1. Prophet / An Age of Exposure
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2. prophet / an age of exposure /
An Age of Exposure / Just as the contraceptive pill
heralded a cultural shift in the 1960s, Facebook
is defining freedoms and society today. Though
over-sharing presents risks – just as free love had
a dark side, could natural corrections to behaviour
on the social network help tolerance flourish half a
century later? / By Faraaz Marghoob, Saatchi & Saatchi /
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3. Today’s youth has a laissez-faire attitude towards
exposing their lives online. Are they the guinea pig
generation, blindly documenting their every move
on Facebook with little or no regard to the possible
repercussions of over-exposure in future? Life
experience may well teach them to hold back, but by the
time they learn this, it may already be too late.
Have we been here before?
On 23 June 1960 in the US, the FDA approved the
release of Enovid – the first ever contraceptive pill – for
public use. It was so effective and so simple to use that
for the first time sex could be about pleasure alone, utterly
divorced from the risk of pregnancy. It found its raison
d’être at the heart of the women’s liberation movement
and commentators have attributed the emancipation of
women directly to the advent of this little pill.
Mass adoption occurred at breathtaking pace. Within
only two years of its release in the US, 1.2 million women
were users of the Pill. Today, there are 100 million users
– one in three of all women of child-bearing age across
the developed world. In 1967, the Pill had appeared on
the front cover of TIME. By 1999, The Economist was
hailing the Pill as the most important scientific advance
of the 20th century.
Not without side-effects
The lasting impact of the Pill is significant; it ushered
in many of the modern, liberal values that define
society today, such as those regarding gender equality,
sex before marriage and abortion. But it was also
instrumental in the creation of the short-lived social
phenomenon known as the ‘free love’ movement.
Epitomised by the Summer of Love of 1967, it meant
that you could have sex with anyone, anywhere, anytime,
without guilt – even the taboo against sex in public was
forgotten. But this period of unrestrained sexual freedom
and experimentation was hauled back by the steady rise
of STD infections amongst young people. By the early
80s, a new and deadly disease – later identified as
AIDS – had brought the last vestiges of the free love
movement to a crashing end.
A bitter pill for Facebook?
Can we draw a parallel between the rise of the Pill in
the 60s with the meteoric rise of Facebook in our time?
Perhaps. Both can be described as an epoch-defining
technological advance (Facebook graced the front cover
of TIME in May 2010), both have changed the nature of
one of the most basic forms of human interaction, and
both have undergone rapid, mass-adoption across the
developed world. Each has fundamentally changed the
context by which humanity expresses itself.
But in the same way that the Pill also nurtured the
free love movement – a period of unsustainable over-
exuberance – are there yet-to-emerge risks and threats
lurking within current Facebook behaviours? Are these
over-exposure risks more acute amongst younger users
who’ve been uniquely energised by the new frontiers
thrown open by social networking?
As part of our study, we surveyed 1,000 16 to 25-year-
old youth users on their Facebook behaviours and
attitudes. Astonishingly, almost two thirds (61%) of
them said they accessed Facebook every few hours
or more (versus only 27% of 36 to 45-year-olds). 84%
visit Facebook at least once a day (versus 46% of 36
to 45-year-olds). Clearly, Facebook is firmly entrenched
within the self-expression of this group, at a time when
they’re in a hugely formative part of their life.
But are they aware of the risks? It seems that only
about one in five youth users have thought of the
dangers posed by over-exposure on Facebook. One
fifth feels they have too many friends, whilst 18% carry
out ‘pro-active profile risk-management’ defined as the
following three behaviours: (i) detagging inappropriate
images; (ii) deleting comments that make them look silly;
and (iii) wanting others to ask permission before images
of them are uploaded.
Risk profile
So, what are the potential risks of over-exposure on
Facebook? There is a growing number of cases showing
that an ill-managed Facebook profile can have potentially
life-changing impacts. Barack Obama presciently said in
2009, ‘Be careful what you post on Facebook, because
in the YouTube age, whatever you do will be pulled up
again later, somewhere in your life.’
A plethora of online reports chart the plight of good
college and job applicants, who have interviewed well,
yet fall at the final hurdle as a result of their recruiters
browsing their Facebook profile. In most cases, a
straightforward change to privacy settings can manage
this, but with so many profiles still available for public
view, there are many thousands of unwitting job-hunters
setting themselves up for a fall.
More seriously, divorce lawyers and academics have
cited Facebook as a leading cause of marriage trouble
in the US. One common indiscretion occurs where
one spouse re-engages with an ex-lover who’s stayed
connected via Facebook. Two-thirds of the lawyers
surveyed said that Facebook was the primary source of
evidence in divorce proceedings. Yet with US divorce
rates staying flat in the last few years, it begs the
question whether Facebook is the cause or merely the
effect of relationship troubles. The execs at Facebook
argue strenuously for the latter.
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4. prophet / an age of exposure /
But perhaps the most alarming cases that highlight the
risks of Facebook exposure are the teenage suicides that
have resulted from cyberbullying. Along with ‘sexting’
(sending sexually explicit images and messages to your
friends) youth culture commentators have been noting
its rise for some time now – but have been startled by the
adoption and acceleration within social media platforms.
Social media certainly didn’t invent juvenile bullying or
the adolescent obsession with sexual discovery, yet the
consequences of social media within this context can
be grave.
Learning to cope
By the mid-1970s, the rising threat of STDs didn’t just
curtail more open attitudes towards sex, but prompted
new coping behaviours that allowed liberal values to
remain, but with added peace of mind. Many partners
required their future lovers to be tested for STIs before
engaging in the relationship, whereas others increasingly
insisted on the use of condoms.
Within Facebook, people are adopting coping
behaviours to improve the management of their online
exposure. Increasingly, users are employing techniques
such as ‘super log-off’ and ‘white-walling’. The ‘super
log-off’ is a way of using Facebook whereby your profile
exists only while you are actively logged in. When offline,
all traces of your status, image tags etc are removed
from the system. Essentially, it’s a mechanism that allows
you to review all media related to you as it happens. In
‘white-walling’, people exist only on that particular day
– they delete all traces of themselves from the platform
from the previous day and before. Dutch group Moddr_
has been more creative-cum-drastic; its Suicidemachine.
org allows you to permanently erase your Facebook,
MySpace and Twitter account in one fell swoop in a
simple-to-use, and admittedly entertaining, website
(Facebook disallowed Suicidemachine’s Facebook app
last year). Even EU lawmakers have taken up the mantle,
and this summer will reveal proposals demanding
that all Europeans have the right to be forgotten and
permanently erase all traces of their online existence.
A simpler and more familiar way to manage over-
exposure risks more holistically is to use separate
platforms to compartmentalise different parts of
your self-expression. Using LinkedIn for work versus
Facebook for play would be an obvious example. The
nature of the platform also acts as an indicator of
appropriate behaviour. For example, Twitter is a one-
to-many platform where anyone can choose to receive/
review your tweets. It follows that you should be careful
what you reveal.
More interesting is the insight into human nature that
is being informed by some of these coping mechanisms.
TherehavebeencasesreportedintheUKofcommunities
of young Muslim girls actively managing two separate
profiles within Facebook: a conservative ‘burka edition’
for the family and a free-spirited ‘western edition’ for their
friends. As a second generation immigrant British Asian
who had to define a single path through two competing
cultures through my teenage years, I’m aware that the
greatest struggle for these young girls is defining their
own identity. If we scrutinise the relationship between
Facebook and identity (namely self-perception) we find
new insights into its role in young people’s lives.
Who do they think they are?
According to philosopher John Locke, one’s identity is
the self-perception that derives from positive or negative
experiences that we hold within memory. Facebook acts
as an addendum to this, constantly reminding and re-
writing our memories of ourselves, thus affecting self-
perception. Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University
found that changing the height of one’s avatar in
immersive virtual reality experiences can transform the
self-esteem and social self-perception of the players.
Therefore, our social media presence impacts our own
self-perception and identity; in other words, we are all
inclined to believe our own hype. And the more we use
or depend on Facebook, the greater the impact it has on
how we definine our identity.
In our survey, a staggering 81% of our youth users
who believed their Facebook profile to be ‘the real me’
also agreed with the idea that their profile allows them
to present themselves in a more flattering way (or show
‘the person I want to be’). Not only are they using it to
project themselves in a better light, they are inadvertently
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5. influencing their sense of self. For mobile-enabled,
social-network addicted teenagers, what happens on
Facebook is having a profound effect on shaping their
identities during arguably the most influential years
of their lives. Facebook content acts as a catalyst,
accelerating young people’s identities towards those
images and ideas that rapidly build self-esteem. But
what builds teenagers’ short-term confidence shouldn’t
always be broadcast to 300 ‘friends’ and be available in
the future to potential employers, employees, partners
and in-laws.
There are some more subtle, yet no less harmful risks
too. When it comes to self-development, one of the
greatest freedoms is the ability to re-invent oneself –
to shake off unwanted behaviours and adopt attractive
new ones. Facebook risks creating an inescapable
gravity to people’s identities (something Jaron Lanier,
author of You Are Not A Gadget, would call ‘lock-in’).
It could curtail the ability of teenagers to ever re-invent
themselves in their own eyes, let alone other people’s.
At this stage, social networking might even start working
against modern notions of freedom, rather than for them.
The underlying truth is that these youngsters will find
any way to express their basic human needs in whatever
channel they can. And they will gravitate to the place
where their needs are best met. Given the ability to
live within intimate tribes, coupled with the chance
to broadcast personal victories (or indeed malicious
content), it’s no surprise that Facebook has become the
most vociferous exponent of self-expression that their
life-stage demands. But does Facebook exacerbate a
problem? Only if you see it as a problem; Facebook
exaggerates humanity, which must be regulated and
guided by the morals, values and ensuing behaviours of
the people within it. Coercion is not an option when it
comes to teenagers, so as a society we need to impress
upon them a modern set of morals and values that can
inspire a new, free-but-safer etiquette for our youth
in social media. I’m certainly going to do this with my
young son.
Human after all
Somewhat reassuringly, this story is not new. As we
learned from the 1960s, it’s a recurring theme; when
society pushes its boundaries, it takes time to learn where
the new ones lie. What at first seems like an exhilarating
new frontier is embraced with such enthusiasm and
gusto that there is always the inevitable over-reach.
After the initial denial, a period of pain leads to the
reassessment of values and wilful taming of behaviour –
so that once again society can sit comfortably within its
boundaries (albeit shiny new ones).
Through it all comes progress. The greatest legacy
of the Pill was not STDs like AIDS, it was the way it
helped usher in a more liberal society and a move
towards equality. We only have to look at attitudes on
both sides of the 1960s to understand that the very
same behaviour could be completely reframed from
abominable to acceptable in a matter of years.
And what will Facebook give us? Over and above the
connectedness, the sharing of rich stories and content,
the sheer entertainment, perhaps its greatest legacy
will be more profound. Faced with a huge archive of
people’s mistakes, embarrassments and indiscretions,
I believe society will have no choice but to become
more tolerant and forgiving of behaviour we would judge
negatively today. It will result in a culture that is more
honest, accepting and pragmatic than anything we have
seen before. I’m looking forward to those days.
Faraaz Marghoob is planning director at Saatchi &
Saatchi, London.
www.saatchi.co.uk
Thanks to Henry Gray and Elaine Webb.
Illustration: Crush / www.agencyrush.com
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