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.
Tomorrow – ‘Perilous Times’, ‘TNR’, and more on voting machines, I promise…
Jason Calcanis has a blog post up on “social network fatigue,” in which he asks:
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? 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.
Is Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Is that what we want?
There’s obviously a certain amount of limerance 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.
Why?
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…
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.
In 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.
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Now we do it on Myspace or Facebook.
There are other things there as well…it’s in the queue, it’s in the queue.
I think alot of the problem is mobility. You are simply unlikely to stay in the same spot long enough to maintain close personal ties with anyone except those that move with you.
I think that social networking tools not only readily address this, but will provide in the long run a way out of the current trap our society is in. Namely we are below a critical threshold of close friendship necessary to function well. We as humans need ‘extended family’. We don’t know enough baby sitters, enough confidents, enough play mates, enough comrades-at-arms, enough people we can fall on during lifes normal personal crunch times.
This problem has been bothering me for a while, because its I think at the core of alot of problems. The developed world needs to reinvent the clan as a practical tool of social dependendability. And I think that the electronic clan provides a means of uniting people that are both sufficiently disparate to help each other out through the bartering of simple services, and yet sufficiently joined by a common beliefs and interests to be able to invest trust in each other. These clans natural evolve in virtual settings, and it is I think only natural to expect that the trust demonstrated virtually become something that people can bank upon socially in the real world as well. The first signs of this have been appearing for a while now. What remains is a critical mass of network connectivity that ensures that each urban area large enough to create anonymity is also able to support a like-minded clan of people.
Getting into the right clan is the next getting into the right pre-school. The online app that understands the underlying problem the best, is going to be the next ebay.
Ah, Celebrim you beat me to it.
Actually, myspace has dramatically increased communication with my friends, whom I would never see otherwise. Myspace had beomce a definitive way to track, contact (& occasionally see face-to-face) old friends whom I wouldn’t see otherwise. In the last 7 years, my wife & I have lived in 6 different states (and about 10 addresses), but my myspace page hasn’t changed.
I have noticed, that the younger college/high school kids use myspace differently. For them, it’s a way of keeping in touch with people CONSTANTLY. It’s a way of multitasking while doing work, a way to keep up with everything that’s going on every moment of the day. Although as you note above, these aren’t very sincere connections, they’re more small talk designed to keep abreast of the situation without actually digging into real/feelings or issues.
It all reminds me of that scene in Farenheit 451 where his wife is watching 12 things on the tv at the same time, but isn’t really paying that much attention to any of them (or her husband, who is right behind her).
Perhaps the major thesis of Lazarsfeld and Jahoda’s sociological masterpiece, communicating a study conducted in the late 1930s, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community, was that “the dole” devastated social networks in Austria (and by inference, Germany) leaving a vacuum into which Nazism stepped. But that’s hardly an acceptable thesis, if you’re inclined to think the US is more dysfunctional than the norm.
I can’t really buy the idea that the internet represents a similar threat, nor have I ever been very receptive to the general notion put forth by Putnam in Bowling Alone, or Reisman, et al, in The Lonely Crowd, or Skocpol in Diminished Democracy. But there is a kind of wedge between people that screams at me from time to time. I suspect the internet isn’t so much the culprit as the deceptively conversational and friendly tone of TV commercials. There’s nothing so cynical as the belief that you’re esteemed only for what you can spend.
When I was a kid on the farm we had some neighbors who lived a couple of miles up the road, and one winter morning close to Christmas their highschool-aged daughter hitched up a horse to a sleigh, drove it down to our house, and took my sisters and I for a ride. I can just barely remember it, but my sister recalls it vividly.
I think the reason it’s hard for me to recall is that it has become so difficult to imagine why someone would do such a thing nowadays? But the truth is, that sort of thing was the norm, before Television sucked us into its false dry echo.
Nah, the internet isn’t the problem. It’s that other medium. The internet is an opportunity to undo some of the damage. And I think it’s working a little…