ALISON YIN
IN THE SPRING OF 2013, ON A LUMINOUS MAY DAY, I VISITED the campus of the mighty Facebook company for the first time. I was startled. To the outside world, Facebook is a company best known for bold innovations on the Internet. But the central square—known as “Hacker Square”—is a striking physical, real-world experiment, too.
On one side of the square, there are open-air seats and benches designed to enable the employees to mingle in the balmy California air. Overhead, architects have placed bright orange footbridges, painted the same color as the Golden Gate Bridge; the idea is to keep employees moving between buildings, to collide with one another, to spark innovation. Facebook is a company that hates silos—so much so that the footbridges have supermarket-style doors that automatically open to let people pass. On the street level, there is an open-plan glass-windowed office exposed to the square, with a sign declaring “Do Not Feed the Animals”; this is where Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg himself works.
In the center of the space, in the spot where a fountain or statue might be found in an Italian plaza, there is a small yellow crane. Zuckerberg and the other engineers first stumbled on this piece of metal in the early days of Facebook, in an earlier warehouse office, and started using it as an impromptu stage for their so-called hackathons, or all-night coding rituals. Later, when Facebook became ultra-successful and moved to its smart new campus, Zuckerberg brought the yellow crane as a reminder of Facebook’s improvised roots. When I visited, hundreds of computer engineers wearing hoodies and jeans were assembled around the crane, preparing for another hackathon, with all the intensity of a tribe gathered around a sacred shrine.
As I watched the crowd, two thoughts popped into my mind. First, anyone who walks across Hacker Square cannot fail to notice that this is a company where huge effort has been put into the design of physical space. Zuckerberg and his colleagues know that architecture matters; our public places are where we swap ideas, display our identities, interact with humans—and, above all, define and create social groups. Hacker Square reflects and reproduces the Facebook dream, as expressed in concrete, plastic, and yellow metal.
The second point is that Hacker Square tells only half the tale. For though companies such as Facebook have spent a lot of time and money designing their physical space, these days people do not just interact and establish identities in “real” squares, of either the corporate or the civic type. On the contrary, the type of social media platform that the Facebook engineers are building is becoming a second key place where humans congregate each day. The idea of public space, in other words, now extends to the Internet, or places such as blogs, social media sites, and other platforms. These cyber platforms have not traditionally been viewed as “squares.” However, in the modern world, they have many of the same functions: for instance, forging identities, creating social groups, conducting commerce, and rallying around ideas. Indeed, for the younger generation of digital natives, these virtual-hacker squares are arguably as important—if not more important—to their daily lives as traditional plazas.
But though these cyber squares are rising in importance, what is perhaps equally striking is that most people give little thought to the question of how these meeting places are designed. This is partly because virtual squares are so new; it may also be because cyberspace tends to feel very ephemeral and transient. Unlike “real” squares, platforms such as Facebook do not carry the weight of tradition and history; they are not “set in stone” but can be constantly remolded each day. And yet in spite of this malleability—or perhaps because of it—the design of these virtual squares matters. So the question that needs to be asked is this: Do we like the type of public spaces that companies such as Facebook have built for us? Do they meet our needs in a healthy way? Or is there a better way to public cyberspace? Above all, are we willing to let these crucial design decisions simply sit in the hands of computer scientists—like those I saw roaming across Hacker Square?
I FIRST STARTED TO PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS IN A PERSONAL way in the year after my first visit to the Facebook campus. My eldest daughter had recently turned ten and had received her first mobile phone. Like most tweenies, she was dazzled by the possibilities that little piece of plastic and metal could unlock; if I left her unchecked in her room, she would spend long periods of time tapping her screen, connecting with her friends. To my surprise, she did not care for Facebook. “That’s for old people,” she tartly observed (defining “old” as someone over the age of twenty). Even Twitter was considered passé. But she loved Instagram, the picture-sharing website owned by Facebook; her friends congregated there online, swapping ideas and photos, exchanging news, making plans, having rows, meeting new people—or simply saying hi.
I was unsure what to make of this. As a nervous mother, I regularly checked Instagram to see what she was doing. The contents seemed utterly banal: Translated out of emoticons and acronyms, the messages were variants of “Hi,” “How are you?,” “Just fine,” or the innocent chatter tweens might make if they bumped into friends on a street or hung out in a town square. But I was uneasy. At best, cyberspace seemed a huge waste of time; at worst, dangerously murky. Either way, I could not fathom why my daughter wanted to spend so much time there, just saying “hi!”
But then I met danah boyd (who prefers to not use capitals in her name), a self-styled digital anthropologist. Boyd, a charismatic dark-haired woman with an easy manner, was trained (like most anthropologists) to study the human condition by observing how people live, work, think, and interact. Instead of conducting her research in the type of locations that anthropologists used to study—such as far-flung jungles, harsh deserts, or exotic mountains—boyd has spent the past decade studying teenagers’ use of cyber technology, initially through independent academic research but more recently as an employee of Microsoft.
That has led her to draw several striking conclusions. First, boyd believes that teenagers use their mobile devices in a different way from adults. People who are not digital natives tend to use Internet devices in isolation from each other and separate out the physical and cyber worlds. But teens congregate around phones in groups and read messages together. They huddle across screens. They send messages to each other while physically standing next to each other; if they meet, they talk about what they have read online. Second—and perhaps more important—the way teenagers move in cyberspace has to be understood in the context of their physical lives. A century or so ago, teenagers, tweenies, and even children had (by today’s standards) huge physical freedom: They could roam around towns and were often permitted to travel huge distances without adult controls. They could use public space to do what kids have always done: create a subversive world with its own rituals and language that adults do not entirely understand—and grow up.
Today this freedom to roam in a physical sense has diminished; children’s independent geographical boundaries have shrunk. Fearful parents these days often prevent children from wandering around in a spontaneous way; they are ferried around in cars, tied up with organized activities, and kept away from public spaces—such as squares—to keep them “safe.” So instead of congregating with friends at a mall, behind a bike shed, in the streets, or in a wood, teens are now hanging out online, in virtual space. “Social media might seem like a peculiar place for teens to congregate, but for many teens, hanging out on Facebook or Twitter is their only opportunity to gather en masse with friends, acquaintances, classmates, and other teens,” boyd observes. “More often than not, their passion for social media stems from their desire to socialize.” And—perversely—the controls that parents place on teens to keep them safe actually encourage this. “Teens told me time and again that they would far rather meet up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their day-to-day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears of their parents have made such face-to-face interactions increasingly impossible.”*
Boyd’s book pierced my heart. I realized that I had spent my tweenie and teen years running around the streets, playing with my friends with gay abandon; in England in the 1970s, when I grew up, children used to hang out in the village squares and greens with considerable freedom. But for my daughter and her friends, who live in twenty-first-century New York, the cultural mores feel entirely different. So after I read boyd’s argument, I stopped fretting quite as much about Instagram—and started looking for ways to give my children more physical freedom.
Then another question started to haunt me: If children and teens are growing up assuming that cyberspace is going to be a key public space to meet, who gets to design the architecture for that? People in my generation know what a shopping mall, sports field, or town square looks like; we know how humans react to that space. But does a place such as Instagram or Twitter or Facebook encourage people to meet in a healthy way? Or does it make them retreat into cliques? In other words, can virtual squares be a force for civic good—or do they present subtle dangers instead?
BIZ STONE, ONE OF THE COFOUNDERS OF TWITTER, IS SOMEBODY who has been confronting these questions for much of the last decade; indeed, they prompted him to create the iconic social media platform in the first place. The origins of Twitter go back to the spring of 2007, when Stone, a cheery former graphics designer from Boston and blog entrepreneur, traveled to Austin, Texas, to take part in the South by Southwest trade fair. Stone had recently teamed up with other entrepreneurs to develop a fledging message group that enabled friends to send short dispatches to each other, and they planned to unveil this at the convention. On the third night, Stone went down to Austin’s infamous Sixth Avenue to meet his friends for margaritas. But the bar was so crowded that he decided to leave—and used his fledgling messaging service to arrange an alternate meeting spot. He expected just a couple of people to appear. But since the messaging platform was “open”—in the sense that it admitted anybody who wanted to participate—the message was widely read, and a mass of people had congregated at the other bar.
Stone looked at the crowd of young techies and suddenly had a vision of people “flocking” together, like birds. By exchanging messages, he realized, people could congregate around a single idea, piece of news, or picture. Sometimes this caused them to meet in real life (as in the bar); often, though, they just rallied around an idea or piece of news. Either way, Twitter created, in some sense, a virtual square. “I just loved the idea of flocking—people flocking together,” Stone later observed. “I realized then that Twitter could be this incredible force for good, to get people to come together.”*
The Twitter platform turned into a big hit. In one year, the platform had attracted such a vast membership that it was hosting one million tweets a day, and by 2010 the volume of daily tweets had jumped to twenty-five million. Just as Stone had hoped, Twitter was an extraordinarily powerful way to rally people around single issues, pieces of news, or ideas. But as the traffic and user base rose, something notable occurred: The volume of Twitter traffic became so overwhelming that it was impossible for anyone to keep an eye on any more than a minute fraction of these different rallying points. Stone had imagined Twitter as a unifying force where vast crowds of people could come together. And in the early days, users did tend to move as a pack. But the bigger the platform became, the greater the tendency for users to fly apart, because the conversation was fragmenting in numerous different ways.
As the trend became more ingrained, social and computer scientists tried to work out what this meant for wider society. In 2009, for example, a team of academics at Georgia Tech, led by Sarita Yardi, analyzed the Twitter traffic that erupted after an anti-abortionist shot George Tiller, a Kansas physician who conducted late-stage abortions. Yardi wanted to understand whether social media was causing people to become more or less polarized.* She duly analyzed eleven thousand tweets discussing Tiller’s death, and the results were intriguing. In direct bilateral conversations between Twitter users—i.e., people who had replied to a specific message—Yardi and boyd found that more than two thirds of messages sent were between people who held the same views. In the other third of cases, people engaged with others who held a different view. This did not seem to spread mutual respect; on the contrary, in these exchanges people tended to become more, not less, polarized. “Replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity whereas replies between different-minded individuals reinforce ingroup and outgroup affiliation,” Yardi and boyd observed.
In early 2013, a group of computer scientists based at the Qatar Computer Research Institute in Doha studied how Twitter was affecting political debate in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.† After collecting seventeen million tweets dispatched between the summers of 2012 and 2013, they concluded that the different “Islamist” or “secular” groups were often polarized—but still bumped into each other online, as a result of hashtags. What was really interesting was that the level of polarization seen on Twitter tended to foreshadow what was happening in the “real” world: When political fighting broke out on the streets, it went hand in hand with growing fragmentation of the Twitter debate. What happened in Cairo’s Tahrir Square overlapped with trends in the virtual cyber squares.
A similar pattern seems to play out on Facebook. In 2012 Facebook let an academic named Eytan Bakshy, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, analyze how Facebook users disseminated news to each other.* His research showed that social groups often huddled together in discreet tribes, staying in their comfort zone and sticking with people they knew well. It also showed that if a novel piece of news entered the network, people would share it with a very wide circle, including contacts with whom they only had weak social ties. This meant that individuals occasionally bumped into worlds on the web that were outside their comfort zone. In other words, when faced with a choice, Facebook and Twitter users tended to huddle with like-minded people; but from time to time they encountered other crowds as they wandered around in cyberspace. In that sense, then, virtual hacker squares are rather like their real-life variants: We can use them to rally as a group; or we can simply huddle with our tribe. It all depends on whether we are willing to lift our eyes and look around at the bigger view.
IN EARLY 2015 I MADE ANOTHER TRIP TO FACEBOOK’S HACKER square. By then, I had started to make peace with my daughter’s forays into cyberspace: As long as she stayed in “squares” that seemed fairly “safe” (such as the Instagram accounts of her friends) and did not spend too long there, I would let her explore. My attitude was similar to the approach taken by my own parents in the physical streets: I was allowed to roam a bit, but only to known locations, and I had to be back at a certain time. Was this the right policy for either my daughter or society as a whole? I had to admit to myself that I did not really know. Physical architects have been designing “real” squares for centuries, even millennia; cyber architects have existed barely two decades. The long-term implications of the Internet revolution are still unclear.
But as I stood in the warm California sunshine, watching the computer scientists huddle together on the plaza or move across those orange footbridges, I realized that perhaps the real message of Hacker Square is that we have to look at the “real” and “cyber” world in symbiosis. We cannot put the Internet genie back in the bottle. But the more time we spend in disembodied cyberspace, the more time and money we must spend thinking about the architecture of the “real world”—if nothing else, because our children are growing up in an environment that will be radically different from what we have known or can put on a drawing board.
Instagram, luminaria San Domenico, Piazza San Gennaro, Praiano
FRANCESCO AMOROSINO, Instagram, thousands dance the tango in honor of Pope Francis’s birthday, St. Peter’s Square, Rome
VUTHEARA KHAM, Instagram, Place du Théâtre, Paris
OLIVIA INGE, Instagram, Fitzroy Square, London