In The Facebook Generation Gap, Arnold Kling argues that there has been a tension between a desire for an open, anonymous online experience, a Wild Jungle, and a desire for a controlled, less chaotic experience, a Walled Garden:
If Facebook — or any other social network — can attract a desirable community while keeping out the crass minority, then it will have achieved an important objective for a Walled Garden. On the other hand, if as Facebook opens up to broader membership all of the problems of the Wild Jungle assert themselves, then the project will probably stall out and go into a nosedive.
AOL and MySpace both managed to have the worst of both worlds.
Kling argues that binary friend-not friend decisions are not finely grained enough for adult users of a social network:
In order to work for adults, Facebook would have to allow much more refined classification. For example, Facebook gives its users news updates from their friends. In school, this may work just fine. A student may be quite interested in the social ups and downs of her chums, and she may have plenty of time to scroll through all the little updates. As an adult, I have less time and more particular interests.Concerning my friends, I cannot make a binary statement that says either “Yes, I am interested in any news that Facebook might have about you,” or “No I have no interest in any update from you.” Instead, I would want to classify friends in different ways.
For example, I do not want to follow the social activities of my former students, but I would like to hear about a new job or a new school that they are attending. With some out-of-town friends, I might want to get together serendipitously if we are going to be in the same city, so I would like to get updates of their travel plans. With other friends, I do not care.
With some friends, I would like to get ideas for things to try. But I want to differentiate. I might like a friend’s book recommendations, but I might not want her new recipes.
David Weinberger’s thesis is that these different notions of friendship are necessarily difficult to specify as rules, so that neither Facebook not any other social networking service is going to be able to offer a satisfying scheme. No doubt he is correct in the sense that no mechanism is going to be perfect, but I think that some better approaches may emerge on Facebook as people experiment with the site’s group-formation and application-development features.
As students get older, they will find that their tolerance for a high noise-to-signal ratio declines, even as their criteria for distinguishing signal from noise become more varied. If Facebook does not evolve to meet these changing characteristics of its user base, it will probably join the long roster of social networking sites that captured the imagination of a group for a few years, but then faded.