Facebook is evolving. It’s been a slow shift, but over time, the site’s purpose has changed.
At first, the goal was to collect your friends and acquaintances in one place. You could see what was happening with your best friend and check in on that classmate you haven’t seen since high school.
As the site grew, Zuckerberg and company began to come up with ways to increase user engagement. After all, more time spent on the site equals more ad views, more app use, and more revenue. So, they add the news feed, increase the prominence of status updates, add messenger, create timeline, and now, create a separate camera app.
These are all great ideas. But I think they’ll also create tension for some users of the site. Here’s why.
In the book The Search to Belong, Joseph Myers talks about the various ways people find connection and belonging. Borrowing from concepts of physical space, he describes four unique “spheres.”
The outer circle is the Public sphere. These are people you know by first name or recognize their faces. You may say “hi” or share a short conversation about the weather or that recent football game. This is the same sphere where you might feel affinity or belonging in a stadium cheering for a team. You may not know the people next to you, but you feel you belong.
Moving one in, we have the Social sphere. This is someone you share a known commonality or two. You might ask them for a small favor, but you probably haven’t spent time in their home.
Next, there’s the Personal sphere. This is the group you regularly share life with. You spend time together. You’ve been in their home. They know your feelings and needs.
Finally, there’s the Intimate sphere. These are the people with whom you share your “deepest secrets, desires, needs, and struggles.” This is a spouse or a best friend. Most people will only have 2-3 of these relationships at a time. Some will only have a few their whole life. They are rare relationships that are difficult to maintain.
So when we look back at Facebook, here’s the takeaway: for most people, the more you share, the smaller the group of people you share it with.
When people started out on the site, the point was to share a little with a lot of folks. You were able to see what that friend from high school looks like 10 years later or find out if that girl you sat next to in class is “in a relationship.”
Now, Facebook’s goal is to create a timeline of your life as it happens. Share your thoughts as updates. Post what music you’re listening to on Spotify. Share pictures of what you’re doing (along with a required location – though I think Facebook will drop that soon). It’s your life – in real time.
Depending on how people use the tools, Facebook has moved over time from a public space to either a social, personal, or – at times – intimate space.
As the site changes, users’ behavior will change in one of these three ways:
- Some will use the site less and keep it as a place to ‘track’ people.
- Some will narrow their friend lists and share with a smaller group.
- Others will broadcast more information to more people.
What do you think? Does Facebook change us? Or do we change how we use the site?
The job hunt – Are you moving to or from?
It’s that season in the Higher Ed world. People across the country are scouring the job listings for open positions.
If you’re looking for a “next step” in your career, there’s an important question to consider.
Are you running to something or running from something?
One is healthy and natural. The other should at least cause you to pause and consider your motivations.
Here’s why. The best life changes come when we are drawn to a place, not from a place. Pursuing your passion and finding a place that fits your strengths is a perfect reason to look. Often, the timing and opportunity is right. The new position matches your strengths and passions, and it’s a logical, exciting next step.
But sometimes you can run from a situation that could be a great fit with just a little effort or communication. Is the move spurred by a strong connection with the new role or a feeling of discontent with where you’re currently working? It’s easy to see how the grass is greener “over there,” but what connections and momentum will you be giving up if you make the jump?
So before you move and simply find yourself discontent in a new place, consider all the options. There may be changes in your current context that will allow you to step into your strengths while building on the momentum and relationships you’ve already established.
Innovation belongs to the tweakers
Malcolm Gladwell writes a great article on why Steve Jobs’ genius wasn’t so much in how he invented or pioneered but instead tweaked ideas.
“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.”
Read more here.
Just ship it!
Sometimes we can get overwhelmed and bogged down in trying to make an idea perfect – so much so that great ideas never make their way to reality.
Seth Godin talks about how shipping – the art of getting something out the door and into the real world - separates the “ok” from the great.
And it’s true. We need to take pride in what we do. We need to thrash around, work to make something perfect, and work hard at it. But the best approach is often to get the idea out there, into the real world, and refine it as it grows.
Example One – Check out this early version of Twitter:
Example Two – The first iPhone had no App options. Steve Jobs didn’t think they were needed and risked messing up the user experience (Instead developers could build pages that worked for the Safari browser already installed on the phone). Later, he changed his mind and the iPhone went from no apps to “there’s an app for that.”
Example Three – Almost any event I’ve seen repeated from year to year in a department with a consistent staff dedicated to growing or improving it. At our school, ResLife does some “fencepost” events that we are known for. It’s been amazing to see the improvements from year-to-year as Residence Directors brainstorm how to streamline processes and build in new, creative, energizing ideas.
Know what you stand for, and make it accessible
What does your organization or department stand for? What do you stand for?
Clearly defining our core values is one of the most difficult and most important things we can do. We’re going to make decisions daily. We can either make them with pre-established guidelines that reflect what we truly value, or we can make them in the moment, trusting that our emotions and the sway of what’s urgent and reacting to what gets placed before us.
So defining our values is proactive. Responding based on the moment is reactive.
National Community Church in Washington D.C. has a unique set of core values. Very “un-church-like.” They’re sticky. They represent a set of beliefs, but they’re phrased in a way that helps people remember and understand them.
When someone hits a situation in their day-to-day life to which one of the values relates, there’s a good chance they’ll remember it. When the church (which meets in movie theaters across D.C. and runs a coffee shop as one of their venues) comes across a new opportunity that means change in how they’re doing things, values like “Playing it safe is risky” and “Irrelevance is irreverence” help them filter the decision through values that speak to the importance of change and relevance. When a person in the church finds personal change and growth hard, a value like “It’s never too late to be who you might have been” inspires them to take steps toward growth.
When we worked to build our developmental model for Residence Life, we realized there are a lot of great, well-researched models out there. But most are in researcher-talk. For something to stick – to influence behavior – it has to be written in a way that connects to the people it’s meant to impact. RAs must “get it” enough to share it or program with it. So we boiled it down to seven core values and tried to name them in ways that would stick. We’re always working to improve things, but so far, they seem to have worked better than anything else we’ve tried.
Core values can be prescriptive and descriptive. They both help simplify decisions by making clear where you stand and what you’re about. But they also show others who you are from the outset.
What about you? Do you have some clear values that drive where you work? Do you have clear personal values that help you filter decisions and actions?
Does social media contribute to or distract from your main thing?
John Mayer spoke to students at Berklee College of Music this summer, and one thing he talked about was the impact social media had on his creativity. While it helped him connect with his fans (millions of followers on Twitter), it robbed him of creative power for his main thing - music:
“The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”
It’s something worth thinking about for everyone. What’s your main thing? Where should your energy go? Some things like Facebook and Twitter can connect us and even make us feel productive, but if it’s robbing us of the core/central thing (if it becomes our main instrument), it may need to be cut back.
I know people in Student Affairs who have used Twitter to connect with colleagues in amazing ways – to learn, to find support, and to share ideas. But for every person who finds #SAChat conversations and a new circle for professional growth, there may be five more who just use it as an escape for the real work of connection, creativity, and getting things done.
So what about you? How has Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Pinterest/Whatever helped you do what you do? What are the temptations that distract you from the main things you do?
The Wednesday List
It’s been busy around here (hello August!), but here are a few things that have caught my eye.
- This TED presentation by Salman Kahn, founder and teacher for the Kahn Academy, deserves a post of its own. The implications for how we teach and learn are huge. But for now, just watch the video and see what they’re doing.
- Sometimes it’s hard to get rid of “stuff” (read: clutter) in our lives because it means something (read: sentimental). But Unclutterer has a few good mantras to help us remember to focus on living, not preserving.
- Environments matter. Look what happens when you put a coffee table at a bus stop.
- I’ll admit, I usually love every post Seth Godin writes, so I try to avoid linking to every. single. one. But you’ve got to read this one about embracing constraints because now, more than ever, it’s timely and true. “When we fight constraints and eliminate them, we often gain access to new insights, new productivity and new solutions. It also makes it easier to compete against people who don’t have those constraints.”
- And finally, just for fun, go to snailmailmyemail.org before August 15, type a letter to anyone, add the address, and someone will write it out, add an illustration, stick it in an envelope, and mail it to whoever you request. Free of charge. Really!
