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 for unobtrusive parental
surveillance, a tool the efficacy of which is inversely related to my level of overt
activity. At one point, my children, both of whom are adults, 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 still 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
our language. Even more objectionable,
in my view, is the site’s propensity to inform me that my friend Mary Jane has updated
“their” Facebook profile. This infelicity
no doubt stems from the difficulty of engineering a distinction between male
and female Facebook members, English lacking as it does a neutered version of “his” and “hers.”
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 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 Finnish hosts and 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 hang out.
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 intramural activity at Harvard University. This I learned a few years ago from The New York Review of Books. In an insightful article, Charles Petersen argued 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.”[1] 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 who would usher in a
meritocratic age in the American judiciary, 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 called the “quest for community.”[2] Then again, come to think about 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. But that’s another story.
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