{"id":1487,"date":"2007-08-06T21:53:52","date_gmt":"2007-08-06T21:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2007-08-07T15:41:02","modified_gmt":"2007-08-07T15:41:02","slug":"the_calcanis_ch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1487","title":{"rendered":"The Calcanis Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know I have other more “serious” stuff to blog about, but this piqued my interest. And since it touched, in part, what I do for a living, I thought it’d be fun to do a blog post out of left field and see what happens. <\/p>\n

Tomorrow – ‘Perilous Times’, ‘TNR’, and more on voting machines, I promise…<\/p>\n

Jason Calcanis has a blog post up on “social network fatigue,”<\/a> in which he asks:<\/p>\n

OK, now that we’ve got that on the table why else are we here? Putting aside the need for humans to procreate, I can’t help but wonder: are we creating a social system to communicate with each other at a distance because the reality of creating and maintaining that social networking face-to-face is, well, scary?<\/b> Do we not want to pick up the phone and tell five friends we want them to come over for dinner and a movie, so we instead throw food at them and tell them to watch something we previously watched and liked? Intimacy, deep friendships, and love can be scary, clicking your mouse is not.<\/p>\n

\nIs Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Is that what we want?<\/b><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s obviously a certain amount of limerance<\/a> in using social networks. But, I’ll argue that there’s some beef there, and that once the companies and tools shake out, tools to facilitate social networking will continue to be among the most important tools on the Internet.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Well, I’ll suggest that the real value of social networks for someone like me – who does manage to have friends over enough to annoy my wife – is in dealing with the big groups of people outside one’s social ‘core’. Because that social core is shrinking<\/a>…<\/p>\n

The new study, based on face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative group of 1,467 adults, provides the most comprehensive look yet at Americans’ degree of social connectedness. The 20-minute questionnaire was done by pollsters at the University of Chicago as part of their General Social Survey, one of the longest-running national surveys of social, cultural, and political issues.<\/p>\n

\nIn the survey, respondents were asked to identify people with whom they had discussed important personal issues in the past six months. On average, they named 2.08 people in 2004 compared with 2.94 in 1985. Almost half of those surveyed could name only one or no confidants, while the portion with at least six close friends has dwindled to 4.9 percent of the population.<\/p>\n

\nThe researchers said that over the 20 years, Americans were most likely to turn away from friendships outside of their families. Four out of five people surveyed in 2004 said they only talk to family members about important personal matters, compared with 57 percent in 1985. The percentage of people who confide only in their spouse increased from 5 percent to 9 percent.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now this was done in 2004, before the bump in social networking, and measures the change from 1985 – 2004 – a period that overlaps the Internet explosion, but I wonder how much of this is Internet-based, and how much is the simple Robert Putnam “Bowling Alone” collapse of intermediate social institutions as work and parenting consume our lives.<\/p>\n

But the unquestionable truth is that we have narrowed our social focus to just a few people, and that most of the people we deal with are acquaintances. <\/p>\n

And keeping track of that big cloud of acquaintances is, to me, what social networking tools are primarily about. there are maybe a dozen or dozen and a half people I know who I keep track of personally and professionally because I talk to them often enough and we have a strong enough sense of mutual obligation that we would call each other and talk about any personal change.<\/p>\n

How do I keep track of the other 1100 people in my Outlook database? How do I keep ‘freshening’ those acquaintances so that they stay alive, and so that some of them have a chance to become real friends?<\/p>\n

Because what happens as we increasngly become nomads at work and recluses at home is that we need to reach out – for a contact, for some advice, for help with something or another – and our narrow slice of close friends doesn’t have anyone in it who can get it done for us.<\/p>\n

So we reach into the cloud. And, to make the metaphor really icky, if we want the clouds to produce, we need to seed them. We used to do that at Rotary meetings, or playing softball on the company team.<\/p>\n

Now we do it on Myspace or Facebook.<\/p>\n

There are other things there as well…it’s in the queue, it’s in the queue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Calcanis is cynical about social networking…Armed Liberal less so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}