Inside the walls of the Mountain View, CA. Googleplex, Google encourages the formation of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). These are little or large affinity gangs for Google employees or Googlers. ERGs include Gayglers for GLBT employees and Greyglers or older employees. There are also employee groups for pilots, new mothers, and veterans. Camille James, a Noogler, or a new employee, said ERGs help “you to find your little micro community.” The article I am citing appeared in the Los Angeles Times (July 7th, B6, Business Section), a week or two after the beta roll-out of Google+, Google’s social media platform whose distinguishing feature is the capacity to create precise “micro communities” or Circles. I perceive a connection between corporate culture, social media, and the political economy of personalization—the for-profit pursuit of an individualized internet.
Both ERGs and Circles express logics internal to Google about the agency to make tribes based on taste affinities into smaller, select groups. While this movement towards greater agency, localization, personalization, and privacy appears as a corrective to the callous notion of Zuckerbergian transparency it does represent a reiteration of the filter bubble. The filter bubble is the tendency towards echo chambers and siloing online. Because filter bubbles isolate like minds and inhibit cross-cultural contact it may have an eroding impact on democracy and the efficacy of democratic services such as journalism.
Google’s ERGs and Google+’s Circles both enshrine subjectivity. Eli Pariser, in his new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You…, examines the political economy of personalization across the internet. Because companies like Google and Facebook and more secretive and ominous cloud firms like Acxiom are collecting our digital residue they are able to tailor our experiences to give us what they and their algorithms think we want–more of ourselves and less of others. This is personalization and it is primarily driven by the desire to target ads specifically to individual people based on an induction from their history of searches, “likes,” key words in emails, tags on photos, and social media updates. As a progressive social activist and founder of Moveon.org, Pariser is concerned with the future of American democracy in an era in which individuals only hear the nice and comforting messages from their friends and like-minds as opposed to the difficult and important information about local and global politics. In the tradition of Lessig and Sunstein, Pariser provides numerous dystopic examples and several doable solutions for ways we can retain the rights to our digital identity.
In a recent post on Google+, Pariser, who is in one of my hand-selected circles (“Activists”), asked:
Google+ ought to provide anthropologists with some really interesting data: how do people think about the subgroups within their friends/associates/colleagues? What are the most popular circle schema? Etc.”
Good question. Anthropologist John Postill, who is a “friend” on Facebook, reaffirmed this sentiment in a status update:
There was always something profoundly unsettling about Facebook’s blanket notion of ‘friend’. The new personal network site Google+ tries to fix this anthropological bug by allowing you to put different categories of people into their own ‘circles’. Another massive cultural experiment under way?”
Thinking about Daniel Miller’s Tales from Facebook later on in the post, Postill acknowledged that some cultures may like the reductiveness of the “Like” button (an example possibly being the Trinidadians studied by Miller). Regardless, both of these scholar-activists are correctly concerned about the shifting agency surrounding personal broadcasting.
Are we witnessing a move from the broadcasting era of web 2.0 to the narrowcasting to an en-Circled group of a hand-picked people on Google+? I propose that an answer to Pariser’s and Postill’s question can be found throughout the history of Facebook, the dawn of non-profit social media org Diaspora, and the rise of Google+. But I am going to briefly focus on how a reading of Google LLC’s in-house culture of encouraging corporate micro-communities or ERGs gives us insight into the logic if Circles is a socio-technological preset for profitable participatory culture.
Stacey Sullivan, Google’s Chief Cultural Officer, encourages ERGs, “It makes us more inclusive and it breaks down the walls and the disconnects that could happen in such a big organization.” I would argue it is not inclusivity but exclusivity that is propagated by such systems. ERGs erect walls based on age, gender, ethnicity, and tenure within the corporation itself. This is not unlike the logic behind Google+ that encourages us to define numerous micro-communities based on broad cultural schema or on much more subjective and judgmental formats. Who knows what constitutes these schemata? We don’t, because we don’t know what categories we are put in. This absence of transparency on Google+ makes it impossible to reflexively know the grounds for our Google+ relationships. Members of Google’s ERGs at least know where they stand. On Google+ we don’t know what the name of the Circle is that we are in and therefore don’t have the footing to understand the relationship–only that we were selected and going to receive a filtered form of personalized knowledge. This is another sign of the end of broadcast media and the closing of some semblance of a techno-infrastructure with which to argue for collective governance.
This returns us to the Filter Bubble and the problem of personalization. Oddly enough on the same LA Times page (B6) there is an article on the digital data deluge as reported from the Economist magazine’s two day conference where Electric Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, Macrowikieconomics author Don Tapscott, and The Shallows scribe Nicholas Carr, amongst others, discussed the cultural consequences of the fact that, as Barlow stated, “Everything you do in life leads to a digital slime trail.” Google+’s response to the data deluge and the slime trail is personalized control over information—their algorithms will do much of the work of assuming the role of a personalized curator and they give us Google+ for us to do the rest of the handpicking ourselves. Google, Inc. gets to reap the rewards of combining their cookied knowledge about our searches with the data from our blossoming social life on Google+ into efforts to personalize advertising directly to us. Win-win?
The similarities between Google Corp.’s ERGs and Google+ shows a corporate logic that runs from the firm to its platforms, impacting 10 million Google+ users thus far. But a more pessimistic view sees Groups and Circles as trends towards splinternets and cyberbalkanization of internet-enabled networks. This worries me. Forgive my universalism for a moment: at this point in time what “we” needs is an honest public dialogue on major issues, not the insular banter of ideological tribes. We need to take control of our public digital discourse. Broadcast media, in the form of cable television, or in the halcyon days of Web 2.0, with its crude category of “friends” and the associated public soapbox, at least gave us some simulation of diversity, access, and publicity.
Are Circles and ERGs metaphors or new forms of guilds and clans? Either or, the larger tribe would be a corporation whose logic and practice structures the smaller groupings under its guidance. Even corporations who pretend to “Do no evil” are motivated to reap surplus economic value from our social relations. How satisfied are we to have a dominant form of sub-cultural development be structured by the profit-motive?
the points you make concerning filter bubbles and g+ are worth raising and debating, and thanks for doing so.
working the google ERGs into the discussion probably doesn’t make sense, though. i’ve worked for four large US tech companies and all of them had analogous programs, serving quite similar sets of minority and interest groups. the weirdest experience i’ve had was being invited to an “career forum” for my particular ethnicity and having it turn out to be a content-free, high-pressure recruiting pitch for the ERG-equivalent for my ethnicity. (i’m guessing the organizers had figured out that they could get some promotion cred with their management if they could “grow” the employee group – huzzah for reductive diversity goals.)
Even if information is broadcasted, it is ususlly only consumed by those within a narrow circle. The internet is already balkinised because people only read what they are interested in, i.e. that which matches their psychograohical profile, ti yse an ugly marketing term.
Very interesting commentary, very clearly based on the subjectivity of your area of academic focus (equally clearly: no judgment intended on that fact; I’m all about subjectivity :).
In my doctoral research on the nature of contemporary organizations (that is, organizations that are consistent with a world that is ubiquitously connected and therefore, pervasively proximate), I found that all such organizations have a construct that is akin to the ERG. In my findings, irrespective of the name, such groups enable new members to acculturate, and create a sense of collective responsibility and mutual accountability. In most cases, the groups’ boundaries are sufficiently permeable to prevent balkanization or siloing; the other aspects of a collaborative culture based on binding relationships that are framed to support common values and enable common sensibilities and volition to action tend to prevent some of the problematics typically associated with status- or class-connected, select groups in more traditional organizational cultures. (For those who might be interested, here’s a link to my research on Valence Theory.)
The link between the logic of ERGs and G+ circles *is* interesting; I tend to believe that
[cont’d]…I tend to subscribe to the notion that the nature of organizational culture transformation from “traditional” (that I refer to as BAH – Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, Hierarchical) to “more contemporary” (UCaPP – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate) creates a change in fundamental worldview among the organization’s members. Hence, it’s not unreasonable that those aspects of the cultural worldview would inform the design of the organization’s offerings, especially in a learning organization like Google that has had the benefits of the lessons from Buzz and Wave.
You know, there is a (maybe) interesting debate in political science on this subject, probably best represented by Diana Mutz and her book “Hearing the Other Side” which argues that deliberative and activist/participatory democracy might be incompatible. Either you have affinity around causes and the need for action, in which diversity of opinion and argument derail things, OR you have rich, deliberative diversity that leads to “agreeing to disagree” rather than action. I’m not sure I buy her version of things, but the debate is relavent to what you are noticing here, and especially so because it is another one of those cases where the first impulse is to say “OMG we have never seen this before, we are about to become ERG/Google+ Circle slaves!” when in fact, the debate–the problem it represents–might be something of longer duration and in need of deeper contemplation than identifying it as a “filter bubble”. I remember very clearly having a nearly identical debate in 1995 with some MIT Media Lab folks who were all amped up about a newspaper recommendation system that would deliver you news articles based on your interests and past reading. Yawn.
Maybe Wikipedia should be our social network!
I think it depends on how users set up their circles… needless to say, users aren’t all going to set up circles the way googler’s do.
There’s always going to be some strange flowers produced by corporate foam whippers and other cults.
But don’t forget, a Republican has always known which paper to buy in the morning, that wasn’t full of “bleeding liberal nonsense” and special subject magazines are legion.
More importantly, the News are mostly top-down controlled by the owners of AP and Reuters, the rest of the media and the internet is a hall of mirrors, where the same snippets get spun according to opinion and agenda, re-chewed like grass till the cows come home. Degenerated to propaganda, who can take it serious?
My use of circles also does not seem to match your or Pariser’s theory. My circles are named for subjects, like you would sort different types of news feeds.
Google+ isn’t a place I’m going to move into, like a house or a village, it isn’t going to be my social life, nor a place where I feed some mental body of useless opinions; I’m planning to use it as a tool for collaboration, a better skype with extra bells and whistles.
Had a facebook account for years. never could see any reason to put up info or use it in any other way. A google search fetches me everything I normally want from the internet. Well facilitated collaboration across geographic distance is where my personal hope for Google+ goes, one further step on the way to a star-trek style personal teleporter.
But I guess its like cars, for some people they’re just transportation, for others, they mean status, prestige or even a way of life.
@ckelty – thanks for the Diana Mutz link, interesting idea. I’ve long thought the anarchist practice of consensus melds action with deliberation quite well. However, it does require a sort of “culture of agreeing-to-disagree” (or something beyond tolerance) in which to exist.
As for internet balanization, there are some who think balkanization can be just fine: http://www.zcommunications.org/dont-mourn-balkanize-essay-after-yugoslavia-by-andrej-grubacic …but again, a baseline cultural assumption of something beyond tolerance for one’s neighbors would seem necessary. How to get there from here would be the question.
Echoing @ckelty, I had this debate inside of Google in 2005 when we were talking about automatically generated recommendations for both web pages and video content. This debate has been going on for quite a long time.
I think the ERG comparison doesn’t support your point because within Google, ERGs are built on the presumption that you are generally immersed in mainstream Google culture and will on a daily basis spend lots of time with people who are not in your “tribe” (to use your term). ERGs are not a means of stratification but instead a means of giving minority groups a sense of critical mass and a safe space to explore that aspect of themselves.
I wonder if it would be more interesting to look at the culture of the Mission district in San Francisco, where many Googlers and Google+ tech savvy types live, and look at how conversations do or don’t happen across groups, or even how groups are constituted in space. I’ve been back in SF after having been doing fieldwork in India for 9 months and it is stunning how, compared to life in Delhi, the Mission’s urban space stratified with fairly clean economic and racial boundaries drawn between Mission St and Valencia St. Each cafe has its scene, perhaps the logic of the circle. Maybe critical geography has more to offer in understanding how these online and offline spaces of exchange get organized.
Re: “Thinking about Daniel Miller’s Tales from Facebook later on in the post, Postill acknowledged that some cultures may like the reductiveness of the “Like” button (an example possibly being the Trinidadians studied by Miller). Regardless, both of these scholar-activists are correctly concerned about the shifting agency surrounding personal broadcasting.”
I think I may have made myself unclear in an email to Adam responding to an earlier draft of this blog post. What I was trying to say is that some individuals and societies/social groups may actually like the fact that Facebook does not compartmentalise people, i.e. what for some of us is problematic, for others it may actually be a big part of the appeal of FB.
I will need to revisit “Tales from Facebook” on this point, but if I remember correctly, according to Danny Miller the Trinidadians he worked with took an immediate liking to Facebook – although the collapsing of boundaries sometimes got people into trouble. By contrast to the village-like surveillance provided by Facebook, mobile phones allow Trinidadians (and Jamaicans) much greater discretion and segmentation in their social intercourse.
It may be interesting to see who ends up opting for Google+ and why, as opposed to FB – supposing Google+ ever takes off. I hear Google+ is big in Pakistan, but I’ve no idea why.
“Google’s ERGs and Google+’s Circles both enshrine subjectivity.”
Funny you should mention this. I’m in the process of enshrining my subjectivity. I’m tired of everyone else’s soiling it.
Seriously, I don’t buy it.
You describe Google Circles and G+ as “filters” (which I agree with), but your underlying concern seems to treat them more like impermeable barriers. They are membranes, and exist within a larger open-sided information sphere, just like ERGs. If I want to swim in unfiltered digital information, or people, it’s easy and cheap to do so, and usually a waste of time.
Don’t believe me? Go to the California State Fair sometime…
I like my coffee without grounds in it, and without dirt and stems, for that matter. Filters are good things most of the time. Nothing more, nothing less.