Via Nick Carr, a long and thoughtful piece on social networking and the meaning of friendship from Christine Rosen at The New Atlantis. It's long, and is a good history and overall refresher on what's happening across various social networks. In addition, she focuses on the societal implications of our current fascination with social networks, and in particular the trend to favor the digital friend over the physical friend. Over on Slate, Reihan Salam provides a step by step how to on how to "unfriend" someone on Facebook, and what constitutes the right number of "friends" on this service. (i love the description of "promiscuous frienders"). Salam notes:
Noted anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that the mean clique—a group of primary social partners—consists of around 12 people. Average maximum network size—a group of real friends plus friends of friends—is around 150. I don't know about you, but most of my primary clique isn't on Facebook. My social graph and my social life overlap, but not nearly as much as they would if all of my close friends were on Facebook.
As an aside, the term "social graph" can go away now. Please.
But back to the concept of the online and virtual friend. At the very end of the article, Rose states:
We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact—and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates—Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.
What we are now seeing is the middle stages of a trend. Social networking is hot, it's created buzz, people are exploring the new medium (and medium it is, make no mistake). There clearly are societal implications, which we are in the process of figuring out. As we do, we are sure to see media focus on the dark side of the new technology, in the same way we've seen before -- internet addition, the breakup of relationships based on chatting via the web, the stories of World of Warcraft participants shunning the real world for the virtual, and breathless prose of the same.
Having more channels of communication is a *good* thing long term, not a bad thing -- it is simply change, and evolutionary change at that. Seems like over the last few years we've gotten pretty good at that. ;)