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Show StatesmanSpedal Features Wed. Aug. 29. 2007 Page 21 Social networking: Can it be alienating? BY MONICA HESSE The Washington Post Jason Calacanis wishes he could be your Facebook friend, but he just can't. The Internet entrepreneur loves networking; the New Yorker magazine once wrote a profile of him called "The Connector." When people want to get from point A to point B, he's A and a half. But Calacanis now has several thousand friends, with more requests streaming in daily. He's tired. So on his blog this summer, Calacanis, 37, declared a Facebook moratorium. In the future he'll outsource his friend management to an intern. While Calacanis may have burned out early, he predicts he won't be alone: "Everyone's going to face a level of this, too." And then ... chaos? Isolation? Abject misery? When we reach that point where a utility that is supposed to bring us closer to our friends actually makes us hate our friends — and the death grip that managing them has on our time — where will we go from there? "Everyone senses that social networking is really important," says Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor and author of "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age." "But the big question has been: How do you convert networking into a Web site? So far it's been done in an ad-hoc, slapdash sort of way." The problem, according to Watts? Despite Newsweek's assertion last week that Facebook "has already changed the way millions of us connect," Watts says such sites are failing us because they do not do the thing that social networks are designed to do, namely: network. His websessed students spend their Facebook time keeping up with members of International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), who presumably all have great jobs and fabulous apartments. (Craigslist, of course, has taken over some of the traditional network's roles, though not all.) The bigger problem with Facebook et al., says Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist and founder of INSNA, is that current sites "assume that everyone in your life is on one happy network." On MySpace, your work colleagues are given the same info as your Halo buddies. That's not how life works, and pretending it does dilutes the meaning of our more powerful connections. the infinitesimal details of their acquaintances' lives through the egomaniacally titled News Feeds. Call it stalking, procrastinating or friend collecting, it doesn't build real connections. A history lesson: "Social network" is not a Facebook term or even — remember these? — a Friendster orXanga one. Sociologist J. A. Barnes coined the phrase in 1954 to explain the friend-of-a-friendof-a-friend connections that cut across traditional groupings of family or ethnic groups. These pathways have historically been the way people get jobs, find apartments, meet spouses and generally navigate the world. They are studied by the 1,200 Part of the problem is a numbers game. Oft-cited anthropological research puts the MAXIMUM effective group size at 150, known as the Dunbar number. Some groups — religious congregations, book clubs — splinter off when their numbers get too high for members to bond. Facebook does not. Facebook allows its users to spread their time and energy, like butter covering an increasingly larger piece of friend-network toast. Do you want a lot of toast? Or do you want a lot of butter on normal-size bread? Ogheneruemu "O.G." Oyiborhoro wants the toast. He is the George Washington University junior who holds the The Subtext of no text BY DENEEN L BROWN You sent the message, now what comes? Doubt, self-pity, delusion, indignation, indolence, fragility, detachment, denial, dependency, cynicism, curses, curiosity, confusion? What do you say to yourself in that silence? Vulnerabilities exposed like in those Cingular Wireless commercials, popular because you can see yourself on either end. "It would seem we would question the phone line, or something technological," says Kipling Williams, a psychology professor at Purdue University and author of the book "Ostracism: The Power of Silence." But Williams has researched behavior around text messaging and found that if people who are expecting a text message don't receive it immediately, they begin questioning themselves. Their self-esteem drops. They don't feel in control of their environment. "They don't worry about the network that has gone down. They worry about their standing with their friends. The thing they worry about is the most threatening option" — isolation. Time has been stretched by instant messaging, wrapping us so tightly in its instantaneous grip, seconds become chasms of doubt. A minute, eternity, withholding blessed assurance. The blank screen taunts, blinking: It's true. Nobody likes you. , • The Washington Post The silence is threatening. The silence between the e-mail sent and ... No response. The text message unacknowledged. Screen blank, waiting. :)~@ The dropped call left dangling into an abyss of ticks. EVE, ARE YOU THERE? It's been two seconds. The mind flips. Throat swells. Ice ball grows in belly. Two minutes. Thoughts weave chaos. WHY DIDN'T HE TEXT ME BACK? T\vo hours of checking e-mail and still no response. DID SHE GET THE E-MAIL? DID HE OPEN IT? DID HE CHOOSE NOT TO WRITE BACK? DOES HE NOT LIKE ME? WHAT? In an era of instant call and response, what does it mean when the response doesn't come instantly? Something splits inside within those seconds, and the forces within creep out whispering negation to you, a pitiful generation that needs instant gratification. Silence mocks. No response and you sink. Those voices of childhood come back, reminding you of the time you sent a note across the room, "I like you, do you like me? Yes?" Box. "No?" Box. No response. school's title of most Facebook friends — 3,456 and counting. He collects them at parties, in classes, in the library. He thinks the face recognition probably helped out when he ran for and won a student government position last year. But if Oyiborhoro needed to find a new apartment, whom would he ask for help? He thinks for a minute. "That's a good question." Not the 3,456, though. "The furthest I'd go with Facebook would be to ask someone to borrow a textbook. I'd want to actually trust the person" for a bigger request. To use a social networking site for actual social networking would be an impertinence. An imposition. A sign — even a relatively small one — of vulnerable humanity instead of the casual snarkiness popular on the site's Walls (so named because messages are posted there, but isn't there a sociologist somewhere dissecting the isolation that the name implies?). It would be like actually playing with collectible Luke and Leia dolls instead of lining them up and occasionally vacuuming off their dusty plastic boxes. It's 50 1996 to worry about the Internet secluding people from one another (and yeah, some people have found love — and even apartments — on Facebook). But the fact that the current popular spaces for social networking come up short means that someone is going to have to find a way for everyone to be real friends again. One industry response to the issue so far has come in the form of... more social networking sites. On Aug. 6, online address book Plaxo introduced Pulse, its solution to the walled garden [MSee SOCIAL, page 24 WELLS FARGO The Next Stage* I Taltowith a Wells Fargo Banker and get your PhD in Money-omics. c . v •'••• •••• \ . ••• J s With College Combo®, designed especially for college students, you get • Free Wells Fargo College Checking® account* I * • No annual fee Wells Fargo® Check Card - now with Visa® payWave • Free access to. Wells Fargo Online® Banking and Free Bill Pay • Free Direct Deposit of paychecks and/or financial aid • Free access to over 6,800 Wells Fargo ATMs Stop by any of our seven Cache Valley Wells Fargo locations and talk with a banker today. •Eligibility subject to approval. Students must provide proof of enrollment at an accredited coflege/unweniiy oc trade school when the account is opened $100 minimum opening deposit required for new checking account. Additional restrictions apply. © 2007 Wells Fargo Bank, N A All rights reserved Member FDKL i I 1 : * |