As an avid blogger and user of the Internet for ten years, I have marveled at the changes in information availability and social connection. Riding the wave of early adoption, I’ve been invited (and joined, out of curiosity) various Artificial Social Networks (ASNs) such as Friendster, Flickr, and Orkut.

In each case, I’ve set up my profile and then mostly abandoned the ASN. I’m not sure what they’re for. Friendster focuses on dating, and I don’t need this. Flickr’s application annoys me, so that removes incentive to use it. Orkut, of all of them, I like the most, because it offers an idea of community that I like in theory. However, in reality, I don’t gain much. One ends up spreading wide and thin. I can be a member of 24 communities, but really, what’s the point? There are more connections to manage, and they all remain superficial. It encourages dilettantism.

All the people in my online community I can contact in other ways. I’m not that interested in the superficiality of “meeting” people with whom I’m unlikely to get farther than clicking “Yes, this is a friend.” Seems as though the purpose of these networks is to graphically depict the number of people in our lives, a sort of Internet yearbook, so we can reassure ourselves that we exist, are important, even though we are small fish in a huge pond.

I came across an article by Mr. Weinberger in which he articulated several compelling reasons why to be wary of these ASNs. Then he provided the most basic criticism of all. I quote liberally from his article, which published in Journal of Hyperlinked Organization:

First, they attempt to recreate our social network by making us be explicit about it. But our social bonds are necessarily implicit. Making social relationships explicit uproots them, distorts them and can do violence to them. Just try describing your child to someone, with your child in the room.

Second, ASNs make us be precise about that which is necessarily messy and ambiguous. This not only leads to awkward social moments (Am I a friend yes-no of some person I met once and don’t know if I like?), it also reinforces the worst idea of our age: The world is precise, so our ambiguity about it is a failure.

Third, they inculcate the stupid belief that relationships are commutative. LinkedIn is especially guilty of this. I have been C in a five-term series that A initiated in order to contact E, which means someone I don’t know asked someone I marginally know to introduce him to someone I kind of know who maybe knows someone I don’t know at all. The formal name for this is “using people.”

Fourth, the fact that they require explicitness in public about relationships guarantees that they will generate inordinate amounts of bullshit. For example, some ASNs let you write “testimonials” about your friends, a feature destined to encourage flattery and sucking up. Worse, they don’t let you refuse testimonials as part of your profile, so I’ve had to to explain to a handful of people why I’m not accepting the sweet sentences they spent time putting together.

And his last point?

Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It’s called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way? … I don’t like this thing coming along that implies that the existing social networks on the Internet — my social networks, the ones that constitute my social world — are so inadequate that some badly designed system with a derivative name (enoughster with the “sters” alreadyster!) sweeps the Net like photos of Janet Jackson’s poppin’ fresh wardrobe malfunction. What’s a matter, the Net wasn’t good enough for you?

He then describes a couple of new applications in development that will enable people to voluntarily provide information they want to share with the world in general, without having to join these specialized, protectionist, closed networks ad infinitum. One of these projects is Friend of a Friend, or FOAF, (a file you can put on your site) that will assist people in searching for and finding people who share a particular set of characteristics, among other things.

I’m pleased as punch to have found the reasons for my ambivalence clarified.

[via Weblogsky]