Odds are, you have a Facebook account. No, really. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook accounts. So, odds are, you have a Facebook account. (25 other countries are also over the 50% threshold, including the United Kingdom and Canada.) So, odds are, you've seen a red equal sign in the last few days.
In the extremely unlikely event you don't know what I'm talking about, here's what happened. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court, highest court in the country, heard challenges to the laws known as Proposition 8 (the California law prohibiting the performance of same-sex marriages in that state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (the U.S. federal law restricting federal marriage benefits from same-sex marriages*). Among the many memes and other trends on the Internet relating to the cases, Facebook was awash in red. The Human Rights Campaign urged followers to change their profile pictures in support of marriage equality, and it caught on. I haven't seen any estimates of how many people changed their pictures, but it was a lot. It also spawned a number of spoofs, from Ernie & Bert to corgis to bacon.
This is not a post about marriage equality. Sorry to disappoint. But I am going to talk about Facebook and social sorting, so click on!
Shortly after the explosion of red equal signs, there was an explosion of analysis about what they meant, and then an explosion of arguments about why they didn't mean what people said they meant, because the Internet is the digital incarnation of Ouroboros. Regardless of what they meant or didn't mean, however, the equal sign trend demonstrates something quite noteworthy: the power of Facebook as a social sorting tool.
What is social sorting? Imagine a baseball game between Amherst College and Williams College. Amherst and Williams are bitter rivals, and their baseball grudge is considered the oldest sports rivalry in the United States. You do not want to be surrounded by fans of the other team (the games have open seating), or you might find yourself very uncomfortable when the game heats up. So you sort the fans into two groups: Amherst fans will sit with other Amherst fans, and Williams fans will sit with other Williams fans. They will mostly mostly talk among their own fanbases, and opposing groups may even go to different bars after the game.
This serves many purposes. Sorting into like-minded groups validates us, it can help avoid conflict, and it can help us find people pursuing similar goals. An Amherst student looking for a partner to write a book on the history of Amherst baseball will have much better luck among other Amherst students. Unless he knows everyone at the game, though, he will need some sort of social cue to determine whether any given person is rooting for Amherst and Williams. This is one of the reasons we wear ballcaps or jerseys to sporting events -- so that we can easily be identified for social sorting purposes.
Sorting, however, is not necessarily always a good thing. In his book Culture War?, Morris Fiorina explains how sorting can make political discourse more difficult.
"As is widely appreciated, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have declined in number. . . . People who were once conservative southern Democrats are now more likely to be conservative southern Republicans, leaving the remaining Democrats more liberal on average and contributing to the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party. . . [and] research indicates that to some extent young voters are entering the party consistent with their views and to some extent people are changing their views to make them consistent with their party affiliation."Fiorina makes two points about social sorting in political parties. First, it makes the political arena appear polarized by marginalizing independents. Second, it encourages politicians to take "pure" polarized positions. I don't necessarily agree with Fiorina's contention that America isn't polarized (some of Fiorina's own data seems to suggest that there is increasing polarization on hot-button issues), but social sorting at the very least polarizes political representatives. It should be self-evident that when political debates are reduced to party lines, policy suffers. (The increasing Congressional deadlock and rampant use of the filibuster in the Senate are evidence enough of that.)
So what does this have to do with Facebook? Simply put, Facebook is the most powerful social sorting tool that the world has ever seen. Facebook enables and encourages social sorting in a way that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
From its inception, Facebook has been about sorting. In the early days when Facebook was only open to a small number of college campuses, people were sorted by school, by interest, and even by dormitory. Today, Facebook accounts contain a huge volume of sortable information -- birthdays, hometowns, vacation spots, "likes", jobs, life milestones, tagged photos and the ability to tag a post as "with" someone. Facebook does this for revenue, slicing accounts into tiny crossover demographics to target ads for maximum impact. Facebook also tries to promote this data to users, advertising in users' newsfeeds when a friend likes something. But most of the data is fairly inaccessible, requiring users to find the information on friends' profiles. This may seem trivial, but when a user has hundreds or even thousands of friends, seeking out information for sorting isn't feasible.
But the profile picture provides an instant sorting tool. A user's profile picture appears next to almost every single action she takes, and can be seen on tags by hovering over a name. Every single time a person with the red equal sign as a profile picture takes or is tagged in an action on Facebook, people will see it. It serves as an instant signifier not only to the user's friends, but also to friends of friends who see the user in conversations, tags, and friend lists. (This is hardly the first time such a device has been used. Previous trends included "this user" pictures and including the word "Equality" in users' names. However, the red equal sign has seen a growth that probably far outpaced those earlier trends.)
The sorting isn't perfect, of course -- many supporters of marriage equality won't change their pictures, and it only works for one issue at a time. But the power of this kind of trend to encourage sorting shouldn't be underestimated. When support for an issue can be demonstrated to thousands of people at once instantly and effortlessly, seeking out like-minded people (and cutting off other viewpoints) can likewise become instant and effortless. (We will never know how many people got unfriended, or how many people made new connections, through the red equal sign trend, but I am confident that it was a lot.)
Sorting can serve some important functions. But it's worth remembering that, in the mid 1990s, the Internet was heralded as the next evolution of the "marketplace of ideas". Born of message boards and science grants, the Internet was supposed to be a place where people from all over the globe could come together to share disparate viewpoints. This very rhetoric is still used in policy debates about Internet regulation. But a marketplace of ideas is strongly at odds with social sorting. If people sort themselves into like-minded groups, nothing is really exchanged.
There's actually quite a bit of scholarship about sorting on the Internet, and I won't rehash it here. But the red equal sign trend on Facebook is really a red flag. It shows how easy, and how effective, sorting can be. The use of a single color on a single picture can broadcast your affiliation to thousands of people.
* Super quick federalism crash course: There is no federal institution of marriage; for all relevant purposes, a couple is married under federal law if they are legally married under the law of any state. The Full Faith and Credit Clause requires (probably) states to recognize legal marriages from other states. DOMA does two things: 1) it allows federal marriage benefits to extend only to opposite-sex marriages and 2) it limits application of the Full Faith and Credit Clause only to opposite-sex marriages.
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