Here in Cardiff we keep a close eye on the Western Mail, so thanks to David Williamson for including my views on Facebook in his wide-ranging piece published today:
Carl Morris, a digital media consultant at Cardiff-based NativeHQ, thinks Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the internet equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife – a site that provides every tool you could want.
While he respects the achievements of its founders, he compared Facebook to a “walled garden” with its corporate-controlled environment.
He said people should remember that the site is a business which makes its money by appealing to advertisers.
“People think that when they join Facebook they become Facebook’s customer but you’re not the customer – you’re what’s being sold,” he said.
While I stand by David’s faithful quotation of my words, such an articles can only ever be an introduction to the topic at hand, particularly where the practical use of technology is concerned. So although generally critical of Facebook’s failings in the article, I do make fairly regular use of it – both in my work as a digital media consultant and personal life.
As with any tool, where, how or even if we use Facebook on a project depends on the objectives. In technology there is no perfect tool for every application, only pros and cons to any choice.
Incidentally, I would have to disagree partly with one of the article’s quotations from Prof Chris Price of Aberystwyth University:
“I don’t worry about Facebook at all,” he said, adding that he is not surprised people are turning to the social network to send messages to their friends instead of using a single e-mail account. But he said he does not expect e-mail to die, instead becoming the medium for professional communications.
The professor said: “In some ways it’s quite a sensible split.”
He also expects people to have multiple identities online to reflect the different nature of their relationships in real life.
“People talk about having one Facebook account for their friends and another which is the one their parents can look at,” he said.
Yes, people do have multiple identities online and have excellent reasons for doing so. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly failed to emphasise this fact, arguably because it drives Facebook’s growth and chimes with his philosophy.)
But don’t create multiple personal accounts! There’s no need, it’s potentially confusing and certainly creates more work for you. There are multiple ways of controlling visibility of your posts, photos and other content on the basis of individual people and friend lists, via what Facebook calls the privacy settings.
Another point I made to David at the Western Mail, which unfortunately didn’t make it to the final article, is that web services such as Twitter and WordPress which default to everything public can be said to possess – paradoxically maybe – better privacy policies than that of Facebook. They have fewer privacy settings, it’s very clear that your posts will be findable on the web, therefore you as a user have a clearer idea of who can read your posts. And if you’re not comfortable with something being on the web at large (rather than an ill-defined semi-public like your Facebook friends), you won’t post it in the first place.
Of course, in practice, privacy is a wider issue than software settings.
The limitations of Boris Johnson’s comment strategy
In The Telegraph today, Boris Johnson opines on the double-edged sword that is comments on blogs:
I’m inclined to agree with Boris, at least on this point.
But for the rest of us, in people’s minds blogs and blogging and discussion around them can tend to be dominated by newspapers. Therefore it would also be useful to remember the following points.
A blog is just a set of posts organised by time
On the web, blogs are all around. To assume every blog post is an opinion piece is wrong. To assume a blog is a diary is wrong too. Not all of what gets discussed on blogs is party political, nor is all of it political. I have no idea of Boris Johnson’s total experience of the web, but I can hazard a guess that he reads a lot of political opinion. For those of us working on digital media projects in industry, in the third sector, in arts and so forth, our experience of comments can be very different, particularly the kind of toxic comments you often find on newspapers. In other words, don’t let blogging experiences by the likes of The Telegraph guide your preconceptions of blogging or comments because this is a big world. You can use your blog to explore your service offerings, to discuss your professional interests, to post video from conferences, to invite comment on your organisation, to think out loud, to share notes and many other things. Hardly any of these things resemble the poisonous blogosphere so demonised – and beloved – by the press.
Your strategy and software are important
The example set by the newspaper industry is frequently poor and unreliable as a model for people in entirely different fields. For instance, the newspaper’s objective is often to maximum ad revenue and one way to do that is to find strategies to boost page view counts. This doesn’t necessarily align with the objective of sensible, polite discussion. I would argue it rarely does. Therefore the way the software is configured encourages this. In the case of The Telegraph, their nested comment threads allow people to go off on tangents, taking them off-topic. That’s possibly OK for page views and controversy (if you’re fine for every comment conversation to descend into “yo loser, we saved your ass in WW2” that is). It is not fine if you want to be the owner of your blog and set the topics and tone. In practice we have found the linear column of comments to be much more conducive to on-topic conversation in many cases. The comments amplify, correct and improve the original post. The general point is that you should invest time in figuring out why your blog exists, why you’re allowing comments and how the software is going to guide your visitors and provide incentives for the right behaviour. Sometimes anonymity can be an advantage, often it isn’t. Often like and recommend buttons can incentivise cheap sloganeering, turning the comments into a game of abuse. At other times, you might want to try that.
The web as a conversation
“Conversation” is a popular metaphor for what happens online. But it applies beyond the confines of any particular blog. It might be worthwhile to consider having a blog for what you do, just as it might be worth opening up comments. But this isn’t the only place the conversation is happening. For example, this blog post is a kind of long-form response to Boris Johnson but it’s not taking place on The Telegraph website. Frequently people will be discussing your subject in their own spaces and own channels in their own formats and media. The move is not only from one-way to two-way communications, it’s towards multi-way. If what people are saying is important to you, then you might need to spend time monitoring it and responding accordingly.
In summary, Johnson is right to emphasise taking the positive with the negative. There is frequently a good argument for taking ownership of the good and bad. If someone wants to emphasise a negative, shouldn’t you be the first to offer them an opportunity to fix it? And be seen to do so?
Often I meet people who would like to shut down the negative comments by not allowing them in the first place. But the fact is, just because you don’t have discussion on your own site, doesn’t mean it isn’t taking place elsewhere on the web.
Many organisations are only just beginning to open up to published comments by third parties. Often people are tempted to offer an email address and receive comments privately, but that won’t win them any kudos for openness and engaging people in public. Such organisations might be advised to offer comments and start the learning process. It has the potential to change their work – for the better.