More On Pre-Zuckerberg Prep-School Facebook Culture

Today an article I wrote for ReadWriteWeb went live titled “Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration For Facebook Come Before Harvard?‘. I think it’s a great question, one worth exploring far beyond the light coverage I gave it in the article because the answer can offer us important clues into why Facebook has been so successful.

Facebook is drastically changing the way we communicate and live our lives. Understanding where it came from, and how and why it grew so fast, is an important part of the story – one we should devote cultural and anthropological research to.  If you think Facebook is just some “Internet thing” that kids do (and a lot of adults surprisingly still do), then you’re completely disillusioned and you need to get your head out of the sand. The reality is that there is a whole generation of kids moving into their teens right now who will never know what it’s like to live in a world without the Internet and social networking…their rise marks the end of an era. And you know what they all have in common? Facebook. We’ve got to wrap our heads around how it affects our psychology, our culture, and how we can best use it to create and strengthen (not dehumanize) our communities and our relationships etc.  I think that telling a more complete  story of Facebook’s history is a critical piece of the “community 2.0″ puzzle.

For all of these reasons, I’d like to discuss the nature of some of the arguments I made in the ReadWriteWeb article and share a few thoughts and personal experiences from my time at prep-school and talk a little bit about those darn Facebooks we all loved back in the 90s. By the end I hope I’ll have helped paint a more complete picture of why I think Malcolm Gladwell would agree that Zuckerberg is a classic Outlier, why strong offline communities are a critical basis for successful online ones, and why Facebook exploded so quickly.

First Things First: It’s About The Inspiration, Not The Name.

I want to make a few things clear. I’m not trying to defame Mark in the article. I realize that it could be received that way. I think Mark is brilliant and that what he’s done with Facebook is revolutionary. He deserves the credit he’s gotten from the media. Given the evidence I accumulated when I was researching this article, there was really no way I could have told the truth without some arguments seeming (a little bit) like a knock. How could you possibly spin “The school you attended made something similar to your billion dollar business with the same name your senior year” in a way that doesn’t imply unoriginality to some degree? And I’d be lying if I told you that some (not all) of his high-school piers that I interviewed had a lot to say about that issue.

I personally think ownership of the idea and the name for Facebook is a moot point for a few reasons. First and foremost, there’s no evidence that Exeter (or any of The Big Ten prep schools) ever had any intent to start a commercial, trademarked business. Second, if they wanted to make a legal claim to the Facebook trademark or idea, they would have done it a long time ago.  And besides, the Exeter administration realistically stands to benefit a lot more from standing by Mark and listing him as a famed member of their alumni (and potential donor) than under any other scenario.  For these reasons, I think it’s important (if indeed events at Exeter did inspire him) to give Zuckerberg credit for recognizing a good thing and having the smarts to make something out of it. He’s still the reason the technology was created, democratized and made available to the world.  For that, we should commend him. Moving on…

More Historical Artifacts That Belong In The Facebook History Books

When I said “all of The Big Ten Prep schools” had “Facebook” directories before Zuckerberg, I wasn’t exaggerating. Prep students called them Facebooks for a reason.  I attended Choate Rosemary Hall from 1994-1998, and every fall semester, like all of my classmates, I got a copy of one of these…(this picture is of the front cover of the Choate “Directory Facebook” from my freshman year)

See what  I mean?

Interestingly…the Wikipedia page for “Facebook” mentions these books in the first paragraph…

The point I’m trying to make in the ReadWriteWeb article is that there are two important things to recognize here. The first is that the way these books were printed (with pictures, not just text) changed the way that students used them to interact and communicate. Adding pictures turned them from just a reference book (like a basic telephone directory) into social objects that students used to discuss their friends, find (new) people they saw on campus who they’d never met, see where people lived (dorms are not unlike Tribes), and facilitate gossip (who was hot and not) etc. The pictures were a key part of the socialization. Indeed, the “Face” in “Facebook” is part of what made (and still makes) these books a sticky element of prep school culture, and I’d argue the same for Facebook.com at colleges. I called it “Facebook-like” culture in the article for good reason.

The second important part of the story of these books is less obvious, but equally as important if you want to understand prep-school culture. Prep schools aren’t separate islands; The Big Ten is actually more of an isolated archipelago. There’s a strong sense of community and rivalry between Big Ten schools. Athletic and academic teams travel multiple times a week to other Big Ten schools to compete, but rarely to non Big Ten schools. Competition and socialization between the student bodies of The Big Ten have been built in to their academic daily rhythms and culture. Moreover, it’s common for siblings of upper class families to attend different big 10 schools (ideas travel between siblings at competing schools). These may be some of the reasons why ideas like photo directories and naming conventions (like “facebook”) are common to most/all of them, but NOT common to high schools outside the Ten Schools Admission Organization.

Seeing these photo directories as social objects that influence interaction and communication patterns of students is the first major key to seeing the links and commonalities between the offline interaction that happened around these books in the 80’s and 90’s, and the online interaction patters that we can observe in Facebook.com at colleges in the early days where Facebook grew like wildfire on college campuses. For that reason, I think they deserve recognition as a piece of the web’s history. You can, in some sense, consider them pre-Internet prototypes for the early social networking tools that began popping up at Harvard in late 2004 – the socialization patterns around the objects where virtually identical, it was just the medium that changed.

Zuckerberg: Gladwell Outlier

Another one of the points I try to make in the article is that the Zuckerberg-Facebook story isn’t just about smarts and ambition. It’s also about luck and opportunity. His timing was impeccable. Had he never attended Exeter, he may never have witnessed students socialize around a photo directory (or the online version that was put up his senior year) for that matter. The term “facebook” might never have entered his consciousness. Awareness of an idea/concept at just the right moment where you make a connection can mean the difference between “an inspiration-less day” and a eureka moment.  We know from the legal proceedings in 2007 that a number of his Harvard classmates were working on similar social networking platforms at the same time. Had Zuckerberg not been inspired and started coding when he did (whenever it was) he may have lost the race instead of won. That he had been coding from early child hood, in combination with the meeting the groups of students he did, when he did, may have been the critical mix that got him started at just the right time…..not to mention the incredible coincidence that his high school student council successfully lobbied the administration to put up an online version of the photo directory during his senior year (which was only available to students for a few years).

Why Facebook Grew So Fast When It Was Launched At Harvard (and other top schools)

Back to that concept of social objects. Having seen the buzz that the Choate Facebook Directory (seen above) used to generate in the first few weeks it was released every fall (we literally used to huddle around it in our dorms and chat and gossip about the new kids, who was recruited for sports teams, which girls we thought were cute etc etc), in retrospect it makes perfect sense that “the same thing but better and online” is a no-brainer for a college campus. The boarding school environment is virtually identical. The Exeter alums I interviewed confirmed the same phenomenon there around their directory,  so I can’t imagine that it was much of a stretch for Zuckerberg to assume it would work online in a similar social environment – he saw it first hand 2 years running, and he (arguably) got to see a prototype of it work online in high-school, whether it was his creation or not.

But if you look at a photo directory itself as a social object, you realize quickly that the people listed within its pages, and the information shown around those photos that make them so social only really matter because they exist in context of an existing offline tight-knit social network to which the socializing participants already belong. The network was there before the Facebook.com pages describing/organizing it did. Moreover, kids back then didn’t need to be “connected” (establish 2-way relationships in the system) to get access to each others’ info. The default used to be “all users on my network (i.e. Harvard) can see my info” so it was useful to EVERYONE who was on it to get information about everyone else at the school, much the way that info in the physical photo directories were structured. Today’s privacy controls came much later. Had the relationship structure been different (where strong privacy is the default, and weak ties cut out voyeurism etc) the social friction may have slowed initial growth. Indeed openness is more useful.

I also think that there’s an argument for the Harvard name in all this. All things equal, had Zuckerberg gone to a smaller, less prestigious college, who knows whether he would have gotten the funding and whether people would have wanted to take part. Let’s call a spade a spade. A “Harvard” social network that’s exclusive to Harvard isn’t the same as one from a no-name community college.  You’d likely see a rich-get-richer phenomenon take place when your first hub is classified by fame and prestige. Convincing other schools and students to join gets easier, getting funding gets easier etc etc and on and on. There’s something about the Harvard name that implies “fitness”, and the laws of “preferential attachment” would definitely apply, especially if you’re creating a giant network of academic institutions, which is exactly how Facebook.com grew at the beginning. Boston based colleges, Ivy League Schools and Stanford made up the initial core Facebook cluster. Would Harvard have been #2 to sign on if the first school to join was a less-prestigious state school? Who knows…

In any case, I’ve said a lot here and made a number of points. What Do You Think? It’s discussion time….