I’m not very good at Facebook. I know some people who are masters of it, and it pretty much dominates their web experience. Whereas, I’m in a constant struggle to make it useful, friendly and interesting all at the same time. I’m actually a little bit frightened of it.
But I want it to be useful, and I want it to be good – so I’m trying some things out. Yesterday I talked about how I’ve hidden lots of people from my timeline.
I also announced that I would close my Facebook Page (not my Profile – different thing) because a) I wasn’t using it, and b) it sort of replicated bits of my Twitter stream and my blog, which seemed superfluous. But of course, now I’ve changed my mind about that and have decided to keep it, and try to use it better.
But this negotiation with my online profile has sparked a number of conversations both in public and in private that speak volumes about how integrated and, especially, personal people’s Facebook use is as part of their daily social communication.
My latest experiment has alienated a few people. I suppose that was inevitable, though I didn’t give it as much thought as I should have and I regret that (sorry). However, I’m struggling with the fact that what I’d actually like to do with Facebook can’t actually be done – and what the parameters of the social network allow end up directing some reasonably antisocial behaviours.
One big conversation doesn’t work
I’m finding that unlike Twitter, Facebook is made up of lots of compartmentalised micro-conversations. A status update is like an invitation to talk about something, and then the comments ensue from that.
If you’ve heard talk of ‘social objects’, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Twitter seems to work slightly conceptually differently (at least, in the way that I use it) in that there’s a central river of communal discussion and thinking out loud, and little rivulets running off it where the conversation becomes focused on one thing between a small number of people.
But on Facebook, I believe I have two main constituencies (not audiences): personal/private and “professional” (in inverted commas) or, if you prefer, “public”.
The personal stuff consists of chats with my family and people who I guess I’d consider to be my circle of friends – and then the “professional” stuff covers anyone I know or who knows me that is interested in things like the internet, the music industry, and so on.
Of course – lots of people fit both categories, and just because you only know me through the internet and through our mutual interest in online media, that doesn’t mean that I don’t consider you to be a friend. That’s not how this works. As Facebook might put it, “It’s complicated”.
I’ve long since given up trying to solve this separation on my blog – but with longer form writing, you can get a sense whether it’s for you, and then either read or not read. But I think there’s definitely some potential value in separating public and private, while allowing mobility and overlap between the two, in the context of short form social networking messages and links.
Now, ideally – that would mean I could have two profiles and two different social groups (though with some significant overlap). One where I talk mainly about family stuff and the mundane, personal day-to-day goings on that most people I know wouldn’t care about – and one where I talk about copyright, conferences, books about music, clever people I’ve met and so on.
Separate conversations don’t work either
Unfortunately, Facebook lets you have either Friends or Fans – neither of which fits the bill properly for me as far as a descriptor is concerned.
The first are in an equal, sharing relationship with you with regard to your profiles and interactivity. The latter are in a vertical power relationship, positioning you as a broadcaster, and the “fans” as commenters and contributors, but on a lesser footing.
Of course, that’s not my intention in separating the two types of conversation out – but it’s the position that the architecture of Facebook leaves me in.
And the problem is this: without that separation, I don’t feel free or open to have the kinds of conversations I want to have fully with either constituency.
In other words, Facebook doesn’t do what I would have thought Facebook would be ideal for: replicating, integrating and reinforcing offline sociality. Facebook should not be online social networking as opposed to offline (“real life”). That separation is artificial, and should, by rights, be largely meaningless – but for me, Facebook reinforces it and makes it awkward rather than natural.
And given that separation, I basically end up offending, patronising or amusing everyone I would otherwise have a cordial friendship with, but in a way that lets me talk with them about work-related, music and popular culture stuff that my family aren’t generally really that interested in.
Of course, I could just mix those things together judiciously, and only talk sparingly about all the things I’m enthusiastic about – but it feels like Facebook should allow that sort of expression without running into these sorts of problems.
It’s even more complicated than that
Additionally, I have lots of Facebook friends who are people that, over the last few years, have read my blog or my Twitter stream, or have seen me speak at conferences, have invited me to be their friend on Facebook – and our mutual interests have led me to accept. Very few of these people care about my neighbourhood, my family situation or anything other than the thing that led them to connect in the first place.
Worst of all – when you invite someone to ‘like’ you (the language of this is so awkward), you can’t include an explanatory note. So essentially the message it conveys is “I want to be able to talk at you. Come and be my fan so I can broadcast and you can receive.”
Which is not what I’m trying to do at all.
Of course, I’m only coming up against these limitations of Facebook as I use it and kick at the edges – and as a result, laughable, embarrassing, misjudged, miscommunicated and unwanted social interactions ensue.
This is an attempt to tease out my two Facebook worlds so I can talk freely without leading my sister to unfriend me again for being boring about stuff she has no interest in.
It’s an experiment, and hopefully, with this explanation in lieu of a note accompanying the embarrassingly awful “please like me” note I sent to all my social network friends earlier today… it might sort of work.
If not, as I see it, I have three remaining options:
1) Find a way to have two Facebook profiles. One as Andrew Dubber private and one as Andrew Dubber public. That’s starting to sound like the better option, actually. Anyone know if I can do this easily?
2) Unfriend nearly everyone (or even start again from scratch), then redirect people to my ‘fan’ page when they ask me to be their friend. Not perfect – and hard to make it sound other than aloof and pompous.
3) Ditch Facebook altogether. That would be a little like admitting defeat and evidence of my inability to grasp something the rest of the internet seems to manage without difficulty – but it would make things easier, I guess.
How do you manage it? Am I making this too complicated? Is there something I’m not getting that solves this? Is it even a real problem?
What do you reckon? I’d genuinely appreciate your advice here.
PS: As it happens, I’m not very good at talking on the telephone either. Perhaps, like that, this is just not my medium…
PPS: Yes, I know I think about this way too much. That’s what I do.
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I have a real simple system:
Facebook for friends, family etc – People who I don’t mind seeing pictures of me drunk.
Twitter for everything else.
I recently broke my FB rules for people I knew in a professional context, or through the internet, and it has made me very uncomfortable since.
You might be giving this too much thought indeed. My personal opinion is: don’t see the ‘like’ / fan thing as a vertical relationship. People who like you (on the professional level) are still able to talk to you on your fan page, and moreover: frequent facebookers are perfectly familiar and comfortable with the concept of liking. I could imagine it feels awkward to have people ‘like’ you, but at the end of the day it’s just a way for people to display their interest in you and your thoughts and opinions.
…and, there’s an option 4) If you feel that a fan page is too pompous to fit your needs, create a group page where every member can talk on the same level
As I’m inconfident in communicaton on the web, I feel like to communicate on the web only with people whom I can feel free to telephone and talk about how to amend the misunderstandings if they happened on the web.
RT Huh. Other than immediate family, I could only find 3 people I follow on Facebook who probably couldn’t give a toss about the music biz.
約6時間前 Tweetie for Macから
Good thoughts. The integration of the different parts of my life was one of the things I really liked about Facebook to begin with, but more recently I’ve found myself self-censoring on both Twitter and Facebook – you’ve really put your finger on this problem of differing constituencies.
It seems like much of your concern on this topic comes from a sense of obligation to manage all your content in an effort to offer ‘optimized delivery’ for each of your readers/followers/fans/friends. I think it’s more than fair to share that responsibility with us; I started following you on twitter after following links to your articles from the Bandcamp FAQ – I came for your thoughts on the music industry. Any time you write something I’m not concerned about, I simply don’t read it.
Much the way you leverage the ‘hide’ feature, we should all comfortably manage our intake and free you of the burden of attempting to do so for us. It makes sense for the consumers to filter out the content they want, rather than have the producer make a ‘best guess’ attempt that will never be ideal for all of us.
I say, in exchange for your continued writing, we’ll take responsibility for getting what we want it of it.
The whole thing is a SPLAT.
just fire off different stuff at the rate each network can handle. A Facebook page can’t handle anything like the amount of tweets you can post in a day simply because this amount of Facebook Page posts would also be clogging up people’s lifestream. So I try and post no more than one or two Facebook page posts a day, if that. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s going to be on our Facebook page, it better be important enough to disrupt people’s MAIN purpose of using Facebook which is to hang out with their friends. And if you too much posting people will be more likely to simply HIDE your posts yet still remain a ‘liker’ – further confusing your concept of how many people give a shit.
With Twitter you have the same problem – but as we’re discovered the advent of third party solutions can also mean you’re getting filtered out with people using things like Tweetdeck and Seesmic etc. One too many ‘look at what we’re doing’ posts on Twitter and bang, you’re filtered out… not unfollowed, but filtered. The more Twitter evolves the more people are just blanking each other using 3rd party filters and not bothering to un-follow them. Twitter is a crap chat room and it’s better to announce that you’ve arrived and start a conversation, rather than stand there blurting out ‘facts’ about yourself to no one. It can appear a bit weird. We’re in a band – we’re ALLOWED to do that to some extent, it’s to be expected, but do it all the time and you’re going to bore the tits off people. I’m sure we have, and there’s not much you can do about it.
Now someone explain wtf to do with LinkedIn to us and we’ll be set x
You make some really good points – after all, that’s how I use Flickr: Here are some photos I took. I’m not going to just put up good ones, because who am I to guess what you’ll find interesting or relevant?
Food for thought…
I’m very much of the Facebook for friends and family / Twitter for my stuff that may be of interest to others. Facebook’s language is clunky and the whole fan / like thing is awkward. I’m a fan of very few things / artists on Facebook and don’t find many of them very useful or a great way to enagage.
I agree with Julian Moore about how people are using third party apps to filter others out on Twitter, I rarely access Twitter directly anymore (usually use tweedeck) and of the six filters I have set up I only regularly check three of them. Unfollowing is now ‘the nuclear option’, I can just filter out people whose tweets I find uninteresting. In Facebook it is even easier to silence these people.
I second Riekus above — the “fan page” (I prefer to think of it as a “music page”) isn’t a vertical relationship as long as you make sure to check in with it regularly and reply to the comments people make there — that way, it becomes the genuine interaction that they want, without involving them in your private life. I have a standard reply I send to friend requests from people I don’t know personally, and for the most part everybody I’ve sent it to has been fine with it (and the ones who weren’t fine with it responded in such an obnoxious way that I figured I wouldn’t have wanted them as friends OR fans in any case). It goes like this:
Hi there — Thanks so much for the friend request! I’m really sorry about this, but I don’t recognise your name. Because I spend about 26 weeks of the year on the road and because the places I’ve lived in for a year or more include Chicago, Washington (DC), Philadelphia, Strasbourg (France), Dublin (Ireland), Gorey (County Wexford, Ireland) and now Penzance (England), I have a lot of friends in a lot of different parts of the world.
Consequently, I like to use my personal profile to keep up with them and my music page for getting to know people I haven’t actually met but would hope to meet someday, such as yourself! Here’s a link to the music page: http://www.facebook.com/sarahmcquaidmusic
If I’m having one of my increasingly frequent blonde moments and should know you, please accept my apologies, and please do send me a message and remind me who you are and where we’ve met — again, I’m very sorry.
Many thanks for your understanding ….
All the best,
Sarah
Hope the above helps …
Dear Andrew, I find this article very interesting and I share your thoughts/concerns about Facebook. From my experience all I can say is that, now, I see Facebook as a medium working exclusively to create egotistic attitude and behaviour and as a matter of fact this ego/superficial behaviour has started to work also ‘offline’ very sadly, this for what concerns our ‘private’ side, although since you post private things on an INTERNET account (a medium that is not private at all!) where friends of your friends you don’t know can easily have access to your ‘private’ life, you should be aware since the beginning of the hypocrisy of this medium, considering also that in your real life you would never share all your private things equally with all your real friends, to some of them you tell something and to some others you don’t, whilst Facebook force you in a anti-social, anti-human, anti-natural behaviour to share every little thing with everybody in your account at the same time…The ‘like’ thing…do you know why people wants to get in your private profile rather than in your ‘public/like’ page? Because of their EGO again…you can see what they do and they can make you see what they do only if you accept them as friends…One more and I finish…the ‘like’ page for music bands…what an awful way to interact with fans and so hypocratic! let’s face this fact, all bands wants is to have more ‘likes’ as possible on their pages only to have more people to display as fans! You’re a band/musician and you wantt to interact with fans? GET OUT AND PLAY YOUR MUSIC LIVE! Are there still new bands who do so? Where? And how good? You are all to busy in getting your ego bigger and bigger waiting for a ‘like’ or two on your posts on the wall…what a sad music business we are experiencing. Imagine John Bonham having a facebook, or Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis…for heaven sake they were more interested in making music, GOOD MUSIC! Thank you Andrew…
Did Kerryn really unfriend you on Facebook?
She did – but then I told her about the ‘hide’ button so she refriended me, and then hid my stream.
I was doing a lot on Facebook at the time (trying it out, as I do, and feeding a bunch of different stuff into it), and she and her friends were using it much more sparingly, so it was a page of me before it got to her friends – and she already knew what I was up to anyway.
Andrew i think for me its the old sayn…people dont care how much you know til they know how much you care. so in light of yours or my interest on facebook..ie musical interest…if one takes time to socialize with conversationa and the recipient feels like your interested in them, then the theyre bound to start wanting to take more interest in you…and of course support your best interests. think of it like a big ole chamber of commerce on facebook. if you walked into one of those meetings expecting to tell everyone everything you know…youll get lil or no interest. however a few handshakes and some light conversation about family, work, a crapy day…and before you know ya have common ground which leads to future support of us…for me its fans as i need to promote my band. thats my perception of it anyway…if i really wanted to dig deep and get real personal, it definately would not be on facebook..it would be face to face…so the question is…what are you really doin on facebook anyway?!….IMO…-e-