it’s the little things that make culture

Witness Facebook: you create a profile. You add friends. You post updates. You add photos. You tag yourself. You write on people’s walls. They do the same stuff, with you. It creates a sense of community.

Then add the much-maligned “Like” button. That there is no “Hate” or “Ambivalence” button speaks to the kind of culture that Facebook wanted to cultivate. You can comment, you can reply, you can like things. Save your hate for someplace else. The comments section on Gothamist or Gawker, for instance.

Now add games. And games that don’t do much, too. Farmville, CafeWorld, Mafia Wars – these games are grinds, repetitive activities aimed at adding life and points to your coffers. In a MMOG you’d be able to use health/points/coin to do cool stuff and level up. In casual gaming, you just accumulate and spend, and level up by completing more and more tasks. But in these games, they are seen as goals, or challenges, or opportunities.

One way to level up is to have friends. Cooperating with and helping others by giving them things you have a surplus of, sharing useful information, or doing some work on their behalf – these are tasks you are encouraged to engage in because it helps you level up… but it also helps your friends level up.

The games are like – in fact much of the ecosystem of Facebook is like – a more mutually beneficial form of parallel play. Toddlers do this – they are not yet socially sophisticated enough to really interact, so they engage in similar play near each other.

We see this out in the real world, grown men and women at parties with a cocktail in one hand and an iPhone in the other, rapidly scrolling through their tweets, texts and email to see if maybe there isn’t some little tidbit that can be transformed into a bon mot (or just as likely, whether there isn’t someplace cooler to be).

Casual gaming and social networks can be a little more robust on the interactivity metric – people actually say things to each other and are mutually reinforcing in a more direct way (this may have to do with the fact that toddlers aren’t on Facebook).

In focus groups, something I used to do a lot of, you would put a half dozen strangers in the room and you could conduct little social experiments on them. The simplest was setting the tone for the discussion – the person who runs the room can decide (and really, must decide) who is running the session (hint: it’s the moderator) and how it will be run. A focus group can be serious, playful, collaborative, creative, didactic, conversational, rational, pragmatic, confrontational. Anything, really. Depends on the people, and the skill of the person running the show.

My mother used to volunteer in the classroom and was a big believer that people live up to expectations – if you expect a kid to be a loser and disruptive, he will be; if you expect a kid to be polite and smart, he will be. I found the same to be true in focus groups – I could get people who would insist they were not creative or didn’t think about certain topics to be creative and to think about those topics.

But my favorite experiment was when I had a racist in a mixed-race focus group. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, talking about science fiction. There were two black women, and 4 white women in the group. They were roughly the same age, and they all liked the same TV shows. One of the women was clearly uncomfortable with being in the room with black people. I wasn’t going to let racism be a factor in my focus group, so I changed the exercises to pair people up to work together. And I made sure that my racist had to work with both of the black women.

Now, this was the South, after all, and a lady is a lady. There was NO WAY she was going to behave badly. She was going to be polite. And because we were talking about TV and I was cracking jokes and everyone was talking about how hot that Agent Mulder is, even my racist had to give in and have a good time with everyone. I wondered, at the end of the night, how she would describe her experience when she got home. And then I realized it didn’t matter – this two hour session had changed this woman’s life in a small way. She had been forced to do something the other cultures she engages with don’t force her to do – she had to be nice and cooperative and equal to a black person.

People want to belong. People want to feel accepted. In the currency of Facebook and Farmville, belonging and acceptance are about sharing – sharing status updates, pictures, articles, and even ‘work’. It doesn’t require a conversion moment, or a major investment of time. The culture emerges gradually, and is defined by the structure of the ‘place’ and by the people in it. Culture comes from ‘micro-behaviors’ – colloquialisms, accents, stories, ingredients and spices, colors and materials. It comes from language, and it comes from tone, and it comes from the small things we do everyday with each other. You get back what you put in.

Posted by Farrah Bostic via email from prettylittlehead