“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

The word was first coined by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. According to the Guardian news site,  Doctorow says it involves:

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

And ultimately, he says it should involve the demise of the platform.

I would like to nominate Facebook as a champion of enshittification. It used to be an excellent site where you found out what was happening in your “friends” lives and told them what was happening in yours, including how you felt and what concerned or amused you about the world. But then, Facebook did the following:

• It introduced algorithms that limit whose posts you see and who sees your posts. So you now have to go to each individual friend’s page to see what they have been up to, and your posts only come up in a small percentage of friend’s feeds.
• Facebook decided to lower the priority of posts that have links to outside websites, especially news sites, so they now are rarely seen by the poster’s friends. This has had many effects. It stops people from linking to the sources of information in a post, so it is much harder to check out whether a post’s information is correct, meaning there is now a greater chance of misinformation being spread by Facebook posts. This lowering of the priority of posts with links also makes it harder for writers like myself to plug their writing on Facebook.
• Facebook flooded feeds with advertising. Now, a Facebook feed has to be extensively scrolled to catch up with friends’ posts.
• Much of that advertising on Facebook is for scams. According to a series of recent articles in The Age newspaper, scammers love Facebook, and Facebook doesn’t care about stopping them: Social Media Scams and Psychopaths are the Best; Confessions from Inside the Scam Industry. Fortunately ads in feeds can be eliminated by installing the FB Purity extension in your browser. I have been using it for the past month.

I hereby declare Facebook a champion of enshittification. If there was alternative to Facebook, like Bluesky is to X, I would have little hesitation in leaving Facebook.

About six years ago, I wrote the essay below for my BA in Internet Communications. It is about how Facebook can actually be beneficial for one of the major disabilities in Australia: depression. I think the ideas in the essay can be applied to children.

The identification and support of individuals on Facebook with depression is enhanced by the anonymity, privacy and bridging ability of their personal community’s weak network ties. 

This paper argues that the weak ties, like workmates or service providers, of an individual’s personal community can be very useful in supporting that individual. Weak ties are especially useful when strong ties, like close friends and family, fail to adequately offer support. This paper begins by explaining Mark Granovetter’s (1973) network theory and its strong and weak ties and examines each ties’ advantages and disadvantages. It then shows how strong and weak ties operate online and some differences between their online and offline use. College student-based studies and a case study of an individual’s Facebook page are then used to show how strong and weak ties are useful in identifying and supporting individuals with depression. These studies show the anonymity, privacy and bridging ability of a personal community’s weak ties make up for some of the potential shortcomings of strong ties when tackling health concerns such as depression.

Our connections with people come in many forms and intensities that can be broadly categorised as strong or weak ties. These terms originated from network theory developed by Mark Granovetter in his seminal work The Strength of Weak Ties (Granovetter, 1973). Granovetter argues that all individuals have a network of people they know and interact with, which are their ties. Strong ties come in the form of family and friends and are people likely to engage with one another, while weak ties are more acquaintances, like neighbours, classmates and workmates, who are less likely to engage with other members of the individual’s network. Strong ties tend to have similar demographics, like class, race and religion, to the individual at the centre of the network (Wright & Bell, 2003). Whereas weak ties can be more dispersed in their demographics. Weak ties usually develop around a specific interest, like a hobby or work. (Donath & boyd, 2004). A network with many strong ties is considered high density, while a network with many weak ties is low density (Granovetter, 1983).  As Wellham and Wortley (1990) point out, most people have a mixture of strong and weak ties in their own personal community.

Network theory is at the heart of social media. Without people connecting and creating strong and weak ties social media would not exist. Social media sites encourage this connecting or networking through the act of friending or liking someone or an organisation on a site like Facebook or following someone on a site like Twitter. Boyd and Ellison (2008) claim our strong and weak ties online are usually strong and weak ties offline. That means that people are using social media to connect to ties like friends, family and workmates who they know offline. But Wright and Bell (2003) argue that people engage with a more diverse range of people online than is possible offline. This diversity occurs because they frequently engage with people online based on one common interest, such as having depression, but they can be completely different in other aspects of life. A person’s online and offline ties may be similar, but there is the potential for more weak ties online.

As network theory is at the heart of social media, it is also central to the construction of online communities. An individual using social media, like Facebook, can create their own personal online community by friending and accepting friend requests from other Facebook users. Wellham and Gulia (1999) argue that online communities have many of the characteristics of offline communities and that online communities can offer support and information like offline communities do. They argue a community can use the web to maintain its strong ties. Therefore, an individual can use social media to maintain their own personal community of strong ties. Like Wright and Bell (2003), Wellham and Gulia (1999) also hypothesise that the net can increase the number of weak ties a community has as people connect more due to shared interests than shared demographics. Network theory’s strong and weak ties are central to both social media and online personal communities.

Each type of tie has its advantages and disadvantages. Strong ties, in the form of family and close friends, offer companionship, emotional support, and a sense of belonging. A person with a personal community network of strong ties is likely to receive a great deal of support from family and friends (Donath & boyd, 2004). Family and friends can feel obligated to listen and offer advice, but this support may become judgemental (Wright & Bell, 2003). Granovotter (1983) argues that each of the ties in an individual’s network has their own network of ties, and weak ties can act as bridges between networks. Granovotter (1983) goes on to say that strong ties such as family and friends are likely to have similar socio-economic characteristics and life experiences to each other and the individual at the centre of the network. Conversely, weak ties, such as a person’s dentist or gardener, are more likely to have ties with people who have no connection to the individual’s network. Therefore, an individual with many weak ties in their personal community has many potential bridges to other personal communities to which they are not directly tied. Those weak ties are likely to have different socio-economic characteristics from the individual at the centre of the community. These weak tie bridges can, therefore, give them access to a wider range of information and life experiences. Conversely, an individual with a dense network of strong ties may find themselves isolated from other groups in society (Granovetter, 1983; Wright & Bell, 2003; Donath & boyd, 2004). An individual with a personal community dominated by strong ties is likely to get a lot of support but have less access to the diverse information and opinions of weak ties.

Online and offline personal communities have differences. One of the major differences occurs because the text-based nature of social media makes it possible for users to choose when and how much information to reveal about themselves. They can choose what information to include on their profile for a social media site like Facebook or Twitter. They may exaggerate or lie on their profile or make up a completely fake profile. In doing this, a person can hide a significant amount of personal and socio-economic information which could quickly unravel in the offline world if they were to meet one of their online ties or even speak to them on the phone. This means that social media can offer a greater deal of anonymity when a person is interacting with weak ties who know very little about them. This anonymity can change the dynamics of an individual’s personal community. For instance, it can help avoid the stigmatisation of belonging to groups negatively associated with particular medical conditions (Wright & Bell, 2003).  For example, diabetes is frequently negatively associated with being poor, overweight and lazy. This anonymity means that people might be more open when interacting with weak ties on social media, and more likely to explore new ideas or ask what may be deemed stupid questions (Wright & Bell, 2003). Social media’s anonymity means people might be more open online, especially with their weak ties.

The solitude of viewing the online world also changes how people give help and support. Wellham and Gulia (1999) argue that people are more likely to provide information, support and companionship to their online rather than offline weak ties. They argue this may be due to the phenomenon of people being more likely to intervene when they think there is no one else to offer help and support to an individual. Because most people interact with social media in the privacy of their own space, they may consider themself the only reader of a post requesting help or an anguished status update and, therefore, feel the need to respond and offer assistance. Wellham and Gulia (1999) go on to claim that online group members often trust total strangers. This solitude, trust and support of weak ties might be why many people are prepared to open up about health concerns, like depression, to their social media network.

A large amount of the population suffers from undiagnosed and untreated depression. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2015) says around 8.9% of Australians reported having depression or feelings of depression in 2014-15. Of those with depression, many are not identified (Whitehill, Brockman & Moreno, 2013; Moreno et al., 2011) or do not receive treatment for their depression (Whitehill, Brockman & Moreno, 2013). One of the reasons they do not seek treatment is the stigma associated with mental health issues (Wright & Bell, 2003; Moreno et al., 2011). Lack of knowledge about depression and privacy concerns are also a reason (Moreno et al., 2011). This lack of identification and treatment of depression in the community needs to be rectified.

A supportive Facebook community can be used to identify depression. Early identification of depression on Facebook might prevent serious mental illnesses from developing or even suicide (Egan, Koff, & Moreno, 2013). Several research projects have been conducted into how US college students who use Facebook react to mental health issues within their individual communities (Egan, Koff, & Moreno, 2013; Whitehill, Brockman & Moreno, 2013; Moreno, et al. 2011). These studies found a high prevalence of depression among college students with 25 percent reporting depression or feelings of depression. The students studied by Egan, Koff, and Moreno (2013) thought that people were more likely to talk online about depression because they used Facebook as a diary and due to its anonymity. As noted previously in this paper, anonymity is more likely to be a factor with weak ties. Therefore, a person with a personal community dominated by weak ties is more likely to inform their community that they are depressed. Other researchers have found that emotionally unstable people are more likely to write Facebook status updates about their emotions (Berger & Buechel, 2012; Beshara, 2013). They may do this because they feel safe disclosing on social media while in the privacy of their home or room (Park et al., 2015), and people feel less judged with the lack of non-verbal cues online (Wright & Bell, 2003). Online disclosures of mental illness can also be less threatening than face-to-face disclosures (Berger & Buechel, 2012). Facebook also offers the opportunity for status updates to be hidden from certain members of an individual’s community, so if a person is worried about how their strong ties, like a judgemental sister, might react to a post about depression, they can exclude her from seeing the post. The willingness of individuals to disclose their depression to their online community due to privacy and perceptions of anonymity created by weak ties, means that they can be more easily identified and then offered support by that community.

Support for those with depression on Facebook can depend on the strength of the tie. Park et al. (2016) say that people with depression claim to get more support from Facebook than offline. Park et al. say this might be because it is easier to give support online than having to meet someone face-to-face. Wright and Bell (2003) suggest that if depression is uncommon or its discussion stigmatised amongst an individual’s strong ties, Facebook offers the opportunity for a depressed person to connect with weak ties who may have knowledge and similar experiences of depression. The US college students involved in the research projects had their own ideas on how Facebook users should respond to depression posts. Most said they would confront a close friend or strong tie face-to-face (Whitehill, Brockman & Moreno, 2013; Egan, Koff, & Moreno, 2013). But they would not do the same for acquaintances or weak ties, as they felt it would be an invasion of the weak ties’ privacy. The students also felt they may not know weak ties well enough to understand the context of their depression post. The students said they might mention the depression post to a friend with a closer tie to the depression poster, or they might report the post to an appropriate authority like a student councillor (Egan, Koff, & Moreno, 2013). It appears that a community of weak ties may make it more likely that an individual posts about their depression. If their strong ties fail to offer initial support, weak ties may prompt their strong ties into action or contact councillors to help them. Weak ties also potentially offer a more diverse range of information and experiences of depression.

A case study of an individual’s Facebook page (I have made them anonymous) is an example of how the weak ties of a personal community can offer support to a person with depression. The individual is a prolific poster on Facebook. In the past year, more of their posts have been about their depression and their anxieties as their medical practitioners alter their medications. The individual appears to be using their posts as a diary. Egan, Koff, and Moreno (2013) suggest some people with depression do this to record and share with their community what they are experiencing. The individual’s posts about their depression are among those that receive the most likes and comments and, as such, are more likely to appear in other members of the individual’s community’s Facebook feeds. There are few, if any, negative comments on the depression posts; just about all the comments are supportive or attempts to help. Many of the comments on their depression posts come from friends involved in the same industry, some of whom the individual meets offline. Therefore, the individual does not appear to enjoy anonymity from their strong offline ties on the web when discussing depression. Interestingly, their partner seems to be the only one in the individual’s family who comments on those posts, which may mean the individual has some anonymity from strong family ties when posting about their depression. Many of the comments appear to be from weak ties who live in other parts of Australia and lack familiarity with the individual. Their main connection with the individual appears to be that they engage in the products of the individual’s industry. Some of the individual’s weak ties discuss the individual’s treatment and offer information about their personal experiences. For example, when the individual posted about their anxieties around food, a commenter said they had to change what they ate due to illness and suggested our case study individual ask their psychologist to speak to a nutritionist. The individual also shared mental health information to and from their weak ties. The individual shared an explanation of anxiety from a weak tie. They thanked the weak tie for the share and stressed how important it was that more people knew what anxiety entails.  The individual’s weak ties offered them the opportunity to receive information and share information with other individuals and their communities, as well as receive support from a wider range of individuals with differing experiences of depression and its various elements.

This paper has shown that weak ties can make up for some of the shortcomings of strong ties in personal communities when it comes to identifying and supporting depression on social media like Facebook. The paper shows how the anonymity of weak ties on Facebook can make it more likely for someone to open up to their community and post about health concerns like depression. That anonymity can help people avoid the stigma and judgement around health concerns that can come with strong ties. It also shows how the private and solitary nature of social media makes posting about health concerns feel safer than mentioning them offline and makes it more likely that a weak tie will offer support. This paper has shown that people with many weak ties in their community have potential access to more diverse information and people with similar experiences than those available from their strong ties. If there is limited experience of a health concern or it is stigmatised within an individual’s close friends and family, a person with a diverse personal community containing many weak ties may be better supported and have access to more information to help them. Personal communities can be made stronger if they have plenty of weak ties that provide support and also act as bridges that spread and bring in information.

References:

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2015). National health survey: First results, 2014-15. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4364.0.55.001~2014-5~Main%20Features~Mental%20and%20behavioural%20conditions~32

Berger, J. A., & Buechel, E. (2012). Facebook therapy? Why do people share self-relevant content online? http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2013148

Beshara, R. (2013). Facebook friends as mental health amateurs: A case study on the new age subculture. Journal of Transpersonal Research, 5(2), 77-85. Retrieved from http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Besharawebsite-paper.pdf

Boyd, D, & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. http://dx,doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x

Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public displays of connection. bt technology Journal, 22(4), 71-82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:BTTJ.0000047585.06264.cc

Egan, K. G., Koff, R. N., & Moreno, M. A. (2013). College students’ responses to mental health status updates on Facebook. Issues in mental health nursing, 34(1), 46-51. http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.3109/01612840.2012.718044

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American journal of sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392

Granovetter, M. (1983). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological theory, 201-233. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/202051

Greenwood Yoga Academy. (2017). In Facebook, Retrieved on April 22, 2017,  from https://www.facebook.com/Northofperth/posts/1645418478805176

Moreno, M. A., Jelenchick, L. A., Egan, K. G., Cox, E., Young, H., Gannon, K. E., & Becker, T. (2011). Feeling bad on Facebook: depression disclosures by college students on a social networking site. Depression and anxiety, 28(6), 447-455. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/da.20805

Park, J., Lee, D. S., Shablack, H., Verduyn, P., Deldin, P., Ybarra, O., & Kross, (2016). When perceptions defy reality: the relationships between depression and actual and perceived Facebook social support.Journal of affective disorders, 200, 37-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.01.048

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I wrote more words of my novel in June than May, even though I started using Facebook again. I had a rule of not logging on to Facebook until I had written at least 500 words. So, on some days, I did not even log on to it. However, I developed the habit of stopping writing not long after I hit the 500-word mark so that I could play on Facebook. On 26 days during the month, I achieved my goal of 500 words; only on two days did I do more than 600 words. My best day was 1089 words. I wrote 15,488 words for the month—an average of 516 words a day.

I have written about 102,000 words of the novel and am about halfway through the fifth and final part. I had hoped to have finished the first draft by now, but I have decided to expand the final part. The decision to do that came about because previously I have read novels with characters on a physical journey arriving at their destination and then the novel suddenly ends, with a disappointed me wanting them to explore their destination more thoroughly. So, I have decided to satisfy a reader like me by doing the exploring.

I had pictured the novel as a stand-alone, but ideas for a sequel set 20 years later keep popping into my head, so there will be a sequel. But first, I have to re-draft this manuscript. Before that, I want to write a short story for a Christmas anthology that is being put together by one of my writing groups. A first draft is required by the end of August. Now, I just have to come up with an idea.

Critiquing.

Once again, I critiqued a story a week for critters.org during June. I read a story from a writer on the Australian Writers Forum, intending to critique it, when technology problems intervened: my internet was slowing down and dropping out. I am still unsure what caused the issue, even though I was reasonably systematic about trying to fix it. First, I replaced the splitter, which didn’t work, and then I replaced the long telephone cable with a shorter one, but the web dropped out just after I connected it. Then I bought a new top-of-the-range router/wifi thingy, as my router was about seven years old and the wifi about five. But the new router/wifi would not even connect to Westnet/iinet, my ISP.  I rang them and spent two hours on the phone; it still didn’t work. They said they would try a few things and asked me to keep my old router and wifi connected. They said they would ring back in two hours or so. Two and a half hours later, I got impatient and reconnected to the new router/wifi. It worked. Five days later, it has not dropped out and is slightly faster than before it slowed. iinet did ring back the next day, 26 hours later. They said they had fiddled with things, but I am none the wiser about whether my new router/wifi is more stable or something they did made my connection more stable.

Reading.

I did not do much reading during June as I was too tired at night. Fortunately, that tiredness has receded in the past week or so; I have no idea why. I am about two-thirds of the way through Amnesia, Peter Carey’s very enjoyable romp through 20th-century Australian politics and history. Its narrator is a very committed writer who is using an old portable typewriter to type even though he burnt his fingers trying to retrieve a manuscript thrown into a fire by its pissed-off subject.

Hopefully, some of his commitment will rub off on me, enabling me to finish the first draft of my current manuscript in July.

In May I started behaving more like a writer, even though I am still very tired. I wrote a lot more, and I started critiquing again. I put this down to quitting Facebook six weeks ago. I really missed Facebook, to begin with, but not so much anymore. I gave myself permission a few days ago to go back on Facebook, but I still haven’t ventured onto it, though I might to plug this blog post. I decided to only go on Facebook after I have written at least 500 words of fiction – or edited for 2-3 hours — and have done whatever critiquing activities I had scheduled for that day.

Novel Writing.

In May, I wrote 13,525 words of my novel Branded, more than doubling my monthly totals for this year. I reached my daily quota of 500 words on 18 days, with 1020 words as my best daily total. So, I averaged 436 words a day.

I have written approximately 87,000 words of the novel. I had hoped that the first draft would be around 90,000 words, but my characters decided not to cooperate with each other at the end of part four. Consequently, I have just started the fifth and final part of the novel. It should go for around another 10,000 words. So, I should finish the first draft in June.

I am writing it as a stand-alone novel with some hanging threads for the reader to imagine what might happens next. But those threads are starting to wrap my imagination in sequel ideas.

Critiquing.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had joined critters.org and the Australian Writers Forum. In May, I did a critique a week for critters, three short stories and the first chapter of a novel. One short story impressed with a non-traditional narrative style.  But the novel appeared to have a very overused plot driver.

So far, nothing has appeared on the Australian Writers Forum for me to critique, so I will start searching for active Australian science fiction critiquing groups again.

Reading.

I finished reading the disappointing What the Family Needed, by Steven Amsterdam. It had none of the urgency or call to action of his excellent Things We Didn’t See Coming. I will review What the Family Needed in my next blog post. I am just about to start reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. He’s one of my favourite authors, I loved True History of the Kelly Gang, and Illywhacker was great fun, too.