Yesterday, I attended PD Day 2009 from the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS). There Andrew Keenan, a HuCo/SLIS student, presented on “Evaluating Sociability Online”, in which he tried to identify the distinguishing features of two popular social networks — Facebook and Myspace — and two niche social networks — Twitter and LinkedIn. In his conclusion, he found that each represented a different paradigm in its success: Facebook as private (closed connections based on real-world identities), Myspace as public (persona building and extravagant), Twitter as technology (doing one thing extremely well), and LinkedIn as community (gathering around a commonality, akin to message board communities). The separation helps explain how there’s roomm for each of these, though Keenan argues that community-based websites will decline in preference of Facebook, while technology-based one-use websites will explode in popular. I agree with the latter sentiment, especially since such “do one thing well” sites are perfectly fit for pluging into Facebook Platform or OpenSocial.

Keenan’s presentation was extremely refreshing, and I’ve identified why: he understood what he was talking about. I read about Facebook much more than I use it, and it seems that, when on the topic of the service, the tin-foil hats come out and commentators lose all sense of reason. Often, these are commentators from established media that simply don’t consider the big picture view of social networking in human communication. Having spent many months teaching journalists,  I can attest to having witnessing this firsthand. Having, I have seen such losss of reason as apparently in school, with young people similarly having a reaction to such recent communications upheaval.

It should be noted that there were people in the audience with their apparently-rehearsed speeches, shocked and ready to attack Keenan on his evaluation of Facebook. “Facebook isn’t private!” was met with many ‘yeas’. “Even if you have a fake name and delete your account, they’ll still have you photos” was another odd comment. Even the keynote speaker pitched it, mentioning Facebook is a business that can do whatever it wants with your data and that it violates Canadian privacy laws because the data that you given it is hosted on servers that are possibly in America. Suddenly, the fresh air that was Keenan’s presentation dissipated into a hot air. What more, within the context of the presentation, the point was right on:  in privacy studies on social networks, Facebook has come out on top with the flexibility and strength of its privacy features. As Keenan noted in a response: privacy problems on Facebook are generally a user-issue, not a systems-issue. This is well addressed by James Grimmelmann in Facebook and the Soocial Dynamics of Privacy:

The first task of technology law is always to understand how people actually use the technology. Consider the phenomenon called “ghost riding the whip.” The Facebook page of the Ghost Riding the Whip Association links to a video of two young men who jump out of a moving car and dance around on it as it rolls on, now driverless. If this sounds horribly dangerous, that’s because it is. At least two people have been killed ghost-riding1, and the best-known of the hundreds of ghost-riding videos posted online shows a ghost rider being run over by his own car.

Policymakers could respond to such obviously risky behavior in two ways. One way—the wrong way—would treat ghost riders as passive victims. Surely, sane people would never voluntarily dance around on the hood of a moving car. There must be something wrong with the car that induces them to ghost ride on it. Maybe cars should come with a “NEVER EXIT A MOVING CAR” sticker on the driver-side window. If drivers ignore the stickers, maybe any car with doors and windows that open should be declared unreasonably dangerous. And so on. The problem with this entire way of thinking is that it sees only the car, and not the driver who lets go of the wheel. Cars don’t ghost ride the whip; people ghost ride the whip.

…

Over a hundred million people have uploaded personally sensitive information to Facebook, and many of them have been badly burnt as a result. Jobs have been lost, reputations smeared, embarrassing secrets broadcast to the world.

It’s temptingly easy to pin the blame for these problems entirely on Facebook. Easy—but wrong. Facebook isn’t a privacy carjacker, forcing its victims into compromising situations. It’s a carmaker, offering its users a flexible, valuable, socially compelling tool. Its users are the ones ghost riding the privacy whip, dancing around on the roof as they expose their personal information to the world.

Keenan’s presentation slides are available at the PD Day 2009 website. What do you think? I haven’t yet addressed any of the nay-sayers’ issues, but if you’d like to hear some on that, feel free to start a debate.