I think I’m suffering from information overload. I’m on seven spirituality or poetry mailing lists (the source of numerous postings here), and I noticed last night that I’ve been hardly reading them — in the sense that I’m letting them sit unread and when I do, my brain doesn’t register much.
I feel bloated with words and ideas. Almost sick on them. I read blogs and feel my eyes glaze, my brain disconnect. Same with the news and all the other websites I read. This is why, in part, I’ve only posted brief quotes as entries in recent days.
For this reason, I’m going to take a rest from this blog until my appetite returns. It will probably be only for a few days, because whenever I give myself time off I shortly begin to come up with things to say. Meanwhile, there is a healthy helping of great blogging in the sidebar.
Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.
No group has embraced this socially impoverishing trade-off more enthusiastically than adolescents, many of whom spend most of their free hours cruising the Net in sunless rooms. This hermetic existence has left many of these teenagers with nonexistent social skills — a point widely noted in stories about the computer geeks who rose to prominence in the early days of Silicon Valley.
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.
I was recently invited to join a new social network similar to Friendster. It’s called orkut. Odd name, no? It’s actually the first name of the engineer who created it, Orkut Buyukkokte.
I had joined Friendster but then dropped out, because I found it time-consuming without the rewards that connecting via blogging provides. I also was being contacted by some fairly odd folk. Now, I’ve nothing against eccentricity or even serious weirdness, but I wasn’t connecting with people I felt shared a common interest. (However, I recently received an invitation to join again and may give it a second go.)
Then I was invited to try orkut. I have to say, I like it so far, particularly because one can join a number of communities. For instance, I belong to communities of orkut members who share an interest in books, dealing with depression, libraries, Macs, self-employment, the INFJ personality type, meditation, Taoism, psychology, cats, marriage equality, feminism, Austin, Good Eats (the food show), and freelance writing.
The only concern I have is about the potential for unwieldiness. As my friend Dave wrote in an email to me, “The system almost has to limit options just to keep the noise level down, or it’d fast become like an overworked mailing list or, gods forbid, like Usenet. It is fascinating stuff, however.”
I agree. I haven’t figured out what practical benefit it has for me, as I’ll not be using it for finding a mate. However, I’m always interested in seeing how networks form and communication flows.
The writer of Heart @ Work has invited other bloggers to answer the question of why people blog. Today’s guest writes BrewedFreshDaily. His answer to how blogging has changed his life appealed to me, because it’s an excellent metaphor describing this virtual experience.
G: Now that I think about it, my website has really fulfilled a dream of mine, only in a virtual way. I always thought it would be really cool to have my own coffee house. A place where people can hang out, drink coffee, talk about anything that’s on their minds, read the newspaper, whatever. Maybe one day I’ll have an actual shop with a big brass cappuccino machine, hardwood floors, leather chairs, and my favorite CDs playing. For now, I’ll have to grab a cup o’ joe, turn on a streaming internet station and hang out with my cool friends who visit me on my blog.
