Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Ben Hammersley Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 08.11.07 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 11.11.07 2130-2200 Tape Number: PLN741/07VQ1045 Duration: 27’ 38” Taking part in order of appearance: danah boyd Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University Dr William Reader Lecturer in Psychology, Sheffield Hallam University Dr Adam Joinson Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, University of Bath David Evans Senior Guidance and Promotion Manager, Information Commissioner’s Office David Bain Planning Partner at advertising agency BMB Robin Mansell Professor of New Media, London School of Economics ANNOUNCER: And now Analysis. Ben Hammersley explores why websites such as MySpace and Facebook have become so popular, and asks whether technology is outpacing society. HAMMERSLEY: Well I’ve come here to the London School of Economics where it’s Freshers ‘ Week and outside there are thousands of students from all the way round the world who are milling around, meeting their new classmates, eager to start the school year. And I’ve been asking them are they on these online social networks and, if so, how much information are they giving away about themselves? FEMALE: I am on Facebook because when I was an undergraduate most of my friends were on it, and once we graduated it seemed to be the way that everyone was staying in touch. FEMALE: It’s like MySpace and everyone’s doing it and so I thought I didn’t want to be a part of it, but really I noticed that my friends knew more about each others lives and I didn’t know about it. I was missing the details and so I had to join. MALE: I found out all the students here are on Facebook, so I thought I might as well because otherwise I might be missing out. FEMALE: The big joke among my friends is that nothing that happens in your life is official until it’s on Facebook, so if somebody gets engaged or somebody gets a job, as soon as it’s posted on Facebook then all of your friends find out. MALE: Yeah, I just think I look at it to document everything I do in my life. I mean I just put up photos, videos and you know write about what I’m up to, things like that. Especially like now I’ve moved away from home and I’ve come to uni. FEMALE: I had my likes and music tastes on it at first, but I took it all off because they’re going to sell Facebook soon to some you know ad agency. MALE: Er yes, I am on Facebook. I’m pretty addicted to it. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do you know before I go to bed. FEMALE: Really? MALE: Yeah. It’s like crack to me. I kid you not. It hasn’t added anything to my life really except you know wasted hours in front of the computer screen kind of stalking people I don’t know and looking at their pictures. MALE: I choose wisely what I put on there. I think that if there’s a poss… even a slight possibility that maybe a teacher or my mum or my dad or you know my sister might be you know looking on there just to see what I’m up to, then I don’t want to put anything too risky on there. HAMMERSLEY: You’re here at LSE. MALE: Yeah, yeah. HAMMERSLEY: Have you looked up the new class? MALE: Yeah, I found a couple of people. HAMMERSLEY: Have you met these people in person yet? MALE: No, I haven’t met them. They’re just Facebook people. HAMMERSLEY: So there’s quite a possibility that walking round here now are people that you know an awful lot about that you’ve never actually met? MALE: Yeah, people could be walking right past me and I could know their whole name, address, their friends, you know. HAMMERSLEY: You have to admit this is weird: your first day at university, and you already know all the people you’ve never met. Now it shouldn’t be strange for me: I’ve been online for more than half of my life. But like most of my early adopting peers, I’ve tried to a keep a separation between my online self, and the real-life me. But over the past two years, social networking websites seem to be blurring those boundaries. At the London School of Economics I had real difficulties finding someone who’s not using them. danah boyd from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and one of the leading researchers in the field, is not surprised: BOYD: The numbers on social network sites are extraordinary. In the United States, Pew collected data in December 2005 and found that 55% of teenagers 12 to 17 would admit having a profile in front of their parents. So this is before Facebook hit at all and this was admitting it in front of their parents. The results now, we’re talking 80% and above. On Facebook, you know say that you live in London, you’ve just exposed yourself to you know what 1.5 million you know Facebook users and maybe even higher now? HAMMERSLEY: While four out of five of all teenagers are on these sites, the numbers are even larger for university students. And none of these users seem to mind giving away huge amounts of information about themselves. In the case of Facebook, this means their real names, dates of birth, photographs of themselves – even class timetables, showing exactly where they’ll be during the day. The more details you give, the more potential friends you make. “To friend” is now a verb on the internet. If I “friend” you, and you “friend” me back, then both our social networks grow. This can be addictive. Even politicians are not immune to the call. Hillary Clinton has official pages on many networking sites. But in July this year, she had only just over 52,000 friends on MySpace, compared to her democratic rival Barack Obama who had 129,000 . And we can exclusively reveal here – and only after thoroughly puzzling at least one constituency office with our query - that neither Gordon Brown nor David Cameron use these sites, although at this year’s Conservative Party Conference, the Tory leader said he’d looked himself up on Facebook and found 265 groups dedicated to him. These range from “David Cameron for Prime Minister” with 313 members, to the group “Stop David Cameron... his lies make baby Jesus cry”, which has more than a thousand supporters. Dr William Reader, a psychologist at Sheffield Hallam University, has just finished a major study of online ‘friending’. Why does William Reader think people are resorting to the virtual world to expand their social circle to the point of becoming so-called “ MySpace whores”? READER: Now exactly why people do this is something of a mystery. I mean partly it could be just competition - you know in the same way that people collect things, people might be competing, so who’s got the biggest friends list? Another possibility could be that it’s a way possibly of achieving status in the eyes of their peers and there’s a possibility that what these individuals, these so-called MySpace whores are trying to do by collecting all these friends is actually try and fake status. So when somebody stumbles on their site, when they see somebody with hundreds or thousands of friends, they might say blimey this person must be really important. They kind of create a persona because we all after all tailor the way we are with respect to the particular kind of interaction we’re in, so we speak very differently to say the vicar than we would our friends down the pub. But those two sides of ourself are usually kept quite separate. In this case it’s possible for the vicar, for example, to see how you are with your friends. HAMMERSLEY: Aren’t we actually running into trouble here because sort of persona creation is perfectly natural and it’s something that you do as you’re growing up. Aren’t we running into trouble by putting all of these things online and kind of setting them in stone, whereas before the personas were almost disposable? The point of them was to be able to leave them behind and never go back. READER: Yes, the danger is that because all this information is public on a social network site, people who knew you before, knew your previous identity can catch you out. The question is whether that possibly leads to even more conflict between the two different groups of friends than you might have had hitherto. HAMMERSLEY: But aren’t social networks meant to cut down on conflict? Well, that’s a nice idea, but these days it’s not uncommon for people to break up with their partners online.( Remember the LSE student at the beginning of the programme who said that nothing is official unless it is on Facebook?) It’s also not certain that massive numbers of online relationships are worth the investment. According to research by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the theoretical maximum number of people you can actively maintain a social relationship with is 150 – the so-called Dunbar Number. People with more than this number of online friends may find they aren’t real friends at all. But social networking sites thrive on quantity rather than quality and the idea is that the more information you give up, the more friends you can add to your list. JOINSON: There’s absolutely no point going on a social networking site and not disclosing any information because you might as well go to the pub, sit in the corner and not say a word because you’re worried about your personal privacy. HAMMERSLEY: Dr Adam Joinson, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Bath. He recently led a major UK- wide study on Online Privacy and Self-Disclosure. JOINSON: The internet poses probably the greatest threat to personal privacy ever. Effectively we’ve lost more privacy than any other technology because storage is so cheap, because data processing is so available and cheap, because often our behaviours online are de-contextualised, so what happens is that you can make a posting to a blog and people will maybe pull it out of Google but they won’t see what happened beforehand, they won’t necessarily look at the comments. When it comes to communicating to each other, we’re also seeing that people are expressing themselves in ways perhaps they wouldn’t have done using other technologies, which also means that they lose a degree of privacy because when you’re talking to someone and you can’t see them, then you have a degree of uncertainty and people are motivated to reduce uncertainty and in doing so what they tend to do is disclose information about themselves in the hope it gets reciprocated. What Facebook has introduced is something called a newsfeed, which is effectively every time you make a change to your profile - for instance if you change your relationship status from married to single or from single to in a relationship - it’s broadcast to the people who are listed as your friends as part of a newsfeed. And when this was introduced, it caused an absolute furore in terms of privacy. And so it allows you to see what your friends have been up to very quickly and very easily and some research I’ve been conducting recently has shown that it’s turning into effectively the killer application of Facebook and it’s motivating people to return to the site over and over again. So it’s effectively a mass surveillance system. HAMMERSLEY: And it’s this mass surveillance system that worries David Evans, Senior Data Protection Manager at the Information Commissioner’s Office, the government’s privacy watchdog. EVANS: I think it’s important that people who are using these sites recognise that you know whilst they might think that only their friends will want to look at and use information about them, little bits of information about an individual can be used by others to build up a picture of who they are and that might lead on, for example, to things such as ID theft. You know personal information at the end of the day is a very valuable commodity and individuals might leave themselves vulnerable either to embarrassment, which can be easily got over, or online bullying, which we see quite a lot in the media, or even worse such as ID theft or even personal safety issues if you know an online friendship turns into meeting up offline with somebody who you actually don’t know that much about. HAMMERSLEY: The Information Commissioner’s Office is currently preparing guidelines for people wanting safely to use these sites. Indeed, there is such Governmental concern that in October an all-party group of MPs called for a health warning across all of these websites, alerting people to the risks of identity theft. But according to danah boyd at Harvard University, online criminal activity is not at the forefront of young people’s minds when they post personal information on the internet. BOYD: Privacy is control over audience, control over who can consume this and why and how and in what context. There’s this tension online where you want all of your friends to get access to your material, but you really want to spend as much time as possible avoiding those who hold power over you - parents, teachers, law enforcement, bosses, you know and that scales up regardless of what age, and those who are lecherous in nature. And you know most people immediately think of predators, but the primary lecherous activity occurs from marketers, spammers and scammers and these are individuals who don’t care about us as people, but care about us as sort of a statistic that they want you know to acquire money or to acquire you know attention, all sorts of commodities. HAMMERSLEY: Social networks are the marketer’s dream. Users not only spend a lot of time on these sites but all the information they give away makes it much easier for advertisers to target their audience. I mentioned that I was making this Analysis programme on my blog. David Bain, a partner in the advertising firm BMB, responded to the posting. “Like many neophilic advertising people,” he wrote, “I have myself been bitten by the social networking bug” So I decided to go and meet him in BMB’s lustworthy office in Central London, staffed as it is with lots of funky young people, all busily updating their Facebook profiles in company time. David Bain doesn’t mind. On the contrary, he thinks it’s good for business. BAIN: Everybody in the advertising and communications industry is trying to work out how to monitise social networking. Nobody’s quite cracked it yet, but that’s the new frontier in terms of marketing communications. It started off with brands on MySpace asking to be your friend - so Kit Kat would want to be your friend, a patently absurd idea. But we’re trying at the moment to build social networking components into our campaigns. We’ve got a campaign at the moment for Ikea, which is around taking a stand against what we call “house culture” - the notion that your home is only about making money. So we have a “ “Not for Sale “ campaign that exists as a Facebook group. The face of the brand is very, very visible and very, very honest and we’re not asking people to be friends with Ikea, we’re asking them do you identify with our values and our beliefs? HAMMERSLEY: It remains to be seen whether the Ikea campaign on Facebook is a success. Apart from that group, there are more than five hundred others dedicated to the store, including the “Every time I go to Ikea, I steal the little wooden pencils!” group, which has over two thousand members. The internet generation is entirely aware of the marketing process, and not very tolerant of advertising. But they’re also willing to give up information about themselves if they feel it’s to their advantage. Tell an online bookstore what sort of books you like to read, for example, and they’ll send you personalised recommendations. But should we really trust people with our data like that? Robin Mansell is Professor of New Media at the London School of Economics. She believes we may have the wrong idea about how much people value their privacy. MANSELL: In the context of constructing relationships in these new spaces, the question I would raise about the security issue there is do you really care? And I think that’s what’s changing and that’s where we don’t have a research base. We don’t really know what people prefer. And I think it’s generational clearly - there are differences between the young and the older. It isn’t even clear I think from the research evidence yet why people should care. Would you take any action? That’s the question. I mean you might even care, but action has to follow if you’re going to really care. You would need to actually do something and be proactive, to make noise in the online community, to protest. HAMMERSLEY: Normally do you see a very strict divide between online behaviour, somebody’s online life and someone’s in real life life? MANSELL: Normally is one of those tricky words, isn’t it? But based on the research evidence both in America and in Europe, there seems to be an enormous amount of consistency between what people think is acceptable offline and what they think is acceptable online. The most graphic example comes from research that a student of mine did a couple of years ago about suicide pacts - very disturbing, groups of people coming together and in real life actually doing damage to themselves. I mean that’s serious. In a more playful way, the whole area of online gaming, which as you know is a huge growth industry, is interesting because people will often come together and disclose all sorts of things about themselves, invading each other’s privacy just with regard to who’s winning and losing games. And that may seem trivial in one way, but again it’s an instance of how our whole understanding of what it’s acceptable to say about oneself to another is changing because of the dynamics of communication that happen on these digital platforms. HAMMERSLEY: Online suicide pacts are, of course, at the extreme end of the spectrum. But they illustrate Robin Mansells’ belief that our online behaviour is largely consistent with our offline lives. Yet the technology is not neutral. Just like the players on gaming sites, people on social networks not only reveal information about themselves, but also about others. Mentioning who you saw at last night’s party, or publishing photographs of your happy revels, gives away your privacy, but steals everyone else’s, too. David Evans from the Information Commissioner’s Office suspects that our attitudes to privacy depend on whether we’re online or offline. EVANS: We do an annual survey and one of the questions we ask is how important do you view the following social issues? And we will give them a list of social issues to look at ranging from national security, the health service, education, and included within that list is ‘protecting my personal information.’ And consistently protecting my personal information does come quite high on that list. I think it was fourth last year and it does appear to be more important to lots of people than national security. But I think future work, as well as advising individuals, will be working with the people who run these sites to make sure that they are aware of what their own responsibilities are. So for example in the UK the Data Protection Act does give individuals the right to opt out of receiving direct marketing. Now if I place information on a social networking site and the social networking site’s policy is to sell that information on, then I should be made as an individual user, I should be made aware of that. There is a level of responsibility to be taken by the companies themselves. HAMMERSLEY: It’s not just companies who need to become more responsible. David Evan’s colleagues, the very people who are so concerned about our privacy, still have to learn a thing or two themselves about social networking sites. EVANS: I found out that half of our office is on there. HAMMERSLEY: And these are people from the Information Commissioner’s Office? EVANS: Yes. I did get one or two anecdotes, which obviously for data protection reasons I couldn’t divulge here, but anecdotes from individuals who’ve basically divulged something that they thought was pretty innocent, but when it was seen by a wider audience it did come back to haunt them. HAMMERSLEY: The people in David Evan’s office are not the only ones to be caught out. Even the internet-savvy advertising executive David Bain found that technology is evolving faster than our social abilities to deal with it. BAIN: For our second birthday, we had a party, an all agency party, and you know we did get very drunk and had the typical messy office party photos and I was quite alarmed to find myself tagged on photo albums on Facebook looking like an idiot. But I’d rather have that than forbid it. I’d rather deal with the consequences of un-tagging those photographs of me than I would of saying be careful what you reveal. I mean I think the culture of an ad agency is perhaps more open to these things and if I was a corporate lawyer maybe it would be different. You might not want to see the partner on your business dressed as a penguin. HAMMERSLEY: Indeed. And for David Bain’s sake we can only hope that he managed to un-tag, that is to remove his name from, his picture in time, before it was archived. And here is the big problem: In 2007, the penguin lives forever: online, public, searchable, and annotated. Even after you have deleted the original, a copy might be cached within a search engine, or stored in the Internet Archive, where it will remain forever. And that’s something most people don’t think about when they disclose information on social networking sites. Psychologist Adam Joinson. JOINSON: Often what people don’t think about is who’s actually logging this data, who’s controlling it, whether they trust them or not. So for instance an email between two people might seem to be relatively private, but of course it’s archived and logged somewhere, as we see in the cases of for instance Enron where the emails sent between various people were logged and archived in all sorts of places they didn’t expect them to be. And so I think increasingly people are going to have to recognise that what they do online, even if they delete it and even if they control their privacy setting, someone - probably a third party that they trusted with the data in the first place, whether it’s an ISP or people who run the site - will have access to that information and potentially could make a decision in the future to make it public. HAMMERSLEY: The future of these sites is uncertain. If they continue to be a success, then they’re liable to be bought – and perhaps by people we wouldn’t have trusted with our stuff in the first place. Or, if they go bust, a firesale of their assets is sure to include the valuable data base. Again, remember the student at the beginning who said she’d deleted much of her Facebook profile because she is mistrustful that the site will be sold? The LSE’s Robin Mansell. MANSELL: What is trust in an online world? Is it behavioural? Is it an attitude? Is it both? Are we becoming more mistrustful as we engage in more and more global virtual spaces? I think it’s an open question because people are habitually behaving as if all of this was incredibly trustworthy because they go back in their droves and back and back and they will consume internet based content which one may raise an eyebrow about and say well you know why are they not taking exception to this. So the whole issue of how do we consume these online contents, do we trust in their provenance, where they came from - does it matter? So we live in a society with a very, very divided view about what trust implies, what you should trust. All of these things are split down the middle. HAMMERSLEY: It seems to me that this split is mostly generational. The young, for whom the internet is something they’ve grown up with, seem much less worried about their privacy than their parents. But if their online openness doesn’t seem to be a problem today, it might well turn out to be one in the future with real-life consequences. Ad-man, David Bain: BAIN: I am often really surprised by the levels of disclosure that go on amongst young people online and I think there’s a different notion of interiority there. If you’re my age, there’s a notion that your inner life is inner; and I think if you’re 20, your inner life is outer, your inner life is shared. People speak and think and feel out loud, whereas we did it far more privately. It sometimes looks like extraordinary narcissism. HAMMERSLEY: When you‘re looking to employ somebody new, do you Google them or look them up on the internet in any way? BAIN: Oh yeah - absolutely, yeah. I might have a look, see what’s on MySpace, have a look what’s on Facebook and kind of check them out and try and get a sense of them. But what I’ve found from that is that actually people don’t reveal anything that’s overly damning. It’s more useful in just getting a flavour of who they are as a person and what they’re like versus anything too Big Brothery and trying to discover dark secrets. It’s quite useful in getting a sense that they’re into folk music and you would never have thought that because they’re a six foot eight rugby player. HAMMERSLEY: It’s not so much Big Brother we have to worry about. But lots of annoying little brothers, going through your stuff, and waving it around. This is increasingly a world where you will leave traces of yourself online – because even if you’re not a user, chances are good and growing that your friends are, and they are putting you online by proxy. And if that’s the case, and everyone starts to have their moment in the penguin suit documented - their embarrassing teenage obsessions or every new love affair made findable forever - then this will have consequences for our future selves and by extension for all of society. In his study of social networking sites William Reader of Sheffield Hallam University looked at the impact this is already having on personal relationships. READER: One of the questions we asked on a questionnaire was have they ever de-friended anybody and about 50% of the respondents said they had. We then asked them why they de-friended somebody and one of the most common reasons was that they were people that they’d drifted apart from or people that they hadn’t communicated with. Now in the old days, if you drifted apart from somebody you’d just simply drift apart from them and eventually your friendship had decayed to the point at which you weren’t in any kind of communication with one another. But nowadays you kind of remove people from a friends list, so if that person goes to your site and realises that they’re not on, you know it can have negative implications for the person. So what we’re kind of doing is taking things which naturally decrease, friendships which naturally decay over time in a kind of unobtrusive and un-embarrassing way, and actually putting a bit of embarrassment in there for people. HAMMERSLEY: Embarrassment is not to be underestimated as a social implication, but it could be much worse. Online hostilities can easily spill over into real life, entrenching animosities between groups and dividing society even further. And we’re already witnessing the beginnings of this according to Harvard University’s danah boyd. BOYD: At a roughly-speaking level, you can sort of think of MySpace as much more working class and Facebook as much more upper class. It also splits along different kinds of race dynamics in the US. Again it sort of gets complicated - like, for example, black culture in the US is actually at this point pretty split across class lines, but by and large the Latino community is much more working class and so not surprisingly you’d see Latino populations, they were all on MySpace instead of Facebook. The other thing is parental education: the higher your parents’ education level, the more likely you are to be on Facebook. And it splits society. So if you think of these social network sites as a site of public space, the fact that they’re being segregated by any length is you know a moment to sort of pause and go, hmmn, what are the long-term implications of this because by no means are they open. HAMMERSLEY: Well, all of these sites are free to use, by anybody whatever their background. And wasn’t the whole raison d’etre of social networks to bring us closer together? Instead, they seem to entrench our differences. People, online or not, tend to gravitate to their like kind, as I found at the London School of Economics where everyone seems to be a Facebook user. On a personal level, this gravitation can be good – the one gay kid in a small village able to find support online where none exists nearby, for example. But expand this out to groups, or the country, and it’s not clear that internet communities are always a good thing, despite the utopian hopes of the early adopters of the internet. Robin Mansell of the LSE: MANSELL: There’s a lot of talk about open source software and open communities which can in fact find ways to make money, and if those models persist they could become increasingly pervasive and that has big consequences for who earns what, the distribution of income. On the more social end, there’s a lot of talk about social capital and what keeps communities together, what makes them work in a collaborative way together. And there are some who say that a lot of these web activities, whatever they are, are consistent with that - there’ll be possibilities for an interaction between online collaboration and offline community- based collaboration. I’m a sceptic about that. I am not wholly convinced that social capital is kind of a glue that falls like manna from heaven and that what we need to know more about is where does social capital come from, where does the balance between competition and collaboration kick in, and does the dynamics of virtual internet interaction make a significant difference to that two-sided coin: competition on the one hand and collaboration on the other? And I’m sceptical because I think over time history tells us that they are working together always, always working back and forth like a ratchet effect, and so that one can’t expect just a new technology to come along and have a social impact that says oh it’s all on the side of more collaboration, more social benefit. HAMMERSLEY: For the younger generation, the internet has already changed their notions of privacy. And as technology changes much faster than social mores, society will always be playing catch up. Online life does reflect the real world, but it adds a whole new set of conditions that humanity hasn’t quite come to terms with.