RealityEquation

∗ On Facebook (or Not) & Hypersocieties

For quite a while now I’ve managed to actively stay away from Facebook and the idea of “social networks” in general. The reason — besides the obvious sense of resentment that it was someone else and not me who invented the thing — is because I never quite warmed to the idea of networking for, well, the sake of it.

Even in real life — this phrase is becoming increasingly relevant, with such alternative worlds as Second Life and Kaneva giving people virtual ones — I don’t handle very well with more than a couple of people. It’s a sort of weakness, but the whole “two’s a company, three’s a crowd” thing works for me, except it’s more like “three’s a company, anything more and it’s a company on the brinks of declaring bankruptcy”. So while I value connecting with my friends quite a bit, especially ones I’ve lost touch with, I’m not convinced online “social networks” are the way to do it; conversely, I have a feeling that Facebook might actually have the opposite effect of alienating you from most people, leaving you with a slowly worsening New York Syndrome.

The reason is this, and I’ll take the liberty of being lazy and quoting something I wrote elsewhere:

“…when an application starts telling me that A and E are now friends and that E would please like C to accept a little gift because D thinks he’s so “amazingly generous” rather coincidentally when T thinks the same of D and T would also like to friend A because hey, why not… it might get a little crazy.”

You see, a lot of great things have come out of leaving things out. I’m not the only one who’s religiously subscribed to this idea: Douglas Adams said so himself in an article titled “What Have We Got to Lose?“, where he points to the Sony Walkman for having excluded the amplifiers and speakers and the Handycam for forgetting the unforgivable zoom function, both launching revolutions in their own scales. We’ve seen this work for Apple: the iPod shuffle itself is a remarkable example of taking basically everything but one little feature out and granting said feature with its very own fanbase. The same people who, when the shuffle functionality was always available in all the other models and in most software music players (as a little button tucked away somewhere in the interface), didn’t think much of it at all.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and come up with a little (highly untested) psychological theory of my own: given fewer things and options to deal with, our minds are able to spend more of their processing power (which, given Moore’s Law and the fact that so many of these were created way back when, might not be too impressive against our newer Intel Core Duo cousins) on comprehending and analyzing them than on filtering out the less relevant data. In the context of Facebook, what this means is that given the bombardment of data a user is asked to deal with — and Facebook really likes telling you things about your friends, doesn’t it? From who they’re dating, what they’re feeling, names their friends like to call them with, causes they’re recruiting people for, flavour of ice cream they are — you have very little ability, or time, to connect with anyone at all beyond that almost superficial level that you’re writing on their “walls” and dropping little comments and gifts and all these things you do because the interface lets you.

One very valid reason that people I know have given me to use Facebook — well, two, actually — is to connect with long-lost friends. It’s nice, to know that the life of your arch-enemy of 10 years ago sucks just as much as yours does: there’s a certain sense of satisfaction. (But seriously, it can be nice catching up). The other is that, in certain conditions like when you’re heading off to College, you can meet people and get a discussion going, saving yourself from having to verbally introduce yourself and spend countless ardorous minutes figuring out how exactly to meet people who will want to have to do anything with you at all.

But I know that these things don’t always work the way we expect. That old friend’s, and your own, excitement of meeting after so long will last about two weeks after which she isn’t so very antique anymore and all your new College-bound friends will be just as alien to you as you will be for them. The only difference in that second case is when you do go to College, the traditional “Hello” can be replaced with the possibly cooler, “Don’t I know you from Facebook?”.

So I haven’t joined Facebook. I’ve almost done it once before and, because the College I’ll be going to has recently asked me to “friend it” — the admissions committee, at least — am close to doing it again. Everyone’s feeling the wave: Colleges, businesses, presidential candidates, Internet celebrities. We’re getting ever more closer to that threshold, that critical saturation point where too much information begins to blend very nicely with a total lack of it. And as most doomsday-esque premonitions are inclined to be, most of us don’t realize it. None of us is really much worried that Facebook now knows more about more people than any single one of us of us can ever wish to know.

So as the world revs on and sinks itself deeper into a brave new world of online social networks, I stand high above atop a lonesome hill and raise the last great flag of rebellion, clutching on to that feeble ideal of “less is more”. But not for very long, it would seem, as I find I’m slowly beginning to lose my grip.

(The way the author know the things he does — or doesn’t — about Facebook, is by way of a fake, pseudo profile, which may or may not be against their terms of use; but then again, he isn’t really “using” it in the usual sense of the word, is he?)