A Diaspora from Facebook, or from Reality?

cross-posted at echoditto

For those of us plugged into tech news, the development of Diaspora is a promising one: true decentralization of social networking.

Diaspora is a grassroots-funded open-source project started by four NYU students. The idea? Instead of hosting photos, links, messages, and friend connections on a centralized server, host it on your own computer. Each person's host is called a "seed" in Diaspora lingo, a borrowed term from bittorrent.

Bittorrent is actually a pretty apt metaphor for what Diaspora aims to do. Diaspora contributor Maxwell Salzberg says, "Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub." Diaspora will pull in info from many of your existing accounts online: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and others will be brought into your personal Diaspora feed (at your discretion, of course).

This isn't the first open source social networking software out there, but its fully decentralized nature makes it pretty unique.

That being said, we are venturing into somewhat new territory here, and there are a few nagging questions when it comes to the basics of implementing this idea. Just like you can't find a torrent without an aggregation site, how will we find long-lost classmates and childhood friends, without one (or many) sites that will host searchable basic information about us?

Will Diaspora be a stand-alone program users have to install? Would the web browser still be the main means of interaction? If the web server is your computer, how easy - or possible at all - would it be to send updates from the road? In a smart phone world, that last question is crucial.

If done well, Diaspora will join an ever-growing list of open-source projects that have broken into the mainstream (Firefox being the most prominent example). That's a good thing. And just as Firefox's open architecture spurred an incredible ecosystem of useful plug-ins, we should anticipate a successful Diaspora spurring a panoply of tools for us online organizers to better connect with our friends and community members.

Participatory Alienation?

Here's where I put my theory hat on. By removing the intermediary servers of the old centralized social networking services, we're given the ability to better control, view, and filter the streams of data we and our friends send out. But is this a qualitative psychosocial improvement, or have we simply made our alienation from reality more "participatory?"

Let's take a step back for a moment.

For social theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, the age of electronic media heralded further abstraction of social relationships, away from reality. Debord's Situationist concept of the spectacle describes how human experiences are turned into commodities and sold back to us. As Larry Law put it:

"Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."

Living life by proxy. That sounds a lot like Facebook. When most of one's social bonds are online, real world events in essence never happen until they are documented online. At first blush it seems clear that every piece of information we post online is commodified. However, as any ad executive will tell you, mainstream media's primary product isn't TV shows or newspaper issues. It's viewers and readers. We're the products that media outlets sell to advertisers.

The same is even truer for the completely ad-supported Facebook, which uses personal information and updates to tailor and customize advertisements: the more we participate, the more we ourselves are commodified.

In many ways, Diaspora heralds the promise of a way out — the ability to connect to each other on our own terms, without intermediaries and beyond (hopefully) the market drive for profit. Less alienation, right?

But Baudrillard warned that the Situationist idea of the spectacle didn't go far enough. We're no longer in an age of the spectacle, he argued, but in an age of simulation. Whereas the spectacle still requires a reference to the physical world (e.g. purchasing the latest Madden instead of actually playing football), the world of the simulation whittles away any need to refer to external reality. Especially with the explosion of online communities, social networks, and entire industries whose products exist only on the web, our actions, communications, and thought are becoming increasingly self-contained and self-referential within the larger online world.

It's reasonable for us to push for Diaspora to replace Facebook. I know I do. However it remains to be seen how a world where social networking is Diaspora-dominated differs from the present in terms of the relationship between the virtual and the real.

What We Learn vs. What We Do

There's a difference between online data interaction and online social interaction - and it's a distinction that we seemingly need frequent reminders about.

Just because Wikipedia is in most ways qualitatively better and more useful than physical encyclopedias doesn't automatically mean online poker is better than real poker, or that helping "tend" someone's Farmville farm is more rewarding than actually growing a neighborhood garden.

The coalescing of what Baudrillard called hyperreality — the sum of all these simulations — grows at the expense of the real world: more online social interaction (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, World of Warcraft) means less physical interaction (sporting events, nightclubs, walks, group dinners, concerts).

Where are we headed, as more of the social becomes informational, and the qualitative becomes quantitative? What happens when a brain designed to thrive on the open savannah in close physical contact with others removes itself entirely from the anchor of an evolutionarily appropriate environment? As author Sven Birkerts recently put it,

The short answer is that we ourselves will become mediated, living with the anxious sense of not being connected to what used to be primary. This will create a vicious circle — our only solace from this anxiety (aside from serotonin reuptake inhibitors, sleeping aids and intensive therapy sessions) will be to plunge more deeply into the distraction at the root of our unease. The big question for me is whether there will be any kind of "return of the repressed" kickback and what form it might take. How deeply programmed are we with the need to feel "real," to recognize ourselves as independent selves?

Let us take the opportunity looming before us to not only change the way we relate to each other online, but to meditate on how tangible we want — need — our relationships to be.

This consideration is of crucial importance to the social change sector, as we all engage further into the latest technologies and services — we must be vigilant that our means to achieve short-term ends (e.g. legislation, awareness) does not sabotage our long-term goals (the creation and strengthening of empowered communities).

Will we collectively use the tool of online social networking to enrich and enliven our real world social lives? Or will we take refuge in it from an increasingly hostile, ecologically degraded, and isolated society: a diaspora from reality?