group online identity

facebook case study

Yesterday evening I went on an informal meet up about Facebook Apps, its capabilities and its possible future uses.
Coming back home from this relatively short and relatively alchol-free night, I felt quite inspired :P about it and had more thinking through. So that's what this post draws from.

What are group identities
Group or collective identities refer to the set of characteristics associated with a particular group. By becoming members of a group, we take on these traits, which therefore become part of our individual identities [1], but at the same time as members and individuals we can also challenge those traits, thus contributing to reshaping them over time.
Group identities therefore work two ways: from the collective to the individual and viceversa.

Group identities and Facebook Groups
With social networking taking off, we now have the possibility to reflect our offline, individual identity, online, by creating a user's profile and writing some stuff about ourselves, our tastes, our preferences and so on. However, I find that collective identities in social networking websites are not equally well represented, although present in other online environments (mailining lists and Google groups are two examples).

In particular, I'd like to point at the "groups" feature in Facebook, which is arguably the most or one of the most popular social networks available these days.
Facebook allows you to join an existing group, or create a group on about anything you want to. As a member you can do some typical operations of an individual Facebook profile, such as putting some pictures in it or writing on the group wall.

Current limitations and ideas for the future
However, it seems to me that Facebook is missing the biggest point: the two-way communication between the group "entity" and its members.
For example, there is no way of putting an application on the group profile, so that every member can share it and upload stuff on it for the other members to have. Another limitation is that there is no common space where to edit information, such as a wiki kind of interaction. In short, Facebook treats groups as entities which merely connect some people together but it does not empower them so that they can also be effective contributors of those groups.

As a consequence, users end up joining lots of different groups to state something about themselves, eg. supporting anti-global warming or being fans of a particular football team, but they cannot take action or at least not do it easily, like, following the examples, sharing a list of to-dos in order to reduce global warming and reorganizingthem through member ratings or collaboratively setting up and writing a group newsletter.

As a Facebook user, I do hope that the potential of this social networking website will be fully exploited, increasing the complexity of the social relations represented, while retaining its usability and easiness to use. I hope therefore that Facebook developers will soon add functionalities to the "groups", instead of leaving them as little more than flags of our believes and values.
If this is not the case, with the exponential growth of third party applications which can now be interegrated within the system, I am sure someone will come up with a brilliant widget to improve these poor, empty, group profiles!


Notes
[1]For more information on how group identities can influence the formation of individual identity, see Turner’s theory of self-categorization in:
Turner, J.C., Hogg, M.A., Oakes, P.J., Reciher, S.D. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Rediscovering
the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory, Oxford, Basil, Blackwell.