An opinion piece by New York librarian and professor Emily Walshe has me nodding in complete agreement:
A common criticism of such social-networking sites is that they cheapen friendship. But they're doing more than reducing its value: They're creating a shadow culture of friendship that spins cosmic sympathy into crowd sourcing.
With greater connectedness has come the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency. Social-networking sites - spurred by a resurgent "Secret" interpretation of the ancient Greek doctrine "like attracts like" - have become a potent medium for mass persuasion. [...]Friendship, like marriage, is a big attraction - a deep commitment to a nonblood relation. It is a relationship predicated on trust and nurtured, over time, through physical and metaphysical connection.
Critics consider the phenomena of chronic "friending" to be a kind of memetic narcissism, and excessive self-regard is surely part of its appeal. But these ever-widening concentric circles of congeniality are subtly turning the desire for friendship into sinister temptations for power or profit.
Do read the whole thing; the writer deplores the commercialism of this kind of "friending" where number of "friends," perceived influence, and the ability to give financial kickbacks in various ways to one's "friends" is corrupting the whole notion of friendship.
I get that some people enjoy social networking sites, and that others find them useful in some way or other. To a certain extent I know my dislike of them is related to my temperament, and the fact that I can't see the attraction in what seems to be a lot of glorified triviality, the chronicling of the events of one's day in tiny repetitive bursts of short words. Frankly, the last time speech was like that in my house I still had toddlers acting as a harness to my natural inclination to verbosity; blogging may be brief compared to novel-writing or even feature-writing, but compared to tweeting or posting on someone's wall, blogging is as expansive and as expository as a Dickens novel.
But the other thing about blogging is that if you blog, and if you're lucky enough, you have "readers," who may or may not become friends in any sense; the word "reader" implies nothing more than someone who reads your ideas, either because he likes them, or because he dislikes them and enjoys disagreeing, or because he is violently apathetic to them and never wastes an opportunity to tell you what a disappointment you are. On social networking sites, however, everybody's your friend, or wants to be; the word "friend," in a social networking context, has become a verb.
But "friend" is not the verb form of the word. That would be "befriend." To befriend someone is to do something active, positive; it is to act in such a way that friendship is fostered, at a level where the person is actually known or where you come to know him or her. The difference between the active cultivation of a friendship and "friending" someone are like the difference between planting a garden and photographing a painting of a garden; the one requires slow, careful, patient effort, and the other is essentially an act of observation with the possibility and within the context of appreciation.
Like I said, I understand that social networks are enjoyed by many and seem to fill a legitimate need for connection. But they employ the language of a more intimate relationship than the rather businesslike one that they facilitate. Perhaps the word "friend" should return to being a noun, and a new word created to describe the connection between an interesting person and the several hundred people who have asked to be his "friend" because they find his brief daily messages interesting, or funny, or uplifting.
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Elizabeth Anne @ 4:51 PM writes:
“Karth, what a surprise. You don't like it / approve of it, so any of us who do must be intellectually infantile.”
Let’s consider this statement for a moment, particularly Elizabeth Anne’s use of the word “infantile”. From what I see and know about Twitter, Facebook and similar “social networking” sites, they tend to emphasize the use of short, simple sentences. Twitter has a 140-character limit on each transmission. Facebook and (especially) YouTube have a great many visual entries, everything from music videos to segments of television broadcasts—but relatively few long, written postings.
Any medium that relies on the use of short sentences and visual images to transmit ideas is geared towards a reader/recipient with a preliterate mind; the mind of a child. Toddlers use one- or two-word sentences when they speak, and young children prefer books with many pictures to books with words. The pre-literate mind cannot handle complex concepts or long chains of reasoning.
Older people, up until very recently (the last 20 years or so) , were not ashamed to distinguish themselves from youths and children by the more detailed quality and character of what they read, as well as the fact that they read, as opposed to watched a screen, to get their information about the world. (See Neil Postman’s works, along with Daniel Boorstein’s “The Image” for a further examination of this.) Yet this state of affairs seems to be celebrated, rather than excoriated as it was in an earlier time. It used to be that a William F. Buckley or Dick Cavett strove to get top-flight writers on their television shows. Today, writers strive to be mentioned on Oprah Winfrey, and visual-media “stars” are treated as near-deities, despite their obvious mental/emotional instabilities and blatant ignorance of basic facts about the world. Exactly how is this supposed to be any sign of social advancement ?
In an era when the ability to process and understand large quantities of detailed, intricate information is essential for survival, let alone “success”, you would stand as an advocate for reversion to an immature state. That’s your prerogative, of course. But I’d rather spend more time engaging the nuances and details of the issues of our time, and perhaps find a way to actually address and deal with them. You may have Facebook and Twitter, if you like; I’ll get back to my books and newspapers.
If you wish to have your statement about my judgment be accurate, Elizabeth Anne, it should read as follows: “Social networking” produces intellectual infantility in its users, so you don’t like/approve of it.”
Your servant,
Lord Karth
DavidTC I save my photos in small JPEG files, and I send a few photos, maybe five, at most. I've never had the need or desire to share a whole photo album, so emailing photos hasn't been a problem for me.
I am also aware of the limited about of information needed to set up an FB account. However, that does not negate the fact that if you have a "wall" (as a real-life friend described to me) with comments about your activities and such on it, that that and your photos, and all of your contacts and their information and whatever else, can't be hacked into, with a much larger trail and wealth of information about you than would be available through an email account, I'm thinking.
I don't IM. I did it a few times years ago, and hated it. I'd much rather call someone and hear his/her voice. (Come on, you knew that was coming.)
Also, are you aware that human resource personnel often search these sites to learn about employee/potential employee conduct, and some people have lost their jobs over things on their sites? At my university, students are told in orientation that they can be expelled if something found on their social networking sites is found to reflect poorly on the university. And this is a well-known, public university.
I am unapologetically a more private person than most, and I'm careful about what I send out on emails, too. Posting on this blog is about as "out there" on the Net that I wish to be, so for me, personally, I'll happily stay out of the social network generation.
Lord Karth, interesting post. I find myself agreeing with you, for the most part.
I have a love-hate relationship with facebook. On one hand I love re-connecting with old friends and since I am far from family and friends, I like to be able to keep up with everyone. On the other hand, I am an extreme extrovert who does not connect with people in real life nearly enough, so I have my connections on line. It is NO replacement for a real community, but since I have no real community it's what I've got. I think that more and more that is true for a lot of people. I'd never touch facebook again if I had the chance to have a real community in real life.
Lord Karth
Lord Karth, as you've never used Facebook, perhaps something needs explaining to you:
Facebook is not a blog and it is not a discussion forum. It is a place for people to send each other quick messages and post information for others to find.
It is the equivalent of a whiteboard on a dorm room door. It's called a 'Wall' for a reason. Read 'bulletin board' or 'whiteboard' for 'Wall'. That is the main purpose, that is what 90% of the people use it for. People do not use it to hold discussions, they use it for two things:
1) To coordinate actual activities in this increasingly complicated world. Instead of calling ten people to see if someone wants to see a movie with you, you just send a message to everyone by checking their name.
I have to laugh when someone asserts that facebook reduces interaction...me and my friends all have weird schedules and it's hard to reach each other, so 75% of the stuff we do is someone saying, on Facebook, 'Hey, who wants to go see 'Star Wars' this weekend, and when?' and people asynchronously figuring it out, something that would be near impossible for any other method of communication.
2) And the other use for facebook is to read vague notes about old acquaintances they haven't seen since high school. Hey, look, that guy that was trying to start a band apparently succeeded. And those two people got married...didn't they hate each other? (It's a valid point that such people are not your 'friends' and shouldn't be called such, but that's a terminology quibble.)
Those two things are essentially all that 90% of people use Facebook for. Criticizing it for the level of discourse demonstrates that you really don't have any idea of its purpose. There aren't any 'discussions' happening on it
People who want to blog know where blogs are. They know where forums and discussion groups are. They don't know where newgroups are, but whatever. Facebook does not even have any sort of obvious functionality to write long posts and hold discussion on them. You can write long 'notes', but there's no way to list them or keep them visible or have non-friends see them...they're essentially for stuff like directions and other stuff that would make an incredibly long wall post, and you don't want to make a limited-recipient private message.
And I have no idea what you think the point of YouTube is. I thought it was pretty self explanatory, but you seem to think the point of it is the inane discussion going on under the videos, which is entirely full of cretins who spend all day watching videos.
No, look a bit higher on the page. The point of YouTube is, in fact, the videos. Almost none of which have any 'discussion' at all in them, and that discussion isn't happening on YouTube.
You are, in essence, criticizing movies because a guy is sitting in front of you talking. No, actually, you're criticizing movies because you sat and read poorly-written reviews of them during the movie, and thought the reviewers were imbeciles. Well, they probably were, but that's not very relevant.
The Sicilian Woman
DavidTC I save my photos in small JPEG files, and I send a few photos, maybe five, at most. I've never had the need or desire to share a whole photo album, so emailing photos hasn't been a problem for me.
So you can't email them as easily as you can post them on facebook, because apparently you have to resize them. Which was rather my point.
You, in your very small and limited manner of emailing photos, might be happy with doing a lot of work, but it is objectively easier to use Facebook. Or any other site designed to post photos, although with Facebook people you know are notified of them automatically.
"And I will friend you, if I may/ In the dark and cloudy day" - A.E. Housman
Despite this literary precedent, however, it is true, as a now-lost comment noted, that Facebook actually uses the term "Add as Friend."
Also true, as another lost post noted, is that telegrams, postcards, Post-It notes, etc. used short-sentence communication long before Facebook came along.
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