UMBC assistant professor of sociology Zeynep Tufekci investigates how we use Facebook, Twitter and other new social-networking services to define ourselves.

By Joab Jackson ’90
Illustration by Michael Glenwood

UMBC assistant professor of sociology Zeynep Tufekci is not a big fan of technology for its own sake. But if a new electronic gadget helps her get through the day more easily, she is all for it.

Take the baby rocker, for instance. She loves this device. On a summer day at home on maternity leave, Tufekci replaces the hulking C batteries of a pendulous crib that gently rocks her seven-week-old boy to sleep. Babies enjoy an easy back-and-forth motion when sleeping – the rhythmic lull reminds the infant of comfort of the womb. This crib creates a few minutes of space for Tufekci to attend to other matters.

The best technology not only solves human problems, but it can actually change our world – sometimes in ways we don’t fully recognize. And Tufekci has become one of the country’s most called-upon academic experts in explaining how new technologies of social networking—such as Facebook and Twitter—are changing the way we live. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other media outlets about the topic.

Although the term “social networking” is relatively new, the concept has been around since at least the 1980s, when people found that bulletin-board systems (which were nothing more than personal computers that other computers could dial into) provided a virtual meeting ground for exchanging messages, jokes, photos, recipes and anything else of interest.

From those humble beginnings, such virtual spaces are becoming an increasingly large part of our lives. Facebook alone reports having over 200 million users. And these spaces have impacts on external events. In June, thousands of disgruntled Iranians logged onto Twitter, another popular service that allows users to post 140-character messages for others to see, to protest the outcome of their presidential election. The cumulative effect of the angry and informative bursts of information from Tehran and elsewhere in the country not only brought more global news coverage to the election, but also helped protestors evade disruptions of mobile telephones and other messaging services by the government .

“People wonder why these technologies spread so much,” Tufekci says. “It’s kind of like asking: ‘Why do people like foods that are high in salt and sugar?’ Being deeply social is part of being human. It is part of your biology.”

Limits to the Digital Self

Researchers theorize that the average person can, at most, maintain cognitive relationships with about 150 people. Not surprisingly, then, the average number of the people who are “friended” in a typical Facebook user account is about 120, according to the company that runs the service.

Tufekci studies how social networking blurs the boundaries between public and private spaces, a topic she came across almost by accident, thanks to a group of students who “took a short cut they shouldn’t have,” she says.

In an introduction to a sociology class she taught, five students turned in sheets to a quiz with identical handwriting. When she confronted the students about it, they all swore that they didn’t know each other. She already knew they were acquaintances, however, even if they didn’t sit together in class. Each of their Facebook profiles had listed the others as friends. Eventually, they ’fessed up.

After Tufekci disciplined the students involved in the incident, she reflected at greater length on the interaction. “What got me really interested was the fact that these were very smart students, but they did not figure out that their Facebook profile was public,” she says. “I saw that these students are conceptualizing Facebook as a private place, but it is potentially a very public space.”

Tufekci found this peculiar conflation of private and public in digital space revealing. She argues that social networks are a natural extension of our social lives – albeit with some subtle but important differences. When the use of the Internet first became widespread in the mid-1990s, many assumed that users would adopt new roles online, expanding beyond the confines of their physical selves. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” was the caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon of the time.

But this perception that one has the ability to create a new self online largely hasn’t turned out to be the case. Most people use the Internet in general, and social networks in particular, as an extension of their lives, rather than as an alternative to them. “They want to do mundane things. They want to do people things,” she says.

Sam Gosling, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin who also studies social media, agrees with Tufekci. Social media, he observes, “is kind of like the telephone. It’s a new technology for expressing the sorts of things we need to do anyway.”

A Slippery Space

Nonetheless, such online social gathering spots can differ from our normal meeting places, such as a friend’s house or a restaurant, in subtle ways that most users don’t fully appreciate. This disparity in perceptions is what Tufekci’s work centers upon.

In a study published last year in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Tufekci examined the actions and perceptions of 704 college students who used Facebook. A peculiar conundrum emerged: Many students expressed privacy concerns about posting information in a public forum. Yet their concerns did not inhibit them from posting a great deal of revealing information about themselves – including their relationship status, their birth date and their cellular telephone numbers.

What are the dangers of having such information out there? In the real world, two individuals may meet and have a conversation. Both people see each other and the conversation fades into their memories. We traditionally think of this interaction as a private conversation. With social-networking sites, however, those same words can be preserved for the ages, and they are available for others to see.

“Usually intimate interactions are in closed space, and public spaces are civic stuff and they are not intimate. Here we have intimate stuff that is public,” Tufekci says. This “collapsing of the boundaries and conflating of characteristics of private and public spaces” can muddy the way people think about how to use such spaces, such as underestimating how many people will actually see that photo of late-night merriment that you posted only for a few friends.

“I’m a big fan of her work,” says Timothy Finin, a professor in UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department who studies ways to bridge machine languages and human languages. “We’ve developed an understanding about information-sharing based on the physical world. And a lot of those same intuitions don’t apply to the virtual world, and that’s where people can run into problems.”

Talking about Tufekci’s work, Finin is reminded of something called the Wason Selection Task, in which sociologist Peter Wason showed that people may use a different part of their brains for thinking about social rules than they do for solving abstract problems. “Maybe, while on the Internet, you do most of the thinking with your [logical] part of the brain you use with the computers, and not the social part,” Finin says.

Computer Science to Social Science

Tufekci is no stranger to large, sprawling communities. She grew up in Istanbul, which, with about 12 million residents, is the fourth largest city in the world by most estimates. She actually started her career not in sociology, but in computer programming. But she found herself more fascinated by the social effects of technology than with the minutiae of the C programming language.

After taking a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, Tufekci studied the effects of technology on low-income people. As part of her research, she followed a group of people going through a computer-skills training program that held out the promise of high-paying jobs upon the completion of the courses.

“That was a time when people were saying that the Internet would solve everything for everyone,” Tufekci says. “I found it was not so great for people, especially if you are low-income and available jobs are being automated and outsourced.”

Tufekci’s work spans multiple disciplines – sociology, social psychology, computer science, psychology, anthropology and communications. “My work doesn’t fit into an existing discipline. It’s fairly grounded in sociology, but it has been very interdisciplinary,” she says.

Gosling observes that Tufekci’s work is “dispersed over many disciplines, many of which have difficulty talking with each other.”

UMBC has been instrumental in helping Tufekci follow this emerging field of study. When she was in the academic job market, she wanted to find a university that was open to her pursuit of a multi-disciplinary approach.

Surprisingly, such schools were hard to locate. While many hiring committees voiced appreciation for the benefits of studying across departmental lines, they were shyer about hiring such a wandering academic.

At UMBC, however, Tufekci says that she found kindred spirits.

“They hired me knowing that I would be cutting across different disciplines,” she says.

It would be a mistake to dismiss social-networking services as a fad. MySpace and Facebook are this year’s popular virtual destinations for many, and their influence may fade within a few years, but chances are they will replaced by other services. Social-networking services have gained their present popularity by reflecting both innate human behaviors and contemporary trends.

By and large, the Internet started out as a male-dominated domain. But in another 2008 study, published in Information, Communication & Society, Tufekci found that the gap has closed. More women than men whom she studied used Facebook, by a slim margin. “What this showed was that if you have the kind of application that is appealing to women, then they are perfectly willing to adopt it,” she says.

In the same study, Tufekci also found that the difference of how men and women used social-networking services reflected traditional gender roles. Men would use services as a search mechanism for finding things on the Internet. (“What they were searching for, we never found out,” Tufekci jokes.)

Women, by contrast, use such services to connect with existing friends. “I thought this is so stereotypical. You think we’re past that – but apparently not,” she says.

At present, Tufekci is working up an academic review that she hopes will explain how social networks fit in the larger picture of how people have traditionally related to one another. For Tufekci, the use of social-networking services represents a return, in at least some aspects, to a time when we lived in smaller and more close-knit communities.

Only in the past 150 years or so have the vast majority of people left their villages to live and work in larger cities, she notes. Such moves to larger urban centers have brought about a sense of isolation and even alienation, to judge from popular analysis from books such as 1950’s Lonely in the Crowd (written by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) and 1956’s The Organization Man (William Whyte). In many ways, the social-networking sites are returning elements of this older way of living to us, for better and for worse.

“That is the kind of environment our species has lived in for the past 100,000 years,” Tufekci says. “We’re not going back to the village, but we’re bringing back some of its aspects. I want to explain why this is an important development in human history. The questions on the table are not trivial.”

Find UMBC Alumni On Facebook.

I am delighted that one of the features in this issue is written by John Strausbaugh ’74, interdisciplinary studies. Strausbaugh has had a successful career in journalism and cultural criticism, and is the author of a string of books that explore fascinating byways of American culture.

But I’m particularly happy to have Strausbaugh in the magazine because I would not have launched my own career without his help. It’s a story that demonstrates the power that alumni have to mentor and shape the careers of those who follow after them.

You might already have recognized the goofy face on the UMBC identification card below. (Though the Social Security number that also served as campus identification back then has been obscured.) I arrived at UMBC in August 1984, having transferred from the University of Pittsburgh, and was interested in becoming a writer.

Thanks to a continuing web of alumni relations between writers and faculty in the English Department in that era, local writers like Strausbaugh (who was writing fiction and involved in local theatre at that time) were often invited back to give readings on campus.

But Strausbaugh’s increasing claim to fame at that moment was his book and music reviewing for Baltimore City Paper – reviews in which he championed his favorites and savaged whatever he thought was inferior.

After a reading that Strausbaugh gave at the English department one semester, we got to chatting about culture. He looked past the big goofy glasses and saw that I might have some future in the journalism game. Not only did Strausbaugh start letting me hang out with him occasionally, but he also eventually brokered a chance for me to break into print at City Paper. My first review – 10,000 Maniacs’ The Wishing Chair – ran in that newspaper in November 1985, while I was still a student at UMBC.

The chance to put clips from City Paper in my portfolio was a great launching pad for my career. I gained a foothold in journalism that eventually took me great places: On tour with Uncle Tupelo. Reporting on media in Bosnia and pop culture and politics in Serbia. Covering national political conventions.

But it happened largely because an alumnus helped out a student. And while it’s a story that no doubt has been repeated thousands of times at UMBC across many disciplines and schools, it’s also a reminder that we, as alumni, can help shape futures by becoming actively involved in the lives of those who attend UMBC after us.

Want an easy way to get started? Sign up to be a Professional Network mentor. The joint effort between UMBC’s Career Services Center and Alumni Relations allows students to connect with professionals in their desired fields. Go to www.careers.umbc.edu to see what it’s all about and sign up.

— Richard Byrne ’86
byrne@umbc.edu

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. What book do you recommend that every young person read before they go out into the “real world?”

— Shivonne L. Laird ’99, biological sciences

A. Right now, I think it’s important for students to be constantly reading. And to read even more when they go into the real world, because life is changing in so many ways.

Now if I were forced to choose a book, I would say Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded today. Because it focuses on the need for a green revolution, the impact of technology, the critical role that research on energy will play and the need for innovation and nation-building. It puts America into the global context.

Q. I am impressed by UMBC’s growth, but it seems like the arts are getting the short side of the stick. Are there plans to increase the budget for the arts at UMBC or to expand course and degree offerings in visual arts, theatre, writing and music?

— Maria E. Watters-Mahone ’87, English and M.A. ’00, instructional development systems

A. It’s a great question. The arts and humanities are very much alive here. The fact that we have a new College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) has to do with our continued commitment to build those disciplines. And our number-one capital project – a $150 million facility – is the new performing arts and humanities building for which we have gotten planning funds, and hope to receive construction funds, in order to break ground in 2010.

I spent time today presenting our proposal for construction funds for that facility. And we’ll be spending time every day with legislators and people representing the Governor’s office, about the importance of that building. The fact is that the arts and humanities building, over the next few years, will transform the campus physically and aesthetically.

The development of our Humanities Scholars Program and our Linehan Artist Scholars program is especially significant in attracting high-achieving, talented students in the arts and humanities and getting them support here. Building a community of scholars. And the Dresher Center for Humanities itself is a very strong intellectual initiative on our campus, focusing on research and teaching in the humanities.

More and more is happening in those areas. I invite alumni to come back to some of these activities. And to serve as mentors to our current students.

I’m especially excited about the Kauffman entrepreneurship grant, which is heavily focused in the arts. People expect it to be in economics and engineering – and while those programs are involved, we have a lot of faculty in the arts and the humanities involved in entrepreneurship initiatives, with the thought that we should be preparing students through infusion of entrepreneurship into the curriculum, to be businesspeople. Because if you think about it, when someone starts a photography studio or a dance studio, it is a business that is designed to elevate people culturally, but also to make money. We are being creative about connecting entrepreneurs and the arts.

Q. Aesthetically, where do you think the university will be in five years? What kind of campus should I look forward to seeing when I visit a few years down the line?

— Elan Schnitzer ’06, political science

A. The greening of UMBC. That is our theme. Every time alumni come back, they will see more trees, bigger trees, more shrubbery, more flowers and more initiatives focused on the environment…. An emphasis on making the campus physically and aesthetically appealing to newcomers and alumni as well as faculty, staff and students.

With $400 million in new construction – and with the new arts and humanities building, it will be half a billion – it has been important to focus on the well-being of the environment. I think the biggest difference between the campus today and the campus 20 years ago is grass and trees. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the concrete and laid down grass. And there are never enough trees. The growth of the trees is symbolic of the growth in the stature of the university itself.

Many theatre companies are born out of a mixture of inspiration and frustration. Take The Venus Theatre in Laurel, for instance.

When its founder, Deborah Randall ’94, theatre, graduated from UMBC, she pursued a career as a playwright and a performer in Washington, D.C. Like many recent graduates, Randall had a desire to succeed in a challenging profession. But she also found some of the roles she played and the theatrical atmosphere that surrounded her to be stifling her creativity. She craved a theatre that valued women and living playwrights.

Randall recalls UMBC theatre professor Wendy Salkind’s advice to her. “Every time I would gripe to her,” Randall recalls, “she’d say: If it doesn’t exist, create it. That was her mantra to me.”

The theatre company that Randall founded in 2001 is dedicated to filling what she sees as a gap in the Baltimore-Washington region, presenting shows with a decidedly female perspective and recent work by contemporary playwrights.

The company is in the middle of its current season, which features new plays that include a fresh look at the experience of women characters in Shakespeare and a contemporary retelling of Medea set in Los Angeles. The series concludes this coming fall with a new World War II memory play called Why’d You Make Me Wear This, Joe? by acclaimed writer Vanda and a comedic look at a very difficult Helen of Troy in a new play called Helen of Sparta.

Randall says that the emphasis on new work – especially by women playwrights – is important to her. A steady cultural diet of reality television and revisiting the classical repertoire, she observes, has meant that “there are so many writers who are not getting an opportunity.”

Finding and nurturing new work, she says, “is part of the life of the theatre…. Finding the pulse in a new work is kind of what I wake up in the morning to do.”

Creating what ultimately became Venus Theatre took time, however. Randall started small, crafting one-woman shows for herself that played in various venues in Washington, D.C. She also started a reading series for women writers and tried her hand at children’s theatre before settling on more adult fare.

After a series of misadventures and mishaps, including one show that had its last week in a D.C. theater interrupted by a street explosion that rendered the space unusable, Randall decided that she needed to find a more permanent home.

The constant scrapping and hustling for space to rent “was not cute anymore,” says Randall, especially after the street explosion. After a long search, she finally settled on a storefront space just off Laurel’s Main Street, which she dubbed “The Venus Theatre Play Shack.” She and a dedicated crew of volunteers transformed the place into a black box theater that’s become a new home base for the company, perched halfway between Washington and Baltimore and drawing from both cities and the surrounding community.

Randall recalls her time at UMBC fondly. “I was a nontraditional student,” she says. “So I was a few years older than everyone else. I had been to community college, worked for three years, sown some wild oats…. I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of the experience.”

Along with Salkind, she counts professors Xerxes Mehta and Alan Kreizenbeck as influences on her current career path. Randall also recalls that her roles in a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (directed by Mehta) and in Cinders – a play by Polish playwright Janusz Glowack, directed by Kreizenbeck – were particularly memorable.

Though Randall still writes plays (one of her works, Molly Daughter, is included in Anthracite! An Anthology of Pennsylvania Coal Region Plays, which was published by the University of Scranton Press), she says that she “has ended up more of a producer and a director than a writer and actor anymore.” Running a theatre company also involves a lot of logistics and fundraising.

But Randall’s commitment to helping produce new works by playwrights – especially women playwrights – remains a primary challenge that she’s happy to take on. With the classics, she observes, “all the kinks have been worked out in a way.” New work, she says, is where the sizzle and satisfaction is.

“If it has been done too often,” she says, “it doesn’t interest me.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

For more information about Venus Playhouse, visit http://www.venustheatre.org/.