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Social networking sites have always been a little bit about voyeurism, maybe more so than about networking. I joined Facebook in its earliest days, in the spring of 2004, as a freshman in college. No one using it then realized that it was going to be a Silicon Valley juggernaut; we were delighted for an easy way to find out more about that dreamy upperclassman on the crew team who, sigh, also listed existentialism as an interest.
A term quickly evolved for these embarassing bouts of recon work on a love interest or even just someone who'd idly grabbed our attention: "Facebook-stalking," a process that got much more fruitful once pictures were added ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out
in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them
to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural,
in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.
My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Jess, I was struck by the story of Demi Moore and the allegedly suicidal tweeter, too. As you so rightly point out, tweeting to a near stranger about your plans to kill yourself shows signs of disconnect, rather than connection. In this sense, I think Peggy Orenstein was onto something—even if she didn't spell it out—when she talked about a "growth through loneliness" she got to enjoy as a teenager in a pre-connected era who could discard old selves (and friends) with each new step. The irony she starts to unpack is that—according to psychologists in her piece, at least—many kids seem to find connectivity more lonely than being alone. All those "friends" reporting on their activity can make you feel even more like an isolated weirdo when you're down.
I'm sure tons of psychologists are studying Facebook as social phenomenon. One question I have is about how Facebook plays with your sense of time. I suspect it messes with eveyone's sense of time, but perhaps it has been especially odd for those of us in our 30s and 40s who had already gone through the process of letting go of old friends when ... voilà! There they were, friending us again, flooding our news feed with their status updates about kids, husbands, wives, work, American Idol. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. I may have had a higher-than-usual dose of this of late because my mother died at Christmas, and she was the head of my middle school. So I was flooded with messages from old friends (now new "friends") about her. It was extremely reassuring at the time, I have to say: It made me feel that life has some continuity and, well, enduring connection, especially since many of these notes were about my mother's influence on their lives. But at less stressful moments, I'm sometimes shaken to glimpse a photo of an old lost kindred spirit on my feed. ... What would Anne of Green Gables have thought? The other day at brunch, a slightly older friend talked about being pulled into this same vortex, becoming almost depressed by this reminder of times past, selves left behind, there on his screen, updating away, hour after hour. It's a strange kind of connection, that's so far. Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels.
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It was big Web news on Friday when Demi Moore responded to an allegedly suicidal tweeter, who had written the actress an online message via Twitter, threatening to kill herself. Moore, along with other Twitter users, tracked the woman who wrote the message to San Jose, California, and many called the police there.* That woman is currently under psychiatric care. Today, there is another story of a suicide intervention via social networking, this time using Facebook. According to the Daily Mail, a 16-year-old boy from Oxford was chatting via Facebook with a Maryland girl when he started talking about suicide and wrote, "I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out." The Maryland girl smartly told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in D.C., who then called Scotland Yard. The police eventually found the boy, who was alive but had overdosed on pills.
All of this brings me back to an earlier point I made about Peggy Orenstein's essay on Facebook. She argued that teens today will miss out on "growth through loneliness" because they're constantly in contact with other people. For these people to make threats of suicide to virtual strangers shows a profound disconnect, rather than a feeling of satisfying interpersonal interaction. If you need Demi Moore to save you from yourself, you're a very sad person indeed.
Correction, April 6, 2009: in the original post, it was incorrectly stated that the Twitter was traced to San Diego, CA.
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Bonnie, your lovely, loving mea culpa raises what's for me a central conundrum of writing about parenting: audience. Do we write for our own middle- and upper-middle-class world? In which it's an easy call, to me, that helicopter parents pose a greater danger to kids than wandering the streets, or rather, the well-groomed sidewalks. Or are we writing to 22-year-old moms like your former self and to poor ones? Sometimes the message is the same. But often it's not, because the set of assumptions we're speaking to are very different. See Paul Tough's smart reporting on Annette Lareau's studies about how child-rearing differs by income. It's a split that affects this discussion we're having and a lot of other ones, I find.
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In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein has an essay about Facebook's impact on today's youth. Orenstein worries about two different, separate things: first, that college-age kids will find it difficult to forge new identities because of their social networking pasts, and second, that Facebook provides such a comforting connection that these members of Gen Y will lose out on "an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness."
As an older member of Generation Y, I think Peggy misses the mark a bit. While I'm certain college kids do spend a lot of their time networking socially, there's not a one-to-one correlation between their Facebook selves and their personas in real life (or IRL, as the kids say). Part of the reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows the user to control his or her experience. It truly is possible for an 18-year-old to delete their profiles or to have the wherewithal to defriend the people who made them miserable in high school. Even though they spend a lot of time on their MacBooks, I find it difficult to believe that they're not also disengaging from the computer, having late-night real-person chats with their floor mates, and experimenting with Sartre and sex, just like many college kids before them.
Which brings me to Orenstein's other point: that Facebook somehow alleviates or prevents the loneliness that many young people feel when first leaving the nest. Nothing sounds more alienating than being miserable at college and seeing Sarah's status message pop up about how she's "On her way to the Bon Iver concert with Dave." Being constantly confronted with your friends' social triumphs when you're flailing seems like it would be incredibly lonely-making. Even if your buddies are all similarly depressed or floundering in college, there's still something sterile about the clean lines and ice blue color scheme of Facebook. I find it hard to believe that it's a satisfying replacement for actual human contact, even for those born after 1990.
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Hey, crankypants—or is the right term crankybra? Yes, I'm talking to you, Hanna Rosin. Your generation may not have "found an easy way into Facebook," but my peeps—as amazing as it may seem with my youthful visage and my love of TV shows featuring high school kids, I'm older than you are—are all over it.
You see, my peeps aren't my birth cohort or any other demographic slice; they're my partners in procrastination and time-wasting. Facebook attracts people who watch a lot of television, have a lot of opinions about pop culture, and don't have very well-developed impulse control (check out some of my photos, Sam!). My peeps. Your peeps are way too busy writing brilliant books and numerous genius magazine pieces.
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Samantha, I understand your disappointment that Facebook isn't the cozy place it used to be, but can I chime in on behalf of the old folks? While it might be desirable to make your profile more "professional" if you're going to be using it for work, please don't think that we're all a bunch of humorless, judgmental old biddies. I, for one, refuse to detag the photo that a friend recently posted of me from college in which another friend and I are posing in the men's room of our co-ed dorm. It brings back too many funny memories. (Just like every generation thinks it invented sex, I suppose every generation thinks it's the first to get away with underage drinking and similar craziness. I assure you, there's probably little your generation can do to shock us.)
And I trust as you get older that you will see the other benefits of Facebook. I don't feel like I'm that old, but I've been out of school long enough to have had a half-dozen jobs in three states. I've always left behind people I adored but didn't manage to stay in touch with, which happens when you get married and start popping out kids. (Let me warn you, kids are a time-suck!) Thanks to Facebook, in the past few months I've found childhood friends, college friends, old co-workers. Granted, I don't spend hours obsessively e-mailing my long-lost pals, like some of Hanna's friends do, but it's great for catching up after years of silence and then occasionally responding to comments or posting. Back in January, I survived Ohio State's loss in the Fiesta Bowl by trading wall comments with a friend from first grade. When two beloved teachers from my high school passed away a couple months apart this winter, not only did I learn about their untimely deaths via Facebook, but I was able to come together with former classmates as we shared favorite stories about them.
Facebook, I guess, is like every other aspect of growing up. It might not be as carefree and fun as it used to be, but it offers its own rewards.
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Sam, your post about how adults have ruined Facebook got me pondering a brain teaser: What happens when we, our generation of twentysomething, Original Gangsta Facebook users, becomes—gasp!—grown-ups? (And, if we're not now ... when? Though I wish it weren't so, we definitely qualify as "adults" to a decent number of users already.) What happens when we're the boss ladies? Will people still feel compelled to edit their drunken photos for our benefit? Or will it just be understood that we've got them, too, and so long as you're not breaking the law in any of them, it's all good? And is that even something we would want our one-day inferiors to see, with a click of a button, us authority figures flush-faced, droopy-eyed, and whooping it up while drinking everclear and punch out of red plastic cups? Probably not. So, while it might hurt a little now, I think all these adults on Facebook are just doing what adults are supposed to do and pushing us "youngsters" to grow up. Or, at least to behave like grown-ups, which often comes before feeling like one but is a necessary part of the process. This whole maturing thing can be a drag, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need doing.
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Sam, you're grieving that adults have crashed Facebook? Get over it. This will happen, in various ways, to everything in your life. It's like the restaurant in that Yogi Berra line: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." What is exclusive becomes inclusive; in the process, it is irretrievably changed.
But so are you-changed, and changing. Nostalgia for the early Facebook years is like nostalgia for flower power and anti-war rallies. Don't get too attached to your generational pleasures lest you turn into one of those old folks who can't stop griping about how young people these days don't but should appreciate, oh, waltzing or the Rolling Stones. The world around you-political, social, cultural-is constantly changing in ways that will seem utterly incredible in about 15 more years: You'll look up and say, "Wait a minute, when did everyone start believing XYZ, which was so unthinkable when I was young? I thought everyone was against war/homosexuality/virginity/drugs/obscenity on the radio/regulation/deregulation, so how did policies get changed in this utterly weird direction? Where did these crazies come from, and how exactly did they start running the world? I want my intimate little Facebook back!"
Won't happen. Might as well start getting used to it now.
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Sam, you hit us where it hurts. It's true, my generation hasn't found an easy way into Facebook. I have friends who use it obsessively, like teenagers, and I'm sort of embarrassed for them. I have others who use it like Linked In, to make professional contacts. And others who are so ambivalent that in all their photos they hide behind their kids. Most, like me, just start a page and then neglect it. But I guarantee you, once you're in my shoes and actually start the breast-feeding phase of life (see cranky breast-feeding me in my Atlantic story), as opposed to just dreaming about it (see giddy, insouciant Sam on breast-feeding here), you'll neglect/misuse Facebook too.
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I second Jess' call for you to become fans of Double X on Facebook. But as happy as I'll be to share that virtual connection with you, I'm not happy this is what Facebook has become. I joined Facebook in the golden years, back when the bulk of its users were friends of friends of Mark Zuckerberg. Younger than Friendster and more exclusive than MySpace, Facebook let us figure out college life as a group. We shared snippets of this strange new experience with the kids we met in class that day and kept tabs on our scattered high-school friends. Facebook let us grow up and apart within view of each other. And then, suddenly, also within view of the grown-ups. And that's when the fun ended.
In preparation for the launch of the Double X page, I started off on a mission to "clean up" my FB profile. I'm friends with my bosses now, after all, so it's time to get profesh. But the same drunken pictures that I know I should untag are also the ones I most love revisiting—driven by that intense nostalgia that causes me to reread my humiliating middle-school diaries every time I visit my parents' apartment. Ever since adults crashed the party, though, Facebook profiles are more like cover letters than diaries. So I embark on my Facebook makeover grudgingly, because I'm way more embarrassed to reveal myself as self-promotional than drunk.
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The XX Factor blog is spinning off into its own site called Double X in the spring (more on that here). If you want to stay informed about our latest stories, news, and events, you can click here to follow our Twitter or click here to become a fan of our Facebook page. We're so excited to bring you the new site and will be keeping you posted.
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Nina wonders if the financial downturn will force more women to pursue writing careers in order to become breadwinners, but I don't believe anyone turns to the life of letters to ward off economic calamity. While writing skills can indeed be marketable (a young stay-at-home mom I know takes projects translating academic research into coherent grant proposals and reports), nobody would choose a writing profession for the money. It has worse hourly wages than busing tables, and there's no tip out. Despairingly, as difficult and time-consuming the labor of prose, many writers consider it a gift to get paid at all. A writer writes, at the core, because she needs to hear her voice on the page and see her thoughts expressed on the computer screen. You write because the muse tells you that you must.
That said, I hope Emily's skepticism that Facebook "infantilizes" human brains and impairs attention spans is well-placed. I worry a little that cell-phone best-sellers popular in Japan are already a sign of the digital impact on the printed word, and tomorrow's written narrative will be 10 consecutive status updates.
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An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings. Her conclusions feel instinctively right (as I've found even adult brains can be rewired for such stunting), but then again, isn't this always the cry of the older generation when a new technology comes along? Television, radio, and telephones were all supposed to ruin the generation that grew up glued to these devices. Even the printing press—which allowed people to absorb cultural knowledge privately—was supposed to destroy the group cohesion that was enforced through the oral tradition. Do others feel Greenfield is right? Or is she just the latest adult warning that rock 'n' roll, et. al., is producing degenerate kids?
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I don't blame you, Margaret, for feeling misled and misused by Facebook, but the whole thing reminds me a bit of the coachmen of Pleasure Island offering toys and candy while quietly turning Pinocchio and the other wayward boys into donkeys. I think your outrage that its CEO "could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes," is a healthy wake-up call. Five years into the social networking phenomenon, its naive beneficiaries are suddenly troubled that young Mr. Zuckerberg is running a business. Along with offering strangely satisfying cupcake images, movie quizzes, free karma, and opportunities to throw sheep or hatch rottweillers, Zuckerberg, without asking for compensation, has created a very valuable forum. Users all over the world put their current Faces forward and entertainingly connect with one another over years and across generations. It seems likely that providing tempting and easily acquired treats must run up expenses and follows inevitably that the clever wunderkind will seek to monetize his principal asset: many millions of members about whom so many useful, voluntarily supplied, tidbits are readily known.
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Emily, I can't reconcile the conflict your freshly minted Generation Y (is it Gen Z now?) has embraced of eschewing privacy, which you all seem happy to do, yet expecting, even demanding as you wrote, "complete control over the private information we make public." The uncomfortable truth is you can never remove all traces of the past. That said, your general forthrightness and candor about your own lives shows a trust and wonder missing during my cohort's coming of age. My pre-alphabet age group of former flower children thought ourselves bold and experimental, but we only flirted with the openness and lovely acceptance members of your on-beyond-zebra generation typically show one another. Each of you inhabits her own skin so comfortably and displays such cheerful self-confidence, it does your elders proud. We third- and fourth-wave Facebook users now crowding your playground are grateful for your gracious reception, but Emily, you are also at the age when you come to realize we can't control what people know about us. We live in a public environment and people like to observe one another. You can't hold a megaphone and then tell people not to listen, nor take pictures of yourselves, post them, and expect the images to remain unseen. Despite the harsh trade-off, I say, go for it. Create as many online personae as you wish to, express yourselves honestly and sincerely, and enjoy the marvelous digital era you were lucky to be born into. Although you do not control who sees what you post nor what they do with it, remember, you will always have absolute power over what you say next.