Cyperspace Generation Gap – Google is So Yesterday, Everybody is on Facebook

I don’t twitter.  The concept does not grab me like it does my students.  Some brag about, more just aver to, micro-blogging their activities and observations 140 characters at a time.  Being constantly “in touch” seems to occupy for them some of the functional space that punctuality does for earlier generations, those of a “certain age” older than some of their parents.  When I tell them that part of the invisible curriculum in college is to learn to make appointments and to be on time, they just shrug,  say “whatever,” and ask why, if they’re constantly available (with those who matter to them) instead.  Instead of points of contact, they seem to think in terms of degrees or modulations of contact.[1]

I can see some uses for the sending of these brief messages to what amount to subscriber lists.  Journalists, for instance, might in some cases tweet an unfolding story instead of calling in; or an editor might deploy a company of reporters at a big event to get multiple simultaneous perspectives; family members or people trying to coordinate a meeting, perhaps at a crowded airport, might tweet.  At one remove, “alternative voices” might try to spin an unfolding event, as with allegedly on-the-spot messaging from and about street demonstrations over election manipulation recently in Iran that, in a sense, took the arguments into international cyberspace, where it can be hard to tell where they come from on the ground.[2] As my students might say, it’s “meet” space, not “meat” space now.

Commentators used to register this sort of testimony and the experience it represents as “dematerialization” or the “virtualization” of reality.  Those tropes from critical cultural studies have lost traction:  postmodernism and simulacra are old hat, at least for the generation that has grown up since those ideas were fresh.  Their realities are IT-mediated “meet” spaces, front-and-center among which are social networking sites, most famously nowadays Facebook.  Facebook did not invent the form; and, arguably, the now-declining MySpace actually perfected its rendition as expressive cultural performance.  But Facebook accumulated the numbers and the press to become the face of online social networking sites, and a very imperious one at that in aiming to become its users’ “platform.”

The platform metaphor comes from the IT-denominated cultural environment of Silicon Valley software startups, where an IT correspondent for Business Week reported it had become “meme” among twenty-something developers for the ambitions they held for their software.[3] As the web browser became a platform for other applications, so could a social networking site, essentially by harnessing (programming for) ever more of what users linked to – bits and sites of information, but also importantly to each other.  As software, the Internet itself is a stack of programs that provide platforms for more.  Structurally, too, the Internet is the platform for for the Web, which became platforms for portals, the Web’s first native format that aggregated information on the Internet around a theme, topic, interest.  Among those, after the portal declined, were social networking sites, which moved linking to like-minded persons from the implicit background to an explicit foreground.  The impetus to their development has been to connect persons and as continuously as possible, over connecting to information.  Some of this is marketing hype.  A decade ago, when portals were the center of developers’ attention, the meme was “Content is King.”  Now, it’s “Connectivity is King,” the idea being that it’s people that now draw people to the Internet, now that the Web (invented in 1990) has been around long enough for a generation to grow up with it, even – in some sense – “on” it.[4]

Certainly, this has been the identifying meme for Facebook, which went from a Harvard dormroom to Silicon Valley headquarters in less than a year and since has been rationalizing its vision as automation of networking practices. Its memes are “friends” and “friending” (linking to others) – or nodes and links in the sociology of networks – plus consumption profiles:  it joins networking with cultural performances, two of the basic and universal features of Internet uptake.[5] It has eclipsed predecessors, like Friendster, and those more focused on cultural performance, like MySpace, to feature networking as itself cultural performance, particularly as performed among college students.  Facebook invites and drives its users to accumulate “friends” and to use links to interests to link to persons sharing those interests (a sort of on-line “getting to know you”).  And it does so across a spectrum from primary bonding (partying, “relationships”) to secondary (around common interests) and tertiary (co-located but not interacting, like Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” the urban flâneur who observes but does not otherwise reciprocate the action around him) characteristic of college students’ developing spheres of intimacies in a sea of cohorts, and now on-line.

When describing what they do, Facebook’s founders, executives or commentators aren’t so much analytical as metaphysical.  The Web, in their view, is “natural” to their generation (the20-somethings who grew up with it), which has extended its forms of getting-to-know-you (i.e., expanding their networks and social experience) with the medium – much as, say, their grandparents and parents might have used automobiles.  Correlatively, they represent theirs as a new business model for the Web, a successor to the dot-com paradigm and generation’s focus on e-commerce that finally focuses on the networking potentials of the Web to bring and develop social, and not just economic, life on-line.  Heady stuff, the vision-thing of a new generation.

To what do such representations point?  There is a cultural shift in the “naturalness” of the Internet for the generation that grew up with a developed form of it, certainly; for them the “virtuality” trope is anachronistic at best, the foreign language of a past.  But this is only the surface.  Beneath it is a sense of and for interaction, as many point out, and beneath that a sense of what is knowledge, which is only beginning to come into view.

Some correlated data points are, with respect to youth, the view commonly reported that they hold their interactions with each other on the Web to be private, not exactly secret but not subject to surveillance, which would be intrusive.  Another is how they gather information, by going on line and getting it in bits.  Systematic search is out, along with libraries, it is said; they would agree with Margaret Mead who scandalized her science-minded colleagues in anthropology seventy-five years ago by arguing that one knew a description was complete when one is no longer surprised.[6] There are two ways this can happen, two ways that more data are redundant, and one of them is that interpretation settles into place and no longer registers “difference.”  A final data point is how my students register their easy assimilation of Twitter into these informational habits – as a tool that operationalizes a more constant level of connectivity that makes punctuality unnecessary, even upon reflection a bit obsessive or, as a reader of Manuel Castells might put it, “more structure than flow.”

All of these, and more, come together in the fuss over Facebook having hundreds of millions of users, of it becoming their “destination” or “home” on the Web.  Some of this is stirred up by Facebook developers who make it their goal not just to attract more users but to make it ever easier in ever more ways to stick around by sticking to others there.  Here is the notion of Facebook as “platform” for a new generation’s interactions on the Internet through “widgets” that, like programs earlier written for Web browsers, are written to run on Facebook.  This is the third typical register of encounters with the Internet that come with each new technology and each new user population that comes on-line: they become subjects for metaphysical reflection.

What I find compelling is that the reflection increasingly shifts the inflection on networking toward information-seeking, last seen about a decade ago around Google.  That was before the dot-com investment bust, which dashed or at least tarnished so many other hopes invested in the Internet.  Google seemed to represent some sort of apogee, some sort of almost purified version of what so many of us had taken up the Internet for – namely, gathering information.  Before Google, you had to know where to look or, for those with access to on-line databases, how to look.  Google turned the whole, or almost the whole, Web into a database.  Its promise was that anything would be, if not knowable, at least findable that found its way to the Web.  A Google search resulted in something that looked like a rough-and-ready index, and at the time gained a reputation for superiority over all other competing search programs for comprehensiveness and depth.  Scholars, in particular, exulted Google, not just for their own quick look ups or for the facility it introduced into those underbelly tasks of scholarship such as monitoring bodies of literature and events in the world that fall within one’s fields of expertise.  They extended this notion of enhanced agency from their own experience into studies of others’ uses of the Internet, particularly emancipatory uses that freed, or promised to free, people from constraints of bureaucracy, isolation, and the like into an age of dramatically increasing equal access to resources through ever-cheaper information technologies.  Much as the Web was the Internet to this generation, Google came to be represent the Web that, in practical terms, it presented.

This register of technological agency seems increasingly old-fashioned, or at least out of fashion, to those who grew up with Google.  They can take it for granted, while exulting in their own discovery and sense of creating Facebook.  I do not think that today’s twenty-somethings and college students are any more or less credulous about what Google searches turn up than were its users a decade ago, or before the dot-com bust.  The sense of marvel may be gone, dissolved like Margaret Mead’s getting used to what formerly was a strange place; but trust is another matter.  I don’t see today’s college students being particularly trusting; if anything, they seem less bothered by distrust in a post-ironic sort of “whatever” way.  They still seek information via Google searches; but they do something that those for whom Google was the marvel didn’t, couldn’t. The information the seek on-line has at the very least expanded to and perhaps substantively shifted its center of gravity to include – or in the ambitions of its developers to center on – Facebook or, more abstractly, on-line social networking in general.

Trend mavens registered this first, as “Connnectivity is King” replacing “Content is King;” and there is a small if growing chorus of anxiety, once again, over trash data, such as earlier visited on portals, the advent of on-line publishing, even the Web itself.[7] To put it bluntly, will it be the blind leading the blind if, instead of going to Google one turns to Facebook for information, to one’s friends (and “friends,” being anyone linked to) instead of the machine, to feckless youth instead of relentless machine.  There are several cultural differences coded into such comparisons – from emotionality vs. rationality to Harvard dropouts vs. Stanford engineers, even echoes of Frankenstein in Google opacity vs. “humanized” searching through friends – and these tend to surface as claims about knowledge.  Do you rely on a “web crawler” whose priorities (mathematical algorithms) you do not know or to your friends and acquaintances whose you know or at least expect are like your own?  In these terms, the most interesting difference to me is not between, say, Silicon Valley techies based in engineering and East Coast networkers for whom the model of post-graduate training is the business school.  There are too many overlaps between those populations to take such a distinction very far.  A more interesting difference is the possibility of a generation gap.

Some grew up with the Web (or before it the Internet); some did not.  The former take it for granted; it is part of their subjectivity.  For the latter, it is an object, a variable in their experience, and an independent variable at that.  Likewise with Google, yesterday’s marvel, today part of the furnishing of everyday life, and now it is the turn of Facebook.  Facebook is less a revolutionary technology than just a new one, which post-adolescents use to expand their social networks and enhance their social experience.  That may well include seeking information by asking people they know, instead of or in addition to Googling.  Their forebears might have checked the library or other sources in addition to quick Google queries.

I don’t know if this distinction is well enough founded to imagine Facebook competing with Google by mobilizing networks of friends for searches; but as a social scientist I would add two observations.  Beyond the fact that searching is a stratified activity, there are additional information-seeeking habits and practices in Facebook’s environment, such as encoded in Twitter – notably, the notion and practice of keeping in constant, if loose, touch that seems to displace the ethos of punctuality, which became a normative ideal of industrial-period bourgeois culture, with an ethos of availability.  Yes, they are more connected, today’s twenty-somethings, but to what?  To each other for sure and, it would seem, for recourse to more and more kinds of information.  If that extends from “what are you doing” to “what do you know,” the analytical issue is what do networks know?

This is not the same thing as what the digerati know, or don’t know.  Literary-based scholarship is likely in these post-critical times to idealize: science is what scientists say it is; networks of experts certify their knowledge, which is itself a construct of their customary practice.  Well, yes.  Sociologists of knowledge call these communities of practice; network sociologists refer to homophily.  Each, but particularly the latter, notes that people who are alike share the same information and so, in communicational terms, form echo-chambers of mutual affirmation, which network sociologists call “strong ties.”  If this were all there were to it, then the anxieties about the blind leading the blind would not be just a normative critique of information-seeking habits of the young; conservatives would be comforted by the thought that when those fail, Facebookers will (re)turn to Googling, maybe even to libraries.

Some might, but what network sociology shows is that the more immediate turn is to “weak ties,” the friends-of-friends who, located elsewhere, have access to other information.  In other words, in the sociology of networks, information is not stratified by how authoritative, or settled, it is but by social distance.  Information is on the margins, between noise and silence.  What networks know is not what their members share – that would not even be information, just identity – but what they don’t share.  It is not the case that this is subjective while the returns of Google searches are somehow objective (for having matched some search criteria).  What is the case instead is that information has a social life that is not exhausted by idealizations of its production and its reproduction.  So, one difference between Google and Facebook as sites of and practices for getting information from the Web is the nature and locus of trust or confidence:  a Google search might be “objective” in the sense of consistently returning the same results that match a query – it is, after all, a machine – but ultimately subjective in how that query is parsed and operationalized.  On the other hand, asking friends might produce “subjective” returns, more dependent on the friend, though ultimately objective in how a query is reinterpreted as it moves along to friends of friends of friends.  That it, it will achieve Margaret Mead’s closure that is registered by redundant returns.

Google already does this.  I do not know what Google’s search algorithms are.  They are trade secrets, so presumably no one outside the company knows.  Considerable discussion has circled around the relative weight of popularity of query terms in ranking results, which is not unlike the friends-or-friends return of “weak” ties.  I just don’t know who those co-queriers are, nor how deep are our similarities, how extensive our dissimilarities.  Neither do people in social networks know that about friends (whom they do not know) of friends (whom they know), although plausibly they could find out (at the cost of increasing the overhead of their querying), which one cannot in the case of Google, which lets users see their own individual searches but those of others only as aggregates.

So, what do we have?  Sociologically speaking, not much of a difference – friends of friends in social networks have their counterparts in Google searches – until one adds back the other informational habits and practices of the Facebook generation.  The generation that has embraced Facebook also embraces Twitter, and for as many different reasons, but around the same practices of loose-but-constant contact.  They may differ from those who earlier embraced Google, and invested some confidence in it, in various ways; but the compelling comparison seems generational.  They resemble each other in enthusiasms for and senses of using software to automate their information-seeking, but they do not resemble each other in their chosen software, in the software they find “new” and so both learn from (how to extend their social networks and expand their social experience) and “teach” (in the information they contribute that developers seek to use).

Looking at this as a generation gap instead of some other kind of cultural difference raises a host of other questions. Is it permanent, a “secular” change or evolutionary step that will turn into the platform for the next?  Or is it a cohort effect that will pass as the cohort ages, acquires experience and knowledge, and so becomes more like its predecessors?  Another is can older dogs learn new tricks?  As Facebook’s demographics grow to include older generations, will theirs be broad form information-providing and information-seeking uses or narrowly restricted to networking defined as “contacts”?    If, arguably, what Google exposed was not a generation gap but a much larger population to additional abstract, depersonalized information, is Facebook exposing information-seeking to social networking more extensive than in the past?  Pre-Facebookers already used social networking for information-seeking.  That’s not the generation gap.  The generation gap is in numbers and in exposure.

The preponderant finding of empirically grounded social scientific research on Internet behavior has consistently been that it is more a dependent than an independent variable, that social practices migrate to more than from the Internet, that it comes to resemble “normal” society the more its demographic sample resembles that universe.  Related to this, IT-mediation of interaction doesn’t seem to change anything even as it increases the level or “density” of interaction.  The reason is that in reducing marginal isolation less isolated actors transact smaller margins of difference.  Or, as the Washington Post recently reported about Facebookers’ linking to a page commemorating the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, in a street demonstration in Tehran that was recorded and viewable on YouTube, this sort of “click-through activism” represents the “easy virtue” of a low level of commitment, which is far more common than the dramatic examples of the Internet/Web/Facebook making a difference.

What is the difference that numbers actually make?  Just as Internet activism does not scale up the levels of commitment of more direct and comprehensive face-to-face relations even as it might scale up the number of interactions, Googlers are not “searching” in any academic sense and only loosely so by any academic model.  Using Google is less to move toward some academic sense of “research,” which is problematic in any case, than broadening access to anonymous, abstracted information.  Similarly, the difference that Facebook makes to information-searching is to extend the sociology of what networks know.  Metaphysicians of the Internet, both the critical and the enthusiastic, imagine it to bring a new model of knowledge; non-hierarchical is a favorite trope.  Yet “distributed” knowledge in a network is anything but non-hierarchical.  While it may lack institutional centers, part of what networks know is different ranges of information, and that what my friend likes is information also about her preference profile.

It is sociologically improbably that Facebook and Google would segregate for different kinds of information – Facebook for friends and Google for facts.  They already overlap for these, and both are post-modern formats of de-centered knowledge – one ad hoc, the other personal.  But then the popularity-ranking component in Google search results means that no search starts from nothing or from a flat data field, while network organization presupposes that some nodes have more information than others.  How they really segregate is generationally.

The lure of the new is most alluring to newbies, who are behind the curve of established uses:  what they have grown up with is not new, at least to them, though it may be to their predecessors.  What they come of age with is “new” to them, as it was to their predecessors.  At the collective level, embrace of newer technologies needs to include a sense of time; it is when these are put together that generation gaps begin to appear.  For today’s Facebook enthusiasts, Google lacks that sense of opening up the online world it had a decade ago and to a degree still has for last decade’s newbies.  Facebook now conveys that sense to those who grew up with Google, while Google or the Web before it or the Internet before that recede into the background as Dad’s or even Grandfather’s technologies.  The context for Facebook users is less backward to Google than to Twitter, which is also new, even newer and “the same” as Facebook, where virtuality has ceased to be a problem.

I don’t know if there is a cyberage generation gap between those who came of age when Google was coming of age with its paradigm of systematic, automated searching by prioritized criteria, and those coming of age with Facebook, with its emphasis on personal, highly situated links.  If there is, however, that is not the difference.   There is not much difference between the opacity of Google priorities and that of friends of friends.  But it does frame differences in a way that is based on the known sociology of networking, of information-seeking, and of what scales up (and what doesn’t).  Taken as a whole, knowledge in networks is not structured personally (whimsically?) but by strong and weak ties.  Cohort effects (differences) go a long way toward explaining on-line behaviors, particularly how people identify and identify with those behaviors; and cohort effects follow the sociology of anytime/anywhere connectivity in ways that other kinds of aggregation (regional, professional, etc.) fail to register.

Notes

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[1] For a riff on “the culture of availability” as expectation and obligation, see: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/04/i-share-therefore-i-am.html

[2] The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days, Web Ecology Project (26 June 2009) http://webecologyproject.org/WEP-twitterFINAL.pdf; A Look at Twitter in Iran, Sysmos Blog (21 June 2009)http://blog.sysomos.com/2009/06/21/a-look-at-twitter-in-iran/; Twitter in Iran: Genuine or Orchestrated, The Hoot: Watching Media in the Subcontinent (20 June 2009) <http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3923&mod=1&pg=1&sectionId=12&valid=true>; Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines, DigiActive: A World of Digital Activists (20 June 2009) http://www.digiactive.org/2009/06/20/iran-beyond-headlines/; Reading Twitter in Tehran: Why the Real Revolution is on the Streets – and Online, Washington Post (21 June 2009) <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061901598.html?referrer=delicious>

[3] Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (Gotham Books, 2008).

[4] A view enshrined in Web scholarship by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Persus Books, 2008).

[5] Daniel Miller & Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Berg, 2000); also Barry Wellman, ed., Networks in the Global Village (Westview 1999).

[6] Margaret Mead, More Comprehensive Field Methods.  American Anthropologist 35(1): 1-15, 1933.

[7] Arthur Koker & Michael Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (Macmillan, 1994).

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