Facebook: Social privacy and the search for an old-fashioned village

We hear a lot about our new lack of privacy, about how strange it seems that people update their Facebook and Twitter status with their location, relationship status, and breakfast details. It’s easy to forget that this need for a small community, to which you communicate your daily events, is not a new one.  But because I am a genealogy researcher in my other life, I am struck by it time and again. 

For example, here are, in no particular order, the broad categories of personal-life (not games, links, news, etc.) Facebook posts from my network on Feb.14th, 2011:

• Meeting/Theater/Party Attendance
• Illness/Recovery
• Family Events (anniversaries, birthdays, engagements, get-togethers)
• Travel/Guests
• Job Changes
• Weather

To look at the other end of the spectrum, I used the Kentuckiana Digital Library, which has a fantastic collection of small town papers. I selected a couple of papers at random, on roughly the same date. Here are the general categories of the “Personals” column for the Interior Journal, Walton Kentucky, February 14, 1905 and The Breckenridge News, February 13, 1895:

• Illness
  
• Travel/Guests
• Family Events
• Parties/Meetings
• Weather

In these same papers, there are columns for business news, commentary about local, national, and international events, and important information like the grocery store having maple syrup in stock. In other words, these papers contain all the little tidbits of information, advertising, sharing, mourning, celebrating, and supporting that a small town needed to thrive.

This highly personal and social information communication was commonplace in 19th-20th Century small towns everywhere. The printing press gave people an efficient and affordable communication mechanism, and the small towns used it vigorously. I think there are a few reasons for this: 

• Communication beyond a community could be expensive or time consuming
• The sense of community and communal responsibility was strong
• The community was small enough that people knew each other, and cared about each others' illnesses, family events, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about tribalism - why it comes up even in modern society, and what people are looking for when they see out their 'tribe.' This week, it is all about the village, the next level of connectedness. The village has a stability that the tribe does not - it is not about people gathered together against a common threat, but people who are geographically connected to each other's well-being and livelihood. They may be more diverse than the tribe, and they are able to concentrate on non-survival issues, like parties and travel, in a way that tribes may not.

As we (yes, wearing the geographer hat now) moved from small towns to larger communities, this kind of intimate communication fell by the wayside, largely because our communities simply became too large to cope with the details. We couldn't cope with the details of thousands of lives, so we fell back to our tribes - the people close to us in terms of religion, neighborhood, school, etc.

But social media expands those circles. Now, we have a place and a community that we don't see every member of every day, but we care about. The social communication returns to village levels, sharing, mourning, celebrating, organizing, and letting each other know what is happening. This sense of village is the core of social media like Facebook. Everything about it - the games, the pages, the goofy memes, the political commentary, the shared links and likes  - can be mapped to a column or feature in a small town paper. 

You are now each at the center of your own little village, the editor of your own small paper.  You put up a status that gets feedback from friends from high school, the neighborhood, and past jobs.  People who have never and will never meet laugh at each other's jokes, 'like' each other's comments, even though all they have in common is YOU.  They wouldn't be in the same tribe, but they are in the same village. 

Wow.  What a tremendous change the last 100 years have brought and yet how little we, as people who need to connect, have changed.