Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln
My great-grandmother had a plaque in her kitchen with that quote on it. My mother preferred “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” (Clearly that didn’t stick.)
I’d like to update Mom’s aphorism for the 21st century: “If you don’t have anything at all to say, join a social network.”
For those of you living under rocks, MySpace is a social network. But the hottest one these days is called Facebook. An appropriate name, as it turns out, since it’s a forum for the most superficial kind of human interaction possible. (The name actually comes from a student directory published for Harvard freshman.)
These networks allow you to make public your tastes in music, pizza toppings and toilet paper color. You can embed video clips and upload pictures of yourself gone wild at Spring Break. You can add extras (Facebook applications) that allow you to do things like take polls about which of your Facebook friends is most likely to move to Tibet and become a monk. Fascinating. People are supposed to extrapolate from the mishmash of inanities you share about yourself that you’re hip, you’re edgy, and then to conclude that they want to know you. I think.
Social networking is shallow, narcissistic and apparently addictive. (I know what you’re thinking. At least blogging isn’t—necessarily—shallow.) It’s the online version of waving to yourself when you see your face on a TV screen in the electronics section. It reminds me of the Playboy centerfold’s turn-ons and pet peeves, the Stay cool!s scribbled in high-school yearbooks, the “Friends Test” 14-year-olds are passing around by e-mail these days, with questions like “Croutons or Bacon Bits” and “What color is your bedroom carpet?”.
(Croutons and dirty. Do you feel like you know me now?)
Then there’s the signal-to-noise ratio. What do people expect to get from these things when there are 80 million of them embedding the same YouTube videos and uploading pictures of themselves getting their [insert body part here] pierced? How do they even tell each other apart?
One college kid looking for love narrowed his options by searching Facebook for women named Grace, just because he liked the name. That got him a manageable applicant pool and he found a candidate who met his requirements. That’s one way of dealing with it, I guess. Love in the time of the keyword search…
But apparently it’s the next big thing. There are kazillions of dollars of venture capital being poured into social networks right now, undoubtedly because corporations are drooling over the opportunity to learn what makes their favorite demographic tick so they can market more crap to them.
I know, I sound like an old fart. But I’m not, really. Well, maybe I am, but it’s irrelevant. The truth is, being the geekette and optimist that I am, I’m convinced social networks don’t all have to be virtual frat parties slash pole dances… The medium will ripen, hopefully, into something that is much more interesting…
I really do want to know this: If you could design the perfect social network for people like us, what would it be like?
Guess that’s the 1 million $ question, Pamela… I was just reading a post titled “Social networking: a new revenue opportunity for mobile carriers”, once again confirming that the “social” in social networking often stops where the “cashing in” parts starts.
I’m no longer a 20-something and my online needs are adequately met by the existing channels, in fact, I hardly find the time to post anything worth reading due to a self-chosen state of information overload.
Just reading the major news-blog, along with some special topic sites can fill my day, removing the “social” part from the entire experience.
There are countless outlets to connect to people online, but most prevent me from meeting anyone in RL.
My social network is right along the corner, on the Antwerp riverbanks: it’s open all night, caters to a mixed 30-60 crowd and most important of all: it serves Belgian beer;-)
One other issue with Facebook and other social networks. They have been and are exploited for espionage, stalking, identity theft, fraud, and other forms of crime. Intelligence agencies trowl activity on social-networking sites, monitor user behavior, and even set up sting operations. The providers provide no security and take no responsibility for the results of their service. Serious geeks (aka hackers, et al.) stay away from these sites for these reasons, too.
Hi Peter. I found a social network, eons.com, for people over 50 (I’m not there yet either). (They have a section for obituaries. How depressing is that!) Anyway, I’m like you. I have my blog, I have my personal website to keep family and friends apprised of my doings (e-mail me and I’ll send you the link) and I have a network of friends and long-time acquaintances that I keep in touch with by the more traditional methods (old-fashioned (!) e-mail, phone, and sometimes I even mail people notecards and see them in person!). By the time we get to this age, I think we’re more discriminating. Our standards must be different than those of the younger generation, too, since we didn’t grow up with the Internet. Your social network sounds very nice indeed! If I’m ever in Antwerp, I’ll let you know and maybe we could have a Belgian beer or two there!
Hi Roger. I know, scary stuff! I’ve read a lot about that kind of thing too. Let’s see some corporate responsibility, people! Let’s see some true concern for community members and less greed! Jeeziss. Oh, but we’re talking about America, where the true religion is the dollar and Big Brother is reading everybody’s e-mails…
Well, yes, I’m afraid I WAS thinking you were sort of describing blogging too…you could say it’s just doing the same thing with a much smaller circulation, no?
Hi Ammel. Sure there are similarities! Blogging can also be an online manifestation of a personality. It’s a question of effort I guess and who’s doing the blogging. Lots of blogs are no less inane than what you see on a social network, but plenty of bloggers are passionate and committed to sharing information, sharing beauty, opening eyes, provoking thought, dialogue, and action, making people smile or cry… Plus there’s a creative element. If there’s none of that, what’s the point? And if you think the circulation is small, there are hundreds of people who read my little blog every month! About half of them find me with keyword searches, which (sometimes) means I’m saying something somebody wants to read about (as opposed to looking for girls named Grace to boff). That’s the difference.
Well, prepare the rotten tomatoes, because i like social networks. Yes, I am on facebook. Worse: I signed myself in a group where a guy promises to streak naked during the big rugby match in France if his idea is approved by 50 000 people. I approved. I’ll watch the match to see if he keeps his word. I would say this: we have a real life and an online life. In real life, we have moments when we need to be vain, shallow and dumb. In on line life as well. And I traced an old friend thanks to face book. That’s more than I expected and I was very happy. Voilà.
It’s OK Claire! I don’t think less of people who join them! In fact, I’m creating one. Like I said at the end, I think there’s potential there. And I’m on LinkedIn myself, although it’s less about LMFAO and more about bizniss. Anyway, you’re one of those “people people” and I’m not so much.
I dabbled with farceb**k because I thought it might be a good communication tool for swapping information with people with similar interests and perhaps drive real life meetups. (It’s not.) If you look at my profile, you’ll be able to gauge my level of seriousness. I’ve got some ridiculous “personal information” entered. This upset a RL friend of mine who saw my farceb**k profile and complained that I wasn’t “telling the truth”. This started me thinking… does reality matter when you are online?
I recently created a fake Facebook profile for research. As I said above I’m creating a SN myself (you’ll be hearing from me shortly on that). It’s like going to a party with a bunch of 20-year-olds. Where’s the interest for grownups? Even grownups of the Peter Pan variety (like me) need a little something more… I can’t believe your friend got mad! I checked out Facebook initially because a friend I respect sent me an invite and because some HuffPo bloggers had mentioned it. But when I got there, I poked around and just closed my account. When you close a Facebook account, they don’t let you close it unless you tell them why (put something int he comment box). I could have put anything, but I really went into detail. A much shorter version of this post. Anyway, the friend who invited me got a little defensive, which actually surprised me, but not mad.