I received two degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, but Facebook won’t let me join the UCLA network.

A Facebook network is an organizational category that allows my profile to come up when someone searches or browses in a particular group. At different stages in the life of the service, networks have been organized by institution (Georgia Tech), geography (Atlanta, GA), and industry (Coca-Cola).

Network membership offers tangible and intangible benefits. For one part, being in a network allows one to see information other members of that network, since Facebook’s privacy settings allow users to expose or conceal parts of their profiles according to network membership. I could reveal my office phone number to members of the Georgia Tech network but show my instant messaging handle only to friends. For another part, being member of a network makes it easier for people who might have had a relationship with me in the context of that network to find me again, former classmates or co-workers, for example. For yet another part, membership in a network is a declaration of identity: “I am an alumnus of UCLA,” or “I am a resident of Atlanta.”

Back to my problem: if anybody could join any network they wished, then no network would be credible. Since network membership confers both identity and trust, Facebook requires some verification to join one: an email address that matches the domain used by the university or company I wish to join.

This is no sweat for Facebook users who are also current students of a particular institution or employees of a particular company. When they move on to graduate school, a faculty position, or a job in industry, they can simply change their status in the network from “student” to “alumnus/alumna.” For people who are growing up with Facebook, network membership works invisibly.

For the rest of us, Facebook’s network system introduces problems, such as my issue joining UCLA’s network. Valid UCLA emails end with ucla.edu. But I don’t have a ucla.edu address anymore. Mine was shut down soon after I graduated.

The usual way to deal with this problem is by means of an alumni network. Many universities’ alumni organizations offer permanent email addresses or forwarders, allowing proud graduates to bask in the prestige of having attended a particular school. This is a relatively new practice, given the fact that email has only been a universal communication tool since the 1990s.

I went through the trouble of retrieving my University of Southern California alumni account (my undergraduate alma mater) so I could get an alumni.usc.edu forwarder set up, so I could in turn join the USC network. But UCLA’s situation is more complicated. First, the alumni association only offers email forwarding to active members of the association. That requires a financial contribution between $45 (annual) and $550 (lifetime). When I pay, UCLA gives me an email forwarder of the form you@UCLAlumni.net, but neither Facebook nor UCLA clarify whether or not Facebook’s UCLA network will recognize this address. If any email with “UCLA” somewhere inside it is deemed sufficient for network membership, both identity and trust would be violated.

The same challenge exists for former employees of a company. Consider a professional who once held an executive position with a company but then left to pursue another career path or to return to school. Let’s imagine that she left on good terms and still occasionally consults for her old company in her area of expertise.

Sometime later this professional joins Facebook. Having had an amicable departure her former company, as well as an ongoing relationship with former colleagues, she decides to join their network. But, not having a valid company email address, she can’t. Given the nature of corporate policy, it is almost impossible to imagine that she might secure a corporate “alumna” address suitable for facilitating her wish. Yet, outside of Facebook, this professional very much matches the criteria for network membership: she self-identifies as a former employee and she maintains an active relationship of trust with the company.

Facebook, Extension of Man

There are numerous ways to react to the way Facebook’s infrastructure enables and limits us. A common response is criticism: I could decry Facebook for serving up broken features that don’t work as they should, or that only work for kids. One thread about problems joining university networks in Facebook’s help center has inspired over two hundred replies, all gripes and accusations. But such a reaction is unproductive. It fails to help us understand how Facebook is changing our experience of the world before we pass judgement on those changes.

Another approach involves looking closely at Facebook as a medium for social interaction, and asking what properties are at work in it.

The twentieth century Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is rarely called a philosopher, but he should be: a philosopher of media. Of the many innovations that find their root in McLuhan’s work (including the very idea of the academic study of popular culture that makes books like this possible), his most influential claim is that the proper object of study in media is form, not content.

For McLuhan, the fact that the novel is read silently and alone is more important than the specific story of, say, Sense and Sensibility– just as the overall impact of mechanical factories on workers and society is more important than the particular products the factories produce. In the case of Facebook, McLuhan would be more concerned with the service’s ability to organize networks of people than with the specific acts people perform once they join.

McLuhan argues that media are “extensions of the physical human body or the mind,” that is, they affect the ways that people perceive, understand, and relate to the world. A “medium” is more than a delivery system, like a cassette tape or a pamphlet. McLuhan discusses media as diverse as roads, numbers, money, light bulbs, and advertisements in addition to more familiar examples like phonographs, movies, radio, and television. The light bulb is a medium? Sure it is!: it alters our relationship with the world by extending the amount of usable time in the day and making uninhabitable spaces habitable. For example, electric lights extend the workday beyond dusk, and they turn pitch-black roads into passable routes. Facebook, likewise, alters how we relate to friends and communities.

[ The rest of the article explains McLuhan’s method, particularly the idea of the “tetrad,” and performs a tetrad analysis on Facebook itself. You can read the whole thing in Facebook and Philosophy]

published September 27, 2010