The Codes Are Alright: On “Code-Switching” And Facebook
Let us now turn from the others to the point of view of the individual who presents himself before them…. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially in their responsive treatment of him…. by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan.
-Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Everyday Life (1956)
This place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret…. If there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression…. we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction by introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the “by heart” itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself.
Electronic mail today, even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal.
-Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever” (italics mine)
Over the years, I’ve complained about Facebook along many axes: the violations of privacy, the hierarchies it creates (for you — free of charge!) among “equals” on your Friends list, and the foundational role of Facebook in the rise of Big Data.
I’ve complained about the dilution of self on Facebook, too: nobody is ever sad, because it looks bad. Everyone behaves moderately, fearing for their jobs. It’s about as wild as a youth group holding a casino night.
But today I have to risk a possibility that makes a lot of that complaining obsolete, which is that Facebook isn’t the problem — at least, not anymore. The fault is in ourselves.
Almost anything you create or fight for, can go on Facebook. You’re not going to lose your job over a poem, or a beautiful photograph, or a health care petition, or a philosophical musing. So when nothing like that appears in your feed, it’s because people aren’t creating. Sure, they might be writing journal entries, but they wouldn’t necessarily share those with you in person, either.
Here’s another dirty little secret: 99% of the “dangerous” things that go on Facebook never come back to bite the poster. Facebook is a huge, difficult archive. Anything you post there gets buried, fast. I’ve written something like 6,000 tweets. I don’t know what tweet #1000 was. I don’t think anyone knows what it was. Finding it by any means, Google search or what-have-you, would be like rolling five Yahtzees in a row. And this concerns information I have made public, and tried to publicize. The multipliers for Facebook are even greater, since I post 2 or 3 times to Facebook for every single tweet.
This is Derrida’s point about modern archives. In theory, everything is instantly retrievable, and utterly searchable. In practice, the archive is subtly and totally opaque. Everything we post is digested into a vast archive where anything can be remembered, but nothing really needs to be. Life goes there to die.
Meanwhile, just look at how far Nishant Kothary runs with “Facebook bad” truisms in his column, “The REAL Real Problem With Facebook”:
Successfully integrating yourself into the Facebook world, then, relies on you being willing (or able) to provide a clear answer to the question, “Who are you?” And therein lies the rub. Speaking for myself, the only thing that’s static about me is my constant state of change. It ripples through the many sides of my identity.
Yes, he’s quicksilver, is Kothary. For example, he used to work for Amazon, but he also used to work for Microsoft! I mean, whoa. How do we even begin to make sense of such crazy zigzags?! And now you’re telling me he’s an entrepreneur? Slow down! I can’t process it all!
But wait, there’s more:
For instance, in real life I wouldn’t flash just any of my friends with a video of my dog licking coconut butter off silverware set to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On” without first assessing the context I share with them: their sense of humor, current mood, squeamishness about animals, the nature of our relationship, and myriads of other things.
He tells us this in a column which is visible to everyone on the planet. And he includes a link to the Instagram of his dog, licking that coconut butter. So apparently he can flash everyone, including complete strangers, with dog antics, as long as we understand that he’s very sensitive to all kinds of things, and has deep reservations about sharing too much about his dog. (Except on his Twitter bio, and again at the bottom of his column, where he notes that he “lives at the mercy of his Weimaraner.”)
Kothary’s column amounts to a complicated performance of Facebook angst, with a very specific rhetorical purpose: he is trying to make himself seem interesting to the TED talk crowd, and he is trying to create the right conditions for some kind of tech design pitch (the two goals are, obviously, highly related). This is also why he’s started giving interviews about the need for “soft” skills in tech design. Hence his conclusion:
And replace it we must: Everything reaches its past-due date…. Facebook’s design—really, the design of public and semi-private virtual interaction spaces on the web—is starting to feel like it’s reached its past-due date. And replacing it is going to…. require us to approach a far more elusive problem, and one that’s at the center of design: understanding humans better.
All the scaffolding about Facebook, and his dog, is just en route to dropping Danah Boyd’s name, flattering her, and deploying critical terms like “code switching,” a term he doesn’t really understand. Code switching is a way for oppressed populations to survive in a society that demands assimilation, and to do so without completely abandoning their inherited cultural practices. Just because Kothary writes two emails in two different voices, doesn’t mean he’s code-switching. Generalizing the term in that way trivializes its political significance. What he’s talking about — namely, performing identity — is a phenomenon that has been well-understood since at least 1956 (!), when Goffman wrote about it in The Performance of Everyday Life (quoted above).
Let me pose the problem like this: according to some current models of the universe, every time we make a decision, the world splits into two worlds. In one world, we opted for Choice A. In the other, we opted for Choice B. Every single world that can exist, does exist, in its own separate, parallel reality.
That means that there may very well be two worlds within the totality of existence. In one of these worlds, Nishant Kothary never posted anything showing his dog licking coconut butter off silverware. In the other world, the one we live in, he did.
I would argue that these worlds are not, fundamentally, very different. Basically, what you have, in that other world, is one less dog video. But there are still a huge number of dog videos over in that world. I can’t stress this enough. Even there, dog videos still lead, indirectly, to the invention of YouTube.
One possible New Year’s resolution, as Kothary observes, is to spend less time on Facebook. Or, alternatively, you could borrow your resolution from Ippolit, a character from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1868 novel The Idiot: “I wanted to live for the happiness of all people, for the discovery and proclaiming of the truth!”
Remember that great moment, at the beginning of every episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, where the scientists announce, “We have the technology”? Well, that’s us. We have the technology, and this anxiety about being boxed-in by Facebook is a sideshow. Facebook is like a giant Coinstar machine where all “the many sides of my identity” are benevolently sorted and totaled, and yet add up to nothing.
I don’t follow sports. If a basketball-loving friend posts something I can’t understand, I’m not furious with him. That’s not what we fear. What worries us now, worried Ippolit in 1868:
I looked through my window at Meyer’s wall and thought I could talk for only a quarter of an hour and everybody, everybody would be convinced, and for once in my life I got together … with you, if not with the people! And what came of it? Nothing! It turned out that you despise me! Therefore I’m not needed, therefore I’m a fool, therefore it’s time to go! Without managing to leave any memory! Not a sound, not a single deed, not spreading any conviction!
Kothary won’t face this nightmare, preferring to spread the blame around instead:
A friend’s like on an anti-gay-rights page. A comment making fun of your musical tastes. A vegetarian friend linking to an article about the evils of eating meat. A complaint about how Apple (or Facebook?) can’t innovate anymore. A picture of some friends enjoying a get-together that you weren’t invited to.
The real problem with Facebook, it seems, is not that he contains multitudes, but that it makes him uncomfortable. Other people aren’t “code switching” enough.
His discomfort is a good sign. Maybe, at the end of the day, these social networks are realer than we thought. We can re-design them, certainly, but we might also try re-dedicating them — to the happiness of all people, and the discovery and proclaiming of the truth.
I don’t disagree with a lot of your critique. I think he was being disingenuous with much of his angst, and I think he did use code switching in a shallow way.
But I think you’re being somewhat disingenuous in not understanding what his underlying point is. Or maybe you don’t agree with it – but I do, and this article helped me understand what my problem with Facebook is (understanding here that Facebook is a proxy for any mass, semi-public, shared online space; it could be Reddit or MySpace, the problem is the same).
For me, my ability to assess my audience and tailor my exposure to them is critical to me being able to take the largest risks I can in personal interaction without stepping over the line to alienation. Getting to show people exactly as much of my ‘authentic’ self as I can get away with.
You’re right when you note that he shares that dog licking video in the article, and so obviously his distress about who he can share it with is disingenuous. But he is in a venue where ‘oversharing’ is expected – we forgive this sort of personality journalist, and artists, a great deal in terms of our boundaries, because we understand it’s a part of the medium.
In a personal interaction that isn’t the case. If I’m speaking with a nice 70-year old veteran, I’m probably going to downplay my anti-war rhetoric. Not because I’m afraid of challenging them, but because I’m not an asshole. I strip fuck and shit out of my speech (words I otherwise love) when I’m with people I know it will offend, because it’s not worth it offend them. On Facebook, since I know that both my 70-year-old veteran friends and my lexically puritan friends will be reading it, I tend to strip a lot out.
The problem for me with platforms like Facebook is that they act like they are proxies of personal interaction – until recently it used to ask me how I was /feeling/, which is a question only my friends or shrinks usually ask. But in reality, it isn’t personal interaction – without the ability to filter and cater, then I am essentially putting myself on public display every time I post, in the same way I would as a writer.
That means the point of my posts is no longer to share my real feelings or experiences with my friends, it’s to put on a performance. That leads to excesses in stylistic tone (hello Cowbird!), to ridiculously pithy one-liners (on Facebook, we’re all Dorothy Parker), to fluff entertainment videos/photos/lists from other sources (the forwarded email of the 2010s), and to showcase political stances. And not a whole lot more.
All of that’s fine, I guess. Although it does wear on me eventually. But mostly I think it wears on me because I actually /would/ like a place to share my actual authentic experiences and voice. Without worrying about how many internet points I’m accruing by entertaining what has effectively become a mass audience – and without worrying about alienating people I do like, but who have more conservative stances in one area or another. To that point, I don’t disagree with him that we do need a new platform – though I also agree this piece was a rather transparent attempt to bolster his own efforts. I think the idea of Google+’s circles was a good one – I’d love to be able to post something and know that a dozen or so friends I really care to see it can see it. I’d like to be able to post my professional exploits for work colleagues without worrying about boring or alienating my personal friends.
Maybe I’m off base, but I do feel like there should be room in this space for something between the truly personal interaction of an individual email, and what is more and more becoming everyone-is-a-pundit-let’s-entertain-the-world.
I’m rambling. Maybe I didn’t articulate myself, or maybe I’m just wrong. I don’t hate Facebook, just like I don’t hate Reddit. I just feel like there’s a bit gap to be filled by something.
Brendan,
I read your comment with something approaching anguish. I really feel for you, here. There is something wonderful about re-framing “the performance of identity” in terms of the risks one might take, rather than simply in terms of degrees of disclosure.
Plus, I can understand an allergic reaction to “creativity” on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. It’s weird and off-putting to watch hundreds of friends and acquaintances transform into imitations of the culture industry: amateur writers, amateur pundits, amateur comics, amateur critics, amateur photojournalists. This is especially true since people often try to do all of these things simultaneously. I know I do.
So…yes, it’s annoying, and something does get lost in the changeover. I suspect that some of what you want to see will involve deploying space more effectively, so that people can gather in a soundproofed virtual room, and say things to each other that nobody else can hear, or leave messages that only a few chosen others can read.
Yes, this already exists in a variety of forms — chatrooms, MMORGs, circles, and so on — but it’s clumsy, it’s not app-sized, and it demands too much scheduling and logistical coordination. So there’s probably work to be done. But if such work succeeds, it will, of course, lead us right back to other things that make people unhappy — above all, when they’re excluded from such a gathering.
Moreover, I worry that the kinds of problems you’re seeing on Facebook, while very real, are not limited to Facebook. I would argue that a lot of them are produced by other modern conditions, such as frequent moves across huge distances. When people are separated in this way, then reunited, there is a lot of guardedness, even face-to-face.
“Almost anything you create or fight for, can go on Facebook. You’re not going to lose your job over a poem, or a beautiful photograph, or a health care petition, or a philosophical musing. ”
Good post, but I think that the quote above is substantially wrong. People lose their jobs over these kinds of things sometimes. Mostly, they don’t, but the thought that they’re taking a risk makes it into a hassle that they can ill afford. That health care petition might get you at-will fired by your right-wing boss. That poem … well, to use my own experience as an example, there’s a poem I wrote that I thought was vaguely amusing that I can’t put on my blog. It sounds like paranoia, but I work for environmental groups, and there are opposition researchers out there working for industry who routinely seize on anything. And there are just random, disturbed people: the idea that you’re safe from malicious reaction to anything you create or fight for is disproved by most of the slightly more well-known long-term bloggers that we probably both know of.
Rich,
I take your points here; it would be cavalier to simply assert that nobody could be harmed by things like poems or petitions.
On the other hand, as regrettable as that is, I don’t see anything promising about Kothary’s vague references to a better-designed web. Without more specifics, it’s hard to see how anyone could create a network better-equipped to handle your poem than what we’ve already got via Facebook and Google+ circles. If you send your poem to twelve people you trust, as you can already do via e-mail, you’ve only got twelve readers. (And you’ve lost control of the text.) If you let many people read it, then you’re (potentially) in hot water. How is a new network really going to fix that?
I agree that a new network isn’t going to fix that. But I think that you’re missing something … Facebook is vapid, but that’s not because people aren’t creating. It’s because they rightly or wrongly believe that they’d better only share the safe things, which means the more or less meaningless things. Just as you say that dog videos lead to the invention of youtube, the inability to share anything too dangerous in our surveillance society leads to Facebook.
Here, I’ll go off on one of my hobbyhorses: remember the Bush years? Any blog even vaguely to the left of center was full of mockery for that administration’s stupidity, malice and so on, and for the media elite that served them, and that was all well and good. The jester gets to laugh at the king, after all. But when they turned into the Obama years, this same habit of mockery turned towards any pathetic Tea Partier or minor right-wing blogger or state politician that wrote something that sounded bad. That was when the number of blogs that I read shrunk rapidly, and really everyone’s did. Really, the mockery of minor right-wing blowhards had always been there, but it was bearable when it was part of a continuum that went up the corridors of power; now that it was merely one group of the powerless attacking another, cognitive dissonance couldn’t cover for it for long.
And that’s the world we live in. Remember the blogger whose initials are E.L. who wrote some tweets featuring a metaphorical call for heads on pikes? No, Twitter didn’t save him from that hassle. Nothing will make a Facebook that will look like people are creating, until our society changes.