I recently had a conversation with Randy about Facebook, where I argued that Facebook would maintain its dominance in the face of competition from other social networking sites. The conversation led me to think about what it is that makes Facebook a successful community (or rather, a successful collection of communities).
On Facebook, online identity is closely tied to offline identity. Generally speaking, people use their real names on Facebook. This is in contrast with MySpace, where many people use aliases and are generally more playful with their identities. On Facebook, people have an incentive to maintain their profiles because a sizable portion of the “real” selves exist on their profile pages. MySpace, on the other hand, will experience more churn because people experimenting with their online identities may have less personal investment in their profile. (Admittedly, this is a pretty general observation. People use these social networking sites in different ways, and individuals may use MySpace in a Facebook-like way—that is, construct their profiles in a way that is closely chained to their offline identity—and vice versa. It becomes clear, however, from looking at the architecture of the two sites that Facebook is much more concerned with “real” selves. Playfulness and experimentation still exist, but they exist on top of a foundation of “real” identity.
The “playfulness and experimentation” part is essential to an online community. If, for instance, a social networking site tries to map offline and online identities too closely, it runs the risk of removing the energy—for lack of a better term—from the community. Witness LinkedIn, which is on one end of a continuum from “playful” to “serious.” MySpace would be towards the “playful” pole, while Facebook would be close to but slightly to the right of the center.
The tension between these two poles leads to some interesting questions for pedagogical use of these online spaces. I’ve been asking how the “energy” of social media can be retained when some of the technologies used on those sites is turned to academic use (course blogs, group wikis, etc). Here’s a slight restatement of that question:
How does academic use of social media redefine/maintain the balance between play and “serious” usage by the participants?
I think I’m getting closer to a potential thesis here. (Which is a good thing, because until this point I was very unsure about the overall direction of my studies.) I’d love to hear feedback on this idea.
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