Friending the Lonely Crowd

I have discovered to my chagrin that the Glenn Fellows--or some portion of them, anyway--are aware of my dalliance with Facebook. I put it this way because I don’t entirely approve of Facebook, and I almost never use it to report my own random activities or idle ruminations (I have a blog for that). Frankly, I find Facebook useful mainly as a means of unobtrusive parental surveillance, the efficacy of which is inversely related to my level of overt activity. At one point, my children had to approve my request to “friend” them. In doing so they must have known that they were devaluing the currency, but at this point I suspect they have forgotten that their old man is lurking in the shadows.

One oft-lamented feature of Facebook is its habit of using “friend” as a verb, and that is only one of the ways in which Facebook has corrupted the language. Even more objectionable, in my view, is when the site declares that So-and-So has updated “their” Facebook profile. This infelicity no doubt stems from the engineering challenge inherent in recognizing a distinction between male and female Facebook members, English lacking as it does a neutered version of the singular personal pronouns “his” and “her.” Perhaps it’s time to borrow from Finnish its versatile, trans-gendered, third-person pronoun, hän.

It was in Finland, in fact, that I first encountered Facebook. Oulu, the home of the university where I taught as a Fulbrighter in 2006, is a city of about 110,000 souls in what is known as Finland’s Silicon Valley. (In the late 1980s, when perestroika was in full swing and Mikhail Gorbachev visited Finland, he caused a sensation by electing to visit a Nokia factory in Oulu instead of the Lenin Museum in Tampere.)

I created my own Facebook account because I thought it would be rude to resist the overtures of my students at the University of Oulu. Over time, I noticed that many of my Finnish “friends” were migrating to LinkedIn, another social networking Web site designed more explicitly to serve professional purposes, and another place for yours truly to lurk.

Perhaps because I was introduced to social networking overseas, I was unaware that Facebook was founded as recently as 2004, and that it began as an extracurricular and strictly intramural activity at Harvard University. This I learned from a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, which features an insightful article by Charles Petersen, who argues that the secret to Facebook’s success lies in the way that it exploits the dynamics of social stratification.

In his explication of Facebook’s “snob appeal,” Petersen refers to the concept of “position taking” associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It has to do with the branding and marketing of self, to wit: “When Facebook had been limited to a few elite schools, listing Beethoven among one’s ‘favorite music’ could easily stand as a statement of aesthetic discovery. This was due to that other salutary fiction of an elite meritocratic education: that class distinctions disappear, to be replaced by pure judgment and analytic reason.” To me this has the ring of truth. It also is reminiscent of a classic work of sociology that, these days, is more often cited than read. I refer to David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), the most popular work of modern sociology--1.4 million copies sold--ever.

The Lonely Crowd attempts to demonstrate that large, impersonal societal forces tend to call forth certain character traits or personality types. In medieval times, a relatively stable and static society favored pious and traditional individuals. The industrial age, by contrast, was all about production and destruction. Its “self-made” men were driven by internalized values; Riesman refers to them as “inner-directed.” In an age of consumption, by contrast, it is appropriate for individuals to look outside themselves when they engage in “position taking.” These “other-directed” souls become masters of the art of exchanging tastes with their peers, though that condemns them to being forever buffeted by the fickle winds of fashion. If inner-directed people have gyroscopes that govern their movements, other-directed people are propelled by highly sensitive radar systems. That’s why they join Facebook, and then maybe they worry about what inadequacies they are revealing in the process.

That the young David Riesman served as law clerk to Mr. Justice Brandeis, the obsessive collector of facts that would usher in a meritocratic age, is probably no coincidence. That The Lonely Crowd touched a nerve in the American psyche is a testament to the power of Riesman’s analytical skills. The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook also may be a measure of the insecurity that other-directed people feel about their “position taking,” and of what another great sociologist, Robert Nisbet, called the “quest for community.” Then again, come to think of it, this may have nothing whatever to do with the American political culture, but rather, with the small-d democratic soul wherever it may be found--and an extremely egalitarian version of it is to be found in Finland, as matter of fact. But that’s another story.