is that this biologically-rooted behavior doesn't really make sense online: in a great deal of our online interactions, it doesn't matter if Joe from Nebraska thinks you're awesome--he's never going to be in a position to do anything for you, nor you for him. Probably the majority of people most of us interact with online will never have any significant role in our lives. And yet here we all are, struggling to get ahead with joe234 and john_q_public.
Posted by: Leah Raeder | March 16, 2010 4:37 AM
18A few days ago (after I got high) I noticed that I was constantly checking if people left comments on my facebook status. As if it was really something worth while which in this state seemed odd.
Next I noticed a nifty +1 icon that is displayed on my facebook page when one of my 'friends' gets connected to a new 'friend'. Like a leveling system in a game. Then it struck me. Facebook is abusing our basic social needs. They are engineering their website to ensure competition and therefor engagement which results in more visits.
On a broader note: as more knowledge about the workings of the human brain is acquired, we will be bombarded with better engineered marketing, products, websites, you name it. This bothers me.
A few people with this knowledge will be able to 'trick' people into almost anything without the 'victims' noticing it.
Maybe I'm being paranoid. Don't smoke weed more than once a week tops so I can't blame the weed. ;)
Posted by: Niels | March 16, 2010 6:31 AM
19Most followers are courtesy follows.
Unfollow everybody and see how many stick around to read your unmissable small talk.
You will be left with a few real world friends and possibly anyone that fancies you (providing you haven't huffed them with the unfollow).
It's very very easy to be popular online, no matter how social inept you are in the real world.
Posted by: loci | March 16, 2010 9:58 AM
20If it will make you feel better, I'll unfriend and unfollow you. I've decided to hold audition for more "friends" on Spacebook in an attempt to increase my social relevance.
Posted by: Kelly | March 16, 2010 10:55 AM
21Hi Jonah,
I think many people are aware of this behavior and feel anxious because they feel anxious about the numbers. I've seen people go through a deliberate process of REDUCING their friend lists on Facebook to only those they actually feel close to.
Working in web marketing and social media as I do, it's literally my job to ensure that someone is getting followers or traffic. It can be soul stripping sometimes, but I aspire to connect by quality, not just numbers. I measure "quality" by connecting people who will matter to each other.
For better or worse, this is the world we live in now, and I think people are seeing how absurd the numbers are while at the same time feeling a prisoner to them.
Perhaps as online spaces become more like real world interactions, numbers will begin to matter less than finding value in the interactions.
Posted by: Jennifer | March 16, 2010 10:56 AM
22Interacting on-line is bad for the brain, according to the authors of the book The General Theory of Love, a neurologically inclined treatise. The idea is that while our brains evolved to take in a whole range of information about a person (their facial expression, body language, the inflection of their speech, likely their aroma or pheromones, etc.) then that's what the brain needs, and that's what leaves a person feeling replete after a face-to-face conversation.
On social networking sites, there is none of that, and your brain is like a hungry lab rat frustratedly drinking saccharine-sweetened water in hopes of some sustenance. There is no neurological(and thus no vital, authentic emotional) 'sustenance' on social network sites, which is maybe why people seek more and more 'friends' or followers, or what have you. It is not that they are seeking a good spot on the hierarchy, it's that they hope get what their brains have evolved to need (crave!).
There is no genuine connection on social sites, for just this reason. It's surface and meaningless, for the most part, unless you are sharing some sort of useful information -- but you are never really sharing yourself.
Posted by: zephyr haversack | March 16, 2010 11:47 AM
231. our tendencies never really fundamentally change - high school is always around us in degrees.
2. FB is a commercial entity and the widget it produces is emotional response - isn't high school the place with the most emotional ups and downs inherently? what better model to exploit for maximum profit?
3. the US is the home of statistics and demographic data collection for the purpose of marketing useless products. no wonder the products of this culture inherently feature comparative data collection.the world over, via superior internet communications, US corporate culture is training all to worship data, and one of the rituals we are taught is self-promotion - to maximize profits... and shareholder value - full circle.
there are idiots like me who are unable to buy into the culture of sheen over substance. i'm sure i'll be obsolete soon, survival of the fittest and all... unless there is merit to the thought that we really do have more value than what numbers tell about us - after all, our capability to capture numbers is finite, and our data models (despite reaching Pbyte levels and so on) will forever be unable to define us.
Posted by: ek_ladki | March 16, 2010 11:50 AM
24In the personality and individual differences literature there are measures of social dominance orientation (SDO). There are some extremely rough twitter apps that aim at measuring "your twitter personality" based on the words in your tweets. (I use many qualifiers, so probably would get measured as low SDO.) I wonder to what degree persons of similar SDO tend to affiliate on twitter.
For what it's worth,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation
And in the following recent paper by Daniel Fessler and others, there are four hits on SDO.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/3/315.fullPosted by: Richard Harper | March 16, 2010 12:42 PM
25I think this is exactly why I just go about by a number of names and don't connect them together. There's a huge freedom in not being known that has nothing to do with not being accountable for one's words, but everything to do with not having to prove oneself constantly.
Posted by: sharky | March 16, 2010 5:49 PM
26I think FB is extremely effective at commercially exploiting status-striving behaviors. (I tried just one FB app, "Knighthood". To get any significant amount of points to spend you pretty much had to buy hundreds of dollars of commercial products through FB advertisers.) Twitter is so minimalist in comparison that it makes status-displays much more difficult. So likely there is already a fairly strong self-selection process in terms of Social Dominance Orientation between who is mostly active on FB versus Twitter.
Posted by: Richard Harper | March 16, 2010 5:57 PM
27So many good points in this article. The other day I noticed my number of FB friends had dropped and freaked out, wondering who had deleted me for a couple of days (then I remembered that I was the one who had performed a recent cull)
As far as Twitter goes, I'm not particularly impressed by the number of followers someone has, and I don't follow that many people - I'd rather cut out the noise of social media as best possible. Then again, I notice those with less followers have less to say...I wonder, is this the reason they have few followers or BECAUSE they know they're not 'talking' to that many people?
Aaaaaand are the 'courtesy followers' mentioned by Loci really courtesy followers? Call me an idealist or idiot or whatever, but I think that Twitter houses more sophisticated users who are interested in creating discussion and conversation within their little (or large) twitterverses and would follow back based on how useful/entertaining they found the other person's tweets.
I'm part of a particular community in Twitter and it's easy, and quite hilarious, to see the more influential users that everyone is falling over themselves to impress. And ek_ladki is absolutely on the money about high school.
Posted by: Elena | March 16, 2010 6:32 PM
28One thing about human monkeys is they have consciousness. As many have here expressed , we suspected there was something fishy about our emotional ups and downs, triumphs and defeats as we communicated or became intimate with those we'd never meet, you have brought it to consciousness. With consciousness one can address it and decide to continue on in the current as a "monkey in a cage with too many monkeys" might, or notice it and adjust. I know I look at my stats on flickr as some sort of affirmation. I know I feel badly when I comment and comment and get no reply, and talk to myself about simply satisfying my own aesthetic or compassionate or intellectual interests. Then I feel bad when someone else gets responded too every time. It's hard to grow out of high school and it takes continued application of consciousness and will. Again, you've pointed out part of the why. Of course, without the reward of the payoff of numbers, these vehicles for social interaction would certainly be less popular.
Funny, this is an aspect of "high school" I always hated.Posted by: Darryl | March 16, 2010 6:51 PM
29Jonah, thanks for giving me reason number eleventeen fuckjillion not to dick around with Twitter or Facebook!
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | March 16, 2010 8:58 PM
30If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
((even in the world of twitter))-from Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata
Posted by: Quercus Barr | March 17, 2010 9:09 AM
31i think that the technology has allowed people to reach through the various dimensions/categories (friends from the past, present work friends, family, professional friends, party friends, etc.) of their lives in an instant yet we haven't yet developed the emotional capacity to handle it all.
Call me a dweeb but when I signed up for FB, I reconnected with all these people from my youth, and with them came all of my unresolved issues from that particularly painful period in my life (adolescence, anyone?). They were wrought relationships. And having them part of a "conversation" along side someone I currently work with, my aunt, and and someone I never really liked yet lacked the balls to "deny" a friendship to all the while knowing that there were 100+ other people reading it. oy. it was overwhelming for little ol' me. I promptly deleted said FB account.
I use twitter now to follow the Economist solely because I can't afford the subscription. I have no followers because I have no desire to say anything.
Posted by: MRS | March 17, 2010 9:30 AM
32Facebook and Twitter shows the entire world that I'm a boring introvert instead of allowing me to hide my shame in secret.
Posted by: Jayzie | March 17, 2010 9:31 AM
33I wouldn't be so quick to assume that many followers equate to a 'powerful' person in a 'hierarchy'.
Full disclosure: I don't have a Facebook page.
Second disclosure: Twice in the last month I've been solicited to be the 'friend' of people whose names I don't even remotely recognize. (I simply trash these emails, unopened.)
But I have to wonder: What is this, a new kind of phishing? A recruitment of clicks for 'friends' that amount only to email addresses? In other words ,perhaps the numbers will increasingly be mere lies/fabrication in the future.
So I wouldn't get too worried about followers. The strength, as well as the number, of connections matter. Better a decent conversation with one, than a babble with many.
Posted by: clare | March 17, 2010 10:47 AM
34Red the post discussing 'knighthood' on Facebook (hat tip Richard Harper) - exploitation of people's social anxieties for financial gain is nothing new. Over 60 years ago, the 'Arthur Murray' chain of dance studios became infamous for high-pressure sales tactics employed during the course of 'dance lessons.' Particularly vulnerable were lonely widows who, after initially signing up for a few lessons in the hope of getting some companionship, found themselves pressured to buy more and more lessons, then 'lifetime memberships' and then multiple lifetime memberships. A few, having gone through their life savings, sued the studio for fraud.
(See: Audrey E. VOKES, Appellant, v. ARTHUR MURRAY, INC., a corporation, J. P. Davenport, d/b/a Arthur Murray School of Dancing, Appellees ; No. 67-476; Court of Appeals of Florida, Second District;
212 So. 2d 906; 1968 Fla. App. LEXIS 5388; 28 A.L.R.3d 1405
July 31, 1968)As Facebook participation is free of charge, the analogy is not a strict one, but the post on obtaining 'knighthood' after buying products from advertisers certainly raised eyebrows, given the site's promotion as a 'social' network.
Posted by: clare | March 17, 2010 11:29 AM
35I got over this a few years ago when I checked out of the whole social networking scene (for the most part). I have a facebook, but I only use it once a week. I don't use twitter. I have a gmail account, which I use all the time, but not for Buzz. I read a lot of blogs, but barely ever comment.
What do you do with your time?, you might ask. Well, I am now playing the Egyptian oud (a fretless guitar) and I am re-learning Arabic, which I had stopped studying when I felt I "didn't have the time". I'd say I am more satisfied with my life than I have ever been.
Having a REAL hobby has made a huge difference in my quality of life. When I think about how many away messages I checked on AIM or how many times I hit F5 in facebook, it makes me sick.
My suggestion? We should all try to get real hobbies.
Posted by: Will | March 17, 2010 11:44 AM
36Good article. It's amazing how much time you monkeys will spend ... on what is purely the ILLUSION of social association and interaction. Twitter is the new boob tube. Monkey see - monkey doo doo.
Posted by: michael | March 17, 2010 2:21 PM
37I put my dog on FB and Twitter. They can learn as much about him as they want to, and he's way more popular than I am!
Posted by: donna | March 17, 2010 8:43 PM
38I guess I'm another one of the "boring introverts" - though I have yet to 'connect' with a single one of my old high school associates. As the kids these days say; what/ev. I tend to like posting photos, links, videos, to my FB, never really thought too much about whether there was any kind of pecking order. (hence the non-connection to anyone from my high school days).
But I was disappointed the other day, when I stepped out into my back yard, and smelled the blossoms on my plum tree, and wished I could upload that and post a link for my friends.
Posted by: NDP | March 18, 2010 2:22 PM
39There are people who can have a horrible life if it is believed that being an introvert is boring, that you have nothing to offer, that there is inherent shame in introversion. Of course, the socially minded people will attempt to convince you of it.
It took me three divorces to find peace with myself, and I have many years of pleasure, enrichment, and just plain satisfaction ahead of me. I have no need to disguise that on FB, Twitter, or LinkedIn. I appreciate the many comments I have read here from those who have a similar awareness.Posted by: David | March 19, 2010 5:30 PM
40As a social media newbie last year, I became a Twitter follower junkie, following any and all in the hopes of a reciprocal follow. The numbers continue to rise, but its like wandering the mall with all of these people I don't know. So, with FB, I learned to keep it close and personal; find friends that are ACTUAL friends and declining invitations from anonymous folks. Reading my FB updates now actually means something because I know these people!
Posted by: Dan | March 20, 2010 12:33 PM
41even for digital natives, we still worry more about our status offline than online. its whether we have the real world credentials, gigs, dating life that still matter, even though the expression of these (in our minds and online) has shrunk to 160 characters.
Posted by: josh | March 21, 2010 1:11 AM
42Don't worry, all men are just monkeys... and not "men" as in people, but men as in men (not women).... and now you boys have broadbands ;)
Posted by: Jennifer | March 21, 2010 1:21 AM
43I dunno... I don't compare Facebook friend counts much. Last time I looked at Myspace, they were still doing the top-N friends on the page, and it was up to you to sort the friends. I can see that being a lot more competitive thing, especially considering the stereotype Myspace user.
Some groups and pages on Facebook make a big deal about reaching large numbers of fans, but I think that's a different thing. You create a group or a page to attract people to it, so the whole 1,000,000 fan initiative thing is little more than marketing.
I think the whole issue is analogous to comparing yourself to other guys at the urinal. Sure, you could probably get away with doing it, but what's the point?
Posted by: Matunos | March 21, 2010 5:44 AM
4410,242 followers on Twitter at last count, and yes I had to become socially promiscuous, at times, with my keyboard to achieve it. But there is some good to be had from that.
Sapolsky is in my top 10 of relevant scientists whose opinions and insights I let influence my thinking and my actions. The social status observations are accurate and arguably they explain the basis upon which we have thrived above all other species. We co-operate to overcome bigger issues than we can handle ourselves.
Richard Dawkins and William Hamilton (only one of which is also in my top 10) elevate and explain Darwinism's that our genes act in selfishness so that we can proper as individuals. In carrying out acts of selfishness it often requires that we take on altruistic traits so that our genes thrive by helping others or through enabling others to thrive at our expense. This can manifest in social co-operation such as allowing status to exists within our numerous tribes, knowing that we may be down the pecking order but our children (our genes) will probably survive and thrive by our complicit act in elevating others.
I use Twitter to share information and for that I have 'followers' or real people that are interested and send me comments. I use this feedback to affirm or otherwise my thoughts on a subject with people that have similar interests or gain an interest in a subject I am passionate about. This feedback happens on an international scale that I could not achieve by going to my local bar and having a conversation with people who have insights that are derived from sources similar to mine. In the corporate world they would call this market research and firms invest their scarce resources in directions according to the outcomes of such market research.
In the social networking world I call this a discussion that enables me to move a subject forward and it is, to me, a way that I can assist society on a scale much bigger than I could otherwise achieve. My selfish goal is to influence people to consider fact based arguments on subjects of importance and to question opinions that might be biased, narrow or misleading. By encouraging people to question issues, such as lobbying by food companies, my aim is to help my children live in a world where misleading health claims on food packaging or irresponsible mortgage lending doesn't affect their future welfare.
The happy co-incidence with my 10,000 followers is that many people want to join the various conversations with each other and new networks are created. It's an evolving hippocampus thing, really.
I agree with comments on the darker side of online social network and the influences it may have on individuals self-esteem or even the real danger that it can assist the demise into online addiction.
However, there needs to be a balanced and even a data driven argument about the pros and cons of allowing ourselves to be electronically connected to each others thoughts.
Posted by: edSanDiego | March 21, 2010 7:35 AM
45The business of business has been the always been the same ....
Change the customer to fit your product ! How a social network site does it is no different than , say, jeans, or cigarettes etc
Nice article.
Posted by: K Y Ashok Murthy | March 21, 2010 8:20 AM
46A good point, especially about the sycophantic nature of some blogs. My advice to you if you are interested in this is to start hanging out with some parrots, who are non-hierarchal by nature. In my opinion, you have to be around some intelligent non-hierarchal creatures for a while to fully realize how deeply embedded our hierarchal nature is.
Posted by: Marshall Eubanks | March 21, 2010 10:17 AM
47Maybe it isn't about a giant high school or status... maybe it's for the same reason you became a writer/journalist and some of us write blogs.... maybe it's the need to feel like we're heard. The need to feel like our ideas matter. If a retweet from Demi Moore makes 1,500,000 people get a chance to be exposed to your ideas... that's exciting. That makes someone who before only had 20 people that cared to "listen" to them feel like, at least for a day, like their ideas matter too.
Posted by: Jennifer | aaaa
Why unions should embrace social media
Why unions should embrace social media
Posted on 24. Aug, 2009 in Blog, Campaigning, Opinion
The new social media is a very powerful thing. It allows unions to have intimate, personal conversations with hundreds, if not thousands of members, potential members and supporters.
No longer are unions reliant on the old forms of media (news papers, television, radio), or on face-to-face conversations between organisers and workers. Social media allows for unmediated communication and dialogue across vast distances, and at any time of the day or night. Unions can now campaign globally, raise awareness of issues locally or build support from non-traditional regions or geographic areas.
Unions can utilise very powerful and flexible social networking tools, but like any organising and campaign tool, they must be used properly. Tools such as Facebook and Twitter should not be just an afterthought. A union cannot just set up a Twitter account, make one or two “tweets”, and then expect hundreds of its members to start “following”.
Like any endeavour, the effective use of social networking requires practice, and trial-and-error. Consumers of social media (union members, potential members and supporters) can interact with corporate and commercial users that have a high standard of professionalism. If a union is going to start using social media, it must be prepared to invest time and (human) resources to do so properly.
(Of course, traditional media is still very important, and by no means am I suggesting that unions stop engaging in traditional media strategies.)
Using social media well
Social media and the social elements of “Web 2.0″ are characterised by conversation, participation, openness and community. Unless your unions understands these principles of social media, you won’t get very far, and many of your efforts may be wasted.
1. Engage in conversations
Social media tools allow you to have conversations. People who visit websites these days expect to be able to interact with you on that website. The content you put on your union’s website is no longer one way.
Even if you don’t have a website that allows comments, users are still able to have their say, using tools such as Facebook or Twitter. Smart unions will engage with those people both on their chosen platform, as well as on the union’s website.
It is no longer enough to simply use your union’s website to broadcast your message, such as media releases or “messages from the secretary”. Members and non-members should be able to leave comments directly on a page, and expect someone from the union (yes, even the secretary) to actually read and reply to the comment. The more personal the interaction the better (see later).
Similarly, if you discover a blog, website or twitterer that is discussing your union, or an employer where you have coverage, use the opportunity to join in. Leave a comment on the blog. Send an “@ reply” to the twitterer. This is especially important if you encounter criticism of your union online – the new social media rules mean you can interact with your critic directly, and others can participate as well. (Of course, make sure any response to criticism is polite.)
Your members and supporters will start to engage with you, and feel a greater level of ownership over your union’s online presence. As you build your relationships with people online, you will find that people will start to promote your cause voluntarily, defend you in online forums, send you information you’d never find out otherwise, and participate in future campaigns.
2. Be active and involved in online communities
No one will read or follow a Twitter account with only one or two tweets. Similarly, if your Facebook feed is only taken up with media releases or links to the news section of your union’s website, then you aren’t really engaging.
Social media is on and active 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Twitter and Facebook operate in real-time. Members, non-members and supporters quickly stop checking a campaign site that hasn’t been updated in a week.
Being active means responding to comments, tweets and Facebook messages. While most unions may not have the time and resources to have someone full-time on social media, it important that someone checks the union’s Twitter and Facebook account regularly. Most social media sites have a bunch of tools to help (for example, Twitter’s search function can allow you to see if people are tweeting about your union).
Social media tools can’t be used sporadically. If you are only sending out a tweet every month or so, it will get lost in the maelstrom of updates that users experience. The “live” nature of many social media networks means that you need to check your union’s accounts daily at least.
3. Choose your social media networks carefully
With the hundreds of sites out there, and more growing all the time, it can be tempting for a union new to social networking to jump on as many as possible.
There are several reasons to limit your interaction with only a few social media sites.
Firstly, choose the site where most of your members and supporters are (or most of the workers in your union’s industries). Most social networking sites allow you to do searches – for example, on Facebook, you can search for your existing members, but you can also search for people on Facebook by the information on their profiles (see my earlier entry on Facebook as an organising tool for unions).
Secondly, unless your union can afford to have dedicated social media officers, it is likely that you simply won’t have the time or resources to adequately maintain your presence on lots of different social media sites. Having an engaged and vibrant presence on one, two or three sites is better than having an inactive, disengaged and infrequently updated presence on hundreds.
Thirdly, choose sites that fit in with your campaign or organising plan. Hundreds of your members may be on sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, but those sites are like straightjackets for campaigns. You have almost no flexibility to export data, or take control of how your profile looks. Simply put, some sites are more useful for specific campaigns or activities than others, and you should consider the feature set of each social media tool before you jump into it.
4. Open up the union to socialising
Many unions run tight ships when it comes to communications, media engagement or interaction with members. Only media officers speak to the media, only organisers speak to members, only the secretary makes official statements.
The rules of social media don’t allow for such rigid structures. Members, supporters and non-members want to hear from a range of voices within their union. Organisers could have Twitter and Facebook accounts. In fact, social media should be embraced by everyone in the union, rather than just a one or two people.
Openness and interaction are a major part of social media. Embrace it.You will be rewarded for your transparency and openness (see point 1 above).
Of course, be prepared to make mistakes, and be big enough to admit when you have screwed up, then move on. Have a Social Media Policy, or set of guidelines for union officials. Make sure everyone knows what the policy is.
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Tags: facebook, social media, Twitter, unions, website
GOP Governors Plot Internet Strategy - Washington Wire - WSJ
By Peter Wallsten
By Peter Wallsten
Just last year, Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign transformed politics by using the Internet to raise record sums of money and marshal thousands of activists.
But Republican governors, meeting in Austin, Texas, to plot strategy for next year’s elections, claim they have now caught up – and perhaps even surpassed the Democrats in using the Internet.
Robert McDonnell, elected this month as governor of Virginia, said his campaign succeeded largely because it adapted the Obama online model, using social networking sites and text messaging to broaden the reach to new voters. Among the tactics taken from Obama: amassing cell phone numbers to send text messages. McDonnell said he hired the same firm that Obama’s campaign used for its text message strategy.
“Looking at President Obama’s campaign last year, he did a phenomenal job using social media, Twitter, text messaging, any number of other things in order to reach people,” McDonnell said.
More than 30,000 supporters signed on as Facebook friends, and McDonnell aides said they worked to he site fresh and responsive to issues.The campaign also spent 7.5% of its overall media budget on online advertising – a far higher portion than most political campaigns these days.
That included banner ads on Google, ads overlaying YouTube videos, and even a new tactic of targeting voters throughout the day with ads appearing on their screens at work in Washington, D.C., then later that night on their home computers in the suburbs.
“We bought banner ads on virtually every major site with a demographic that we were trying to reach with the independent voters,” McDonnell said. “You couldn’t go to those sites without having a popup with my name on it.”
A less visible piece of the online strategy came in the behind-the-scenes cultivation of conservative blogs, aides said.
McDonnell wanted to be viewed as running a positive campaign about jobs and the economy. But when his campaign wanted to spread a negative story about Democratic opponent Creigh Deeds, the first call would often be to a sympathetic blogger who would post a video or a line of attack that could then be picked up by the mainstream media – giving the campaign some distance.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, touted exit poll data showing that in Virginia and New Jersey, where Republican Gov.-elect Chris Christie also relied heavily on Web-based tactics, a vast majority of voters who ranked the Internet as a primary source of information about the campaigns backed the GOP contenders.
Officials at Google, which leads the industry in selling Internet advertising and is escalating its efforts to attract political ads, confirms that Republicans spent far more than Democrats in the two state races this year. Political ads are a tiny fraction of the search engine’s revenues, but with an eye on hundreds of competitive congressional, state and local races next year, the company is expanding its operations in that area and can only gain from a partisan arms race in online tactics.
“Republicans are now the models to watch and learn from in 2010,” said Peter Greenberger, head of political advertising for Google. “They were seen as behind in 2008, but it’s clear that they have caught up with—if not surpassed—the Democrats in their use of digital advertising. They were more innovative, more aggressive and they spent more than Democrats.”
One Democrat, Bill Owens, who won the special election in New York’s sprawling 23rd congressional district, used some innovations, uploading the shape of his district to Google in order to target advertising there. A similar tactic was used by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who won re-election this month to a third term.
And, at least in his primary, Deeds showed Web acumen, using targeted ads based on Google search terms to publicize his endorsement by the Washington Post.
Not every Republican here seems pleased with the party’s progress, however.
Former Rep. John Kasich, who is running for governor of Ohio, expressed frustration during a panel discussion that his party had fallen way behind.
“The women of Iran have been more effective using Twitter than House Republicans have been getting their message out to the country,” he said.
