Jesper Tække's 'Facebook: Networking the Community of Society' Conference Paper for the 11th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)) [
PDF] -
The article examines the significance of new "social media" like Facebook for the way we socialize, develop social identity, and shape society. Based on the work of Luhmann, the article proposes that community communication is fundamental to the selfregulation of our society and that this type of communication also provides the basis for the formation and maintenance of people’s social identity, so that they and society are in harmony. In contrast to community communication, the article explores the notion of network communication, which is classified as communication that may have some positive effects but that also may pose certain risks for modern society and for the development and maintenance of social identity. The article argues that communication through and about status updates on Facebook may be categorized as network communication, and finally it discusses whether and to what extent this kind of communication leads to the aforementioned risks.
In a comment on the metrics of cool Tække goes on to comment that -
Facebook consists of thousands of synchronously existing parallel networks and all users are isolated in the centre of their own unique networks.
Since Facebook is a medium for online contact between people who know each other offline, there must be a limit to how many friends a user can have before seeming unserious, or becoming a microcelebrity, as Danah Boyd called this phenomenon when I discussed it with her. It is my feeling that it seems cool to have at least 200 friends, but, conversely, not very cool to have many more than the 400. Users with so many friends seem to be collecting all sorts of unknown people in order to become a micro-celebrity, which someone with around 700 friends may be described as. The fact that many comedians and politicians (and also some of my colleagues) now have thousands of friends means that they have gone from using Facebook as do other mortals ― to network with friends, colleagues and family ― to using it as a quasi-mass medium facing their crowds of fans. ...
I have defined communities as a special kind of communication system whose main principle is that everyone has access to communication. Networking is also an expression of communication, but with a much smaller degree of community; networks are not organized and can only be poorly described as systems because their social differentiation is weak. Even though Facebook is not as cartel‐like as LinkedIn, the medium still plays a role in increasing the diffusion of networks. Theoretically, this could perturb the balance between society's primary functional
differentiation based on organizations and the secondary network coding.
He concludes - oh mirabile dictu - that
The societal risk is that network friends might not be sincere in their contributions to organizations. So rather than base their contributions on objective criteria and rules that apply equally to all, people will choose to further their network friends’ special interests. The parasite may kill the host. From a theoretical perspective, the problem is that networks cut across the closure of functional systems in the fact dimension and the closure of organizations in the social dimension. This problem is more complex in the case of Facebook: Exchanging services in the Facebook network may well be limited in the fact dimension but not in the social dimension because Facebook does not require membership in a strict sense. In addition, Facebook allows messages to be forwarded. It may be argued that the friendship system for the individual bounds the system in the social dimension, while no closure is evident in the fact dimension (everything can be communicated).
The fact of the matter is, however, that within Facebook's communicative structure many parallel networks are actualized in which no one has the same circle of friends, which means that the relationship structure is poly‐centred in the social dimension and thus open and impossible to limit. As a result, the only unique feature of the system is that communication occurs in it, and that this communication is decoupled from other communication by the very technology that enables and quasi‐duplicates it. If Facebook is considered a quasi‐mass medium it might actually contribute to the community of society. For example, Facebook can also be used critically to address the corruption of networks that worries Luhmann, and it can be used to focus the debate, as foreseen by Habermas, by processing societal reflection within all the functional systems.
There is a similar perspective in 'Clicking for friendship: social network sites and the medium of personhood' [
PDF] by Daniel Lee, Jessica Goede & Rebecca Shryock in 49
MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research (2010) -
Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook depend on familiar social resources, including language, reading/writing and established semantic constructs such as personhood, privacy and friends. However, the use of computers, the Web 2.0 platform, and the latest networking software are revolutionising how "personhood" and "friendship" are produced by communication. We refer to the media theory of Niklas Luhmann to identify specific differences in how communication is organised and reproduced on networking sites. The electronic medium appears to be changing the way participants selectively construct and bind expectations of personhood and communicative ties to themselves and others. Using software available on the Web, users confront each other as digital bodies, as participants in communication, available for friendship within a new "ether of interactivity".
