Ever since its inception, people have
used the technology of the Internet to represent
themselves to the world. Sometimes this representation
is a construction based on who they are outside the
network, such as with a personal webpage or blog. Other
times people use the built-in anonymity of the Internet
to explore and engage alternative identities. This
identity tourism (Nakamura, 2002) takes place within
game spaces (e.g. MUDs, MMORPGs), chat rooms, or forums,
as well as within those spaces already mentioned such as
webpages and blogs. In each case, the underlying
technology that facilitates this network society of
digital representations is software. How this software
is designed by its creators determines the ways that
users can (and cannot) craft their online
The most popular network space for
personal representation is Facebook, the world's largest
online social network. The site has more than 500
million active users and has become the most visited
website in the United States, beating out Google for the
first time in 2010 (Cashmore, 2010). Facebook functions
as a prime example of what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls
"participatory culture," a locus of media convergence
where consumers of media no longer only consume it, but
also act as its producers. Corporations, musicians,
religious organizations, and clubs create Facebook
Pages, while individuals sign up and fill out their
personal profiles. The information that organizations
and people choose to share on Facebook shapes their
online identity. How those Pages and profiles look and
the information they contain is determined by the design
of the software system that supports them. How that
software functions is the result of decisions made by
programmers and leaders within the company behind the
This paper explores how the
technological design of Facebook homogenizes identity
and limits personal representation. I look at how that
homogenization transforms individuals into instruments
of capital, and enforces digital gates that segregate
users along racial boundaries (Watkins, 2009). Using a
software studies methodology that considers the design
of the underlying software system (Manovich, 2008), I
look at how the use of finite lists and links for
personal details limits self-description. In what ways
the system controls one's visual presentation of self
identity is analyzed in terms of its relation to the new
digital economy. I also explore the creative ways that
users resist the limitations Facebook imposes, as well
as theorize how technological changes to the system
could relax its homogenizing and limiting effects.
The developed world is now fully
integrated into and dependent on computational systems
that rely on software. Most critical writing about new
media fails to explore this underlying layer of the
system (Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). If we are to understand
the effects of these systems, it is imperative that we
investigate the ways that software, through both its
vast potential and its limiting paradigms of thought,
leads to certain kinds of systems and not to others.
Matthew Fuller, in his volume "Software
Studies \ A Lexicon," refers to this balance between
potential and limit as "conditions of possibility."
(Fuller, 2008, p. 2) Just as the principle of linguistic
relativity theorizes that the structure of spoken or
written language affects our ability to think (the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) (Hoijer, 1954), so does the
structure of computer languages affect the types of
procedures and algorithms we can create in software.
Given that software now "permeates all areas of
contemporary society," (Manovich, 2008, p. 8) we need to
consider this software within the context of its
inherent limitations (both technical and cultural) as we
investigate the media it enables.
Therefore, in this paper I will utilize
a software studies approach, as outlined by Fuller and
Lev Manovich, in my analysis of how Facebook homogenizes
identity. Consideration will be given to the ways that
the syntactic, economic, and cultural aspects of
software development lead to certain types of
human-computer interfaces. In addition, as part of this
cultural aspect, I will also look at who is
writing today's software, and how their histories lead
to certain types of user experiences.
My viewing of Facebook for this paper
took place between April and May of 2011. As Facebook is
constantly changing the site, features discussed in this
paper may change at a later date.
Software studies is a relatively young
discipline, even for new media scholarship. The term was
first coined by Manovich in The Language of New
Media (2001), but has only come to refer to a
particular methodological approach in the last few
years. The New Media Reader (Wardrip-Fruin
& Montfort, 2003) anthologized papers that explore
the history of software as it relates to cultural
history. Fuller's aforementioned 2008 volume was the
first text published specifically about software
studies. In 2009, Wardrip-Fruin published Expressive
Processing, exploring how software drives
narrative technologies such as games and digital
fiction. This is the first book in a new MIT Press
series on the subject, which is edited by Manovich,
Fuller, and Wardrip-Fruin. The most recent edition in
the series is a work that explores the relationship
between programmability and ideology (Chun, 2011a).
Software studies first focus on the two
most important aspects of software, data structures and
algorithms (Manovich, 2008; Goffey, 2008). How
programmers compose structures to hold data controls the
internal representation of those data stored by the
program, and thus has a significant affect on the way
that data can be searched, presented, or stored. A
fundamental unit of many such structures is the list, a
flexible and "ordered group of entities (Adam, 2008, p.
174)." Algorithms, on the other hand, are abstract
procedures devised by computer scientists to operate on
that data, stipulating how the data flows through the
program, and the methods for evaluating and transforming
it into whatever the program requires (Goffey, 2008).
Other relevant topics within this
paradigm include the relationships between computational
power and social authority (Eglash, 2008), and the ways
that notions of interaction disrupt the composition of
algorithms, forcing modes of action on both the computer
and its human counterparts (Murtaugh, 2008). A number of
scholars have recently explored how race intersects with
technology, including the notion of race as a
technology (Chun, 2011b), the similarities between
physical and digital gated communities (Watkins, 2009),
and how aspects of modularity in UNIX relate to the
structures of racism (McPherson, 2011).
In order to understand how Facebook
homogenizes identity, it is also necessary to understand
previous investigations of identity in network spaces.
In general, identity functions as a "self-concept," or
"the totality of the individual's thoughts and feelings
with reference to himself as an object (Rosenberg, 1979,
p. 8)." Identities are personal "sources of meaning"
based on self-construction and individuation, and within
the network society, organize around one's single
primary identity before they combine to develop into
collective identities (Castells, 1997, p. 6). These
collective identities are supported by information
communication technologies such as mobile phones, social
networks, and electronic messaging systems.
The movement into online spaces, which
started en masse with the launch of Netscape
Navigator in 1995, has had a further broadening
effect on identity. In its infancy, the web was
primarily an anonymous space where anyone could adopt
any identity without others connecting them to their
offline selves. This allowed role-playing as alternative
identities within chat rooms, MUDs, and bulletin boards
(Turkle, 1995). The option to role play in this way led
to a more fully engaged act of identity tourism, where
individuals try on different racial or gender
identities, enabled by the anonymity of the network
(Stone, 1996; Turkle, 1995; Nakamura, 2002). At first
this tourism manifested primarily in text-based
environments, but as technologies improved, evolved to
extend into visual environments and representations,
such as avatars (Nakamura, 2007). While such role
playing holds potential promise for empathy and
expansion of viewpoint (Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin,
2008; McKenna, Green, & Gleason., 2002; Suler, 2002;
Rosenmann & Safir, 2006), it can also lead to the
reinforcement of stereotypes through the resultant
suppression of gendered or racial discourse (Nakamura,
2002). Part of Facebook’s current popularity originates
from its exclusionary framework; the site’s genesis as a
boutique Ivy League network has led it to enable
segregation along racial lines, and to its domination of
use by upper class educated whites (Watkins, 2009;
Not all online identities are
anonymous. Facebook's requirement (and enforcement) of
real identity within their system makes it the locus of
a significant shift away from anonymous online identity.
Zhao (2006) refers to these online real identities as
"nonymous anchored relationships," connections that
exist within the online world but are supported by
non-anonymous connections in the offline world. As Zhao
explains, if the real world results in the presentation
of "masks" that hide certain aspects of self, and the
anonymous online world facilitates the lifting of that
mask for the presentation of one's "true" self, the
nonymous online world is somewhere in the middle,
allowing people to present their "hoped-for possible
selves" (Yurchisin, Watchravesringkan, & McCabe,
2005). Zhao's 2006 study found that Facebook users tend
to stress "group and consumer identities over personally
narrated ones (p. 1816)." Another study explored this
"hoped-for" concept in regards to racial identity, and
also found that users use self-selected or
autophotography to enhance or steer their online
representations (Grasmuck, Martin, & Zhao, 2009).
These nonymous online spaces that use
and reveal actual identities threaten individual's
abilities to shift their online representations over
time. Those newer to the internet (whether because of
age or lack of exposure) are often slow to realize that
the network retains whatever they post online. This
makes individual change and exploration more difficult
due to the perpetual storage and retrievability of the
information they make public (Blanchette & Johnson,
2002; Mayer-Schonberger, 2009).
To date, no software studies-based
analyses have been published about Facebook. Given
Facebook's increasingly powerful position in
contemporary society, it is essential that scholars
begin to unravel the hows and whys behind the site's
functionality. Doing so requires, among others, a
software studies approach if we are to fully understand
its role and power in the network society. Combining
this approach with an analysis of Facebook's role in the
shaping of identity should reveal new insights critical
to understanding how social media function within
Facebook's Ideology of Singular
Identity and the Commodification of the Individual
Before unraveling some specifics
regarding Facebook and identity homogenization, it's
important to understand how and why the site focuses on
nonymous relationships. According to Facebook CEO and
founder Mark Zuckerberg, "having two identities for
yourself is an example of a lack of integrity
(Kirkpatrick, 2010, p. 199)." The design and operation
of Facebook expects and enforces that users will only
craft profiles based on their "real" identities, using
real names and accurate personal details (Facebook,
2011). This ideological position of singular identity
permeates the technological design of Facebook, and is
partially enforced by the culture of transparency the
site promotes. The more one's personal details are
shared with the world, the harder it is to retrieve or
change them without others noticing—and thus being drawn
to the contradictions such changes might create. This is
further enforced by the larger software ecosystem
Facebook exists within, such as search engines, that
index, store, and retain those personal details in
perpetuity (Blanchette et al., 2002).
Why is Zuckerberg so bullish on
singular identity? He says it's to encourage people to
be more authentic, and that the world will be a better
place if everyone shares their information with anyone
(Kirkpatrick, 2010). Given that Facebook's servers are
primarily constituted of data produced by the immaterial
free labor of its members (Terranova, 2000), and that
the monetary value of Facebook is the advertising
usefulness of that data, it's no wonder that Zuckerberg
prefers extreme transparency. The financial future of
his company depends on it. Facebook now delivers more
ads than Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google combined (Lipsman,
2011). The more data they collect the more advertising
dollars they can deposit (Manovich, 2008).
The value of that data is further
enhanced by its connection to real identity, as well as
the way that singular identity encourages the blending
of one's disparate communities into one space. By
disallowing alternative identities and multiple
accounts, Facebook pushes its users to build networks
containing people from their work, family, and friend
communities. This discourages the code-switching
(Watkins, 2009) that happens when people use different
networks for different aspects of their lives, and
instead forces them to consolidate their online (and
offline) identities into a singular representation. It
literally reduces difference by stifling interactions
that might have happened in alternate spaces, but are
now off-limits because of conflicts between social
communities. For example, a user will resist posting
something about their hobby interests because it
conflicts with their work persona. Therefore, this
blending begins to limit personal representation and is
thus a significant step on the road to identity
homogenization. Further, this limiting makes Facebook's
users more useful instruments of capital, as a reduction
of difference means marketing and product development
tasks are easier and less expensive for corporations.
Community Pages and the
Consolidation of Interest
Ever since Facebook opened itself up to
the public in 2006 (abandoning its previous exclusivity
to university students), it has steadily made changes to
the way the site operates. In April of 2010, Facebook
rolled out a new feature they call 'Community Pages.'
Community Pages made it possible for Facebook users to
'like' topics (in addition to specific brands or groups
who had been represented by Fan Pages), by allowing the
creation of pages devoted to these (relatively) abstract
concepts. For example, a user could 'like' hip hop music
by linking their profile to the 'Hiphop' Community Page.
These pages are not run by any one individual, but
simply serve as collection points that gather links to
everyone on the site who lists themselves as liking the
The way that Community Pages interface
with an individual's profile is significant. Prior to
this change, each Facebook user had a series of text
boxes on their profile where they could describe
themselves. These boxes were labeled, and included
headings such as 'Activities,' 'Interests,' 'Favorite
Music,' 'Favorite TV Shows,' etc.. Users would fill
these boxes with whatever text they desired. While often
what they listed would fit the category (e.g. a list of
TV shows in the TV Shows box), sometimes they would use
them as methods of distinction or resistance (e.g.
saying that they 'don't watch TV' in the TV Shows box).
When Community Pages were introduced,
Facebook used them as a mandatory replacement for the
previously open-ended text boxes. No longer could users
write whatever they wanted in a text box to describe
themselves. Instead they had to "connect" (link) their
interests with Community Pages already in the system.
During the conversion to the new system, users were
offered the chance to convert what they had in their
text boxes into Community Page links, but that option
only worked when pages already existed with descriptions
similar or identical to their own handmade lists.
The result of this change was
significant. The old contents of many users’ text boxes
were wiped out. Those users most affected were those who
had used the text boxes as methods of resistance or
distinction (either by listing information that wasn't
actually related to the stated topic of the box, or by
being unique in how they described the information).
Even those users who had been using the boxes as
Facebook intended found the bulk of their carefully
crafted text deleted forever.
Why would Facebook enact such a change?
There are two reasons, each related to the other and
both related to the commodification of the individual.
First, standardizing and linking everyone's interests to
Community Pages makes it easier to keep track of who
likes what. "By interacting with these interfaces,
[users] are also mapped: data-driven machine learning
algorithms process [their] collective data traces in
order to discover underlying patterns (Chun, 2011a, p.
9)." Second, this standardization makes it all the
easier to sell advertising to corporations interested in
targeting specific groups of people. For example, if an
advertiser wants to reach those who like hip hop music,
under the old system they would have to think of every
label a user might choose to display that interest. This
could include band names, song titles, genre
descriptions, musician names, etc. Under the new system,
all they need is the list of users already mapped as
'liking' the Hiphop Community Page.
Community Pages are also an
illustrative example of how data structures and
computational power lead to certain kinds of interfaces
or modes of presentation. Under an increasing pressure
to monetize the data they store, Facebook looks for ways
to limit difference across the site. In fact, it’s an
imperative given the exponential increases in data
occurring with their current level of growth. As
described above, being able to sell an advertiser a list
of people that like Hiphop is more valuable than asking
them to target specific keywords. Further, enabling
their advertising algorithms to pre-identify potential
targets of advertisements requires a consolidation of
interest and identity—otherwise there's just too much
data to sift through.
How Lists Limit the
Self-Description of Gender
When a prospective user visits
Facebook's homepage to sign up for a new account, they
are asked six preliminary and mandatory questions. Those
questions are: 1) first name, 2) last name, 3) email, 4)
password, 5) birthday, and 6) gender. While above I have
addressed issues related to questions of name and its
relationship to Facebook's ideology of singular
identity, here I want to start by focusing on this
question of gender.
Facebook asks this mandatory question
as follows: "I am:". For an answer, the user is
presented with a drop-down list containing two choices
they can select from: 'Male' or 'Female.' In other
words, a user can say 'I am Male' or 'I am Female.'
There are no choices to add your own description or to
select a catchall alternative such as 'other' (Figure
|Figure 1: A
screenshot from Facebook showing what type of
gender a user can choose
These limited choices exclude a set of
people who don't fit within them, namely those who are
transgender. Transgender individuals are uncomfortable
with the labels 'man' or 'woman' for a variety of
reasons, such as "discomfort with role expectations,
being queer, occasional or more-frequent cross-dressing,
permanent cross-dressing and cross-gender living," as
well as those who undergo gender reassignment surgery
(Stryker & Whittle, 2006, p. xi). Someone with a
transgender identity lives that identity as strongly as
a man or a woman, and, while some might choose to
describe that identity as 'male' or 'female,' others
prefer a more complex description. However, Facebook
excludes them from listing that as part of their user
profiles. This exclusion puts Facebook at odds with
other online communities, such as Second Life, where the
portrayal of gender is a function of the way one
constructs their avatar (although identifying as
transgender within Second Life can be fraught with
prejudice and harassment (Brookey & Cannon, 2009)).
If we accept that Facebook's primary
motivation is to monetize its data and to get its
advertisements in front of eyeballs (Lipsman, 2011),
then why do they exclude an entire group from
participating? Wouldn't the accommodation of as many
people as possible best serve their financial interests?
I'll focus on three reasons that lead to this exclusion.
First is that Facebook is a designed
space, and a designed space inherently represents the
ideologies of those who designed it. Despite software's
propensity to hide its actions and origins, this
"invisibly visible" (Chun, 2011a, p. 15) entity is
something that, at its core, is created by humans. In
other words, software is an embodiment of the
philosophies and cultures of its designers and how they
think (McPherson, 2011). While a demographic analysis of
Facebook's programming staff is not available, we know
from more broad analyses that Silicon Valley is
primarily run by white men, with a significant
underrepresentation from white women and racial/ethnic
minorites—especially in positions of mid- and
upper-level management (Shih et al., 2006, Simard et
al., 2008). This analysis holds true in terms of
Facebook's senior leadership; their executive staff is
15% female (with zero women in technical leadership
roles), while their board of directors is 100% male
(Facebook, 2011b,c). An industry that is failing to hire
and/or promote women and minorities is unlikely to be
run by individuals concerned with the politics of
gender. The biases or prejudices that contribute to this
situation, intentionally or not, have manifest
themselves in this question of "I am:."
Second is that an important component
of Facebook's popularity is the way it allows and
encourages its users to form virtual gated communities.
Craig Watkins (2009) explores this topic at length in
chapter four of his book, The Young and the Digital.
He, as well as Esther Hargittai (Hargittai, 2011), have
found that in the United States, lower class and Latino
users frequent MySpace, while upper class, educated
white users prefer Facebook. An important part of that
preference is that white users desire exclusive
communities that keep the "fake" people out. With this
"I am:" question of gender, Facebook launches each
profile with a degree of exclusion, and thus,
potentially leading to its white users seeing Facebook
as "safe" and "private," "simple" and "selective"
(Watkins, 2009). Enabling those with alternative gender
identities to accurately represent themselves on the
site, not to mention foregrounding the issue as part of
a mandatory question on its homepage, would not be
supportive of the selective atmosphere Facebook has
built, and from which it benefits.
Third is that the drop-down list is an
interface paradigm born out of software. The "I am:"
question allows everyone to make a choice, as long as
it's one of the two options already presented. No
accommodation is made for selecting something other than
male or female. A logical human solution to this problem
would be to let everyone provide their own description.
While a majority of people would still likely choose
male/female, or man/woman, those who don't feel they fit
in either of those categories could write their own
description. As computer users, we tend to blindly
accept this kind of interface without regard for its
exclusions; this is one way that software is
contributing to the homogenizing ways we think about and
Drop-down lists, or other interface
models that present a list of predetermined choices
(e.g. radio buttons, check boxes) illustrate the way
that new media interfaces are crafted in response to
methods of programming as much, or more so than they are
in response to notions of human-computer interaction.
This crafting starts with how data is represented within
software systems. The most common building block of
software data structures is the list (Adam, 2008), such
as an array (an ordered set of data accessible by
numerical index). Arrays are typically of preset sizes,
and in the case of the "I am:" question, would be of
size two, one index for 'male' and the other for
'female.' The array serves to manage the data during the
computational stage (e.g. waiting for and then grabbing
the data from the user), but must eventually be stored.
Storage occurs within a database, where each user likely
receives a row of their own, and in which gender would
be stored as a single table cell of data. While this
cell could conceivably contain a string of text taken
from the user, it is more useful for Facebook if they
already know what could be in that box.
Knowing ahead of time what genders are
possible, and limiting those possibilities to a known
set enables a number of subsequent software-driven
actions. First, it is easier for Facebook’s search
engines to index user data if they know what the options
are, because searching through a finite list is much
faster than searching through an unending list of custom
personal descriptions. This means that faster searching
algorithms can be devised. Second, it makes it easier to
make comparisons across users. If everyone writes their
own custom descriptions, then every spelling difference,
every text case difference, and every difference of
phrase makes it harder for Facebook to aggregate users
into broader classifications. Aggregation is a useful
tool for improving computational performance, as it
limits data. Perhaps more importantly, aggregation
better serves the needs of their advertisers who want to
quickly and easily target whole classes of potential
Language Lists and the
Representation of Racial and Ethnic Identity
If gender identity is limited to two
choices, how does Facebook manage racial and ethnic
identity? There are no specific questions within one's
profile that ask for this kind of information, but there
is a query in direct relationship to it: languages. At
first glance, this question, just a couple below the
gender drop-down, appears to welcome a self-description.
It is listed as "Languages:" followed by an empty
text-box. However, if one starts typing in this box they
will find it quickly attempts to autocomplete what
they’re typing to match a pre-determined list of
While there are quite a large number of
languages available for autocompletion, many are still
missing. For example, those who speak the Chinese
languages of Min or Gan cannot select their language.
These languages are spoken by 110 million Chinese people
combined. The Ethiopian language of Gallinya, spoken by
8 million people, is also not available. If a user types
Gallinya in the box anyway and hits Enter, the page
refreshes and fails to list that language on their list.
It acts as if they never typed anything at all.
While Facebook will likely continue to
add languages over time, this method of choosing from a
pre-determined list of choices is once again emblematic
of an interface born from the programmatic thinking of
software developers. In this instance, Facebook has
setup a list much larger than the one for gender, but it
is still a finite list. Therefore, while it presents
similar problems to those posed by the gender question,
it also presents additional problems. First, the list
appears to be most exclusionary of non-western languages
(I could not find an official language from North
America or Europe that doesn’t appear). Second, even
when Facebook does have a match for a particular
language, their spellings sometimes differ from those
used by speakers of those languages (e.g. Facebook lists
Kaqchikel, a language spoken by 500,000 Guatemalans, but
doesn’t list its alternate spelling Kaqchiquel).
Finally, many regional dialects of the languages it does
include are not listed.
It is unsurprising that Facebook hasn’t
been able to include all of the world’s languages in its
list. There are so many variations and versions that the
task might be impossible. However, what is important
about the missing languages, spellings, and dialects is
that it illustrates the degree to which Facebook cannot
preprogram the identifiers of racial and ethnic identity
that the world’s population would use to describe
themselves. That they try to anyway, using a limited
choice interface model, ends up revealing their
“lenticular logic,” magnifying the ways that their
abstractions of identity lead to technologies “which
underwrite the covert racism endemic to our times
(McPherson, 2011).” The result, then, is an interface
that reduces, and therefore excludes, difference. By
forcing individuals to choose particular spellings or
dialects, or to not list their language at all, their
identities are homogenized into smaller collections, all
for the goal of making them easier to sort, search, and
advertise to. This obfuscation of identity may enable
some protective benefit, in terms of the way it protects
their real identities from advertisers and others, but
only at the cost of losing the potential for accurate
self-description and the negatives that may entail.
Reduction of Difference, and the Digital Economy
Facebook's reduction of difference and
limiting of identity is not restricted to the data it
collects and disseminates, but is also a product of its
visual style. Every user's profile looks nearly
identical, with only a small photograph and a list of
increasingly homogenized identifiers to distinguish
them. Where those elements reside on the page, the
colors they're rendered in, their order of presentation,
and even the background behind them are all
predetermined. Almost zero customization is possible,
leaving each one of Facebook's 500 million users looking
more and more like the residents of a typical gated
community, even though there is a world of difference on
the other side of the screen.
This visual blurring of difference is
a new trend across the Internet, one which Facebook
appears to be leading. In the earlier days of the Web,
individuals created homepages for themselves using the
limited options available to them. Pages had blinking
text, garish colors, low-resolution photographs, and
poor typography. As the production tools used to craft
webpages improved, so did the uniqueness of designs and
personal representations. But in recent years, the use
of Facebook profiles as one's personal space on the
Internet has risen substantially. Because of the fixed
visual design of these spaces, each individual
represented literally looks the same.
Combining this visual homogenization
with the reductions of difference described earlier
blurs the "territory between production and consumption,
work and cultural expression. ... Production and
consumption are reconfigured within the category of free
labor," and "signals the unfolding of a different logic
of value (Terranova, 2000, p. 35)." This new logic is a
digital economy focused on the monetization of the free
and immaterial labor that each user gives to Facebook.
In return, their Facebook profiles increasingly look
like a cross between a resume and a shopping list,
telling the world who they work for and what products
they consume. As Chun writes so eloquently in her new
software studies book Programmed Visions (Chun,
2011a, p. 13):
You. Everywhere you turn,
it's all about you—and the future. You, the
produser. Having turned off the boob tube, or
at least added YouTube, you collaborate, you
communicate, you link in, you download, and
you interact. Together, with known, unknown,
or perhaps unknowable others you tweet, you
tag, you review, you buy, and you click,
building global networks, building community,
building databases upon databases of traces.
You are the engine behind new technologies,
freely producing content, freely building the
future, freely exhausting yourself and others.
Empowered. In the cloud. Telling Facebook and
all your "friends" what's on your mind. ...
But, who or what are you?
You are you, and so is everyone else. A
shifter, you both addresses you as
an individual and reduces you to a you like
everyone else. It is also singular and plural,
thus able to call you and everyone else at the
same time. Hey you. Read this. Tellingly, your
home page is no longer that hokey little thing
you created after your first HTML tutorial;
it's a mass-produced template, or even worse,
someone else's home page—Google's, Facebook's,
the New York Times'. You: you and
everyone; you and no one.
Chun's you is the
homogenized you. The you represented by a Facebook
profile, the you whose identity is being reduced to a
set of links—links pointing to Pages that enable the
site's advertisers to sell you the latest and greatest
products of late capital.
Ways Users Resist Profile
Despite Facebook's reductionist visual
style, some users have found ways to resist it from
within the system. For example, ever since the "new"
profile was released in late 2010, the top of each
profile now includes thumbnails of the last five photos
a user was tagged in. For most, this tends to be a
random collection of event photos, usually without any
particular ordering. A few users, however, utilize their
knowledge of how it works to construct singular images
that stretch across their page from left to right, using
the five photos combined with their profile image as
tiles of a larger image (Figure 2). While this technique
results in a more distinctive visual profile than the
norm, it is still within the larger context of an
extremely confined visual space that is the Facebook
profile. For example, the user in Figure 1 is still
confined to liking pages for movies, books, and other
brands or media represented by Facebook Pages.
|Figure 2: An example of a
Facebook profile hack by Alexandre Oudin,
using the last five photos across the top in
conjunction with the profile photo to break
out of the conventional visual style of a
A more significant trend is the action
of gender hacking. Using tools built into the major
browsers for live editing of HTML and CSS, users are
able to temporarily modify the "I am:" gender drop-down
list elements. A video on Facebook (Bayaidah, 2011)
teaches people how to accomplish this (Figure 3). The
technique allows users to add whatever descriptor they
want to the drop-down box (Figure 4), be it
'Transmasculine,' 'Femme,' or 'Fierce' (Picher, 2011).
While the drop-down modifiction will not persist beyond
the first save, the act results in a permanent
alteration of the user's profile; previous and future
additions to their News Feed refer to the user with a
gender-neutral pronoun such as 'their' instead of 'her'
or his.' Technically, this is because users are changing
the data in the 'value' field of each of their drop-down
choices to 0 (1=Female, 2=Male). That the inserted value
of 0 results in a gender-neutral self-description, even
on past entries, clearly shows that Facebook has the
code in place to allow such neutrality—even if they
don't use reveal it in the interface. This is further
evidence that Facebook prefers a limiting of gendered
description even when they've taken the time to program
a system with more options than two.
Figure 3: A screenshot from
Simon Bayaidah's video on how to hack the
gender drop-down dialog in the Facebook
profile editing interface. Such editing allows
not only a temporary addition to the drop-down
choices, but also triggers Facebook to
automatically use gender-neutral pronouns when
describing the user's actions in their News
Figure 4: Rae Picher's example
of gender hacking the Facebook Profile editor
based on the technique outlined by Simon
Bayaidah (Fig. 3). This image was used on her
Facebook note titled Facebook's Gender
Binary Got You Down?
Other users take a more exclusionary
approach. Popular options include refusing to list any
personal information beyond the most basic required to
gain the account, using false information to create
profiles that don't adhere to Facebook's real identity
requirement, or avoiding Facebook altogether. While
these three options are resistive in nature, they also
result in a less than full participation within the
economy of Facebook. As the site continues to grow into
a primary communication technology, those who resist in
these ways may be at a distinct disadvantage in areas
such as job search networking or even regular social
How Technological Changes Could
Relax Facebook's Homogenization of Identity
Given the degree to which the
homogenization of identity is an essential component of
Facebook's bottom line, it's illogical to presume they
want to reverse the trend. However, to the extent that
some of the conditions described in this paper are
solely the product of programmatic thinking, there is
room for improvement. In particular, any feature of the
site that limits choice could be written to limit choice
less, or to allow nearly unlimited choice. Limits are
ultimately the results of decisions made by programmers
to implement a feature in a specific way. In the cases
of the gender or language questions, for example, the
site could allow users to enter any text they want
without loosing the aggregation characteristics of the
current method. Doing so would require algorithms that
perform pattern matching on those entered texts, looking
for ways to programmatically make the connections
between items that humans so easily do. Alternate
spellings of a specific language could be combined under
one link while still allowing the user to spell it how
they want to. Varied transgender descriptions could
still be collected into a subset of identifiers. Such an
approach might also be limiting of self-description, but
it would be much less so.
Another change that would likely make
a more fundamental difference is an expansion of the
demographics of software developers. As Shih (2006)
points out, the ranks of computer scientists skew
heavily towards white men. While there are certainly
exceptions, white men educated in US engineering schools
tend to have a certain view of the world. Adding people
of various colors and genders to the programming staff
(especially in positions of leadership) would change the
final product because each and every feature we see on
Facebook is the result of a human decision. If we want
our software to be more inclusive of racial, ethnic, and
gendered viewpoints, then we need a broader demographic
bringing their varied contexts to the table when
designing the system and writing their code.
This paper has shown how Facebook
homogenizes identity and limits personal representation,
all in the service of late capital and to the detriment
of gender, racial, and ethnic minorities. The company
employs its tools of singular identity, limited
self-description, and consistent visual presentation in
order to aggregate its users into reductive chunks of
data. These data describe people not as the complex
social and cultural constructions that they are, but
instead as collections of consumers to be marketed to
and managed. There are many reasons the company has made
these choices, including the demographics of its
software development staff and its capitalistic
imperative to monetize its database. However, to fully
understand how this new digital juggernaut functions it
is important to analyze the core component at the heart
of it: software. Software is built by humans but also
produces new types of thinking that lead to specific
types of interfaces. In the case of Facebook, these
interfaces are taking the vast promise of an
internet-enabled space of tolerance and, in new ways,
imposing age-old practices of discrimination. By
exploring software as part of our larger cultural
history we can begin to envision new ways of thinking
that might help us break away from old ideas in our new
Sincere thanks to Lisa Nakamura for
introducing me to much of the theoretical material
underpinning this work. Additional thanks to Lisa as
well as to Kate McDowell for reading and comments on
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