Web Something-Point-Whatever

Today was one of those lucky days. Someone sent me an email with a link to an article about Facebook and asked for my response. That means that you guys get to see my stream of consciousness email response to an article, instead of a coherent anything. (That said, I think there's some really fun things to think about in this whole thing. Also, I just linked you a ten page article. I'M A CONTENT PROVIDER. HUFFINGTON POST DOES IT.) Having seen the Social Network will help, and it was a good movie anyway.


I'm starting to wonder whether or not I'm really qualified to talk about the way "my generation" uses the Internet. By that I mean that Facebook and the like are relative latecomers to my Internet experience. I've been using the Internet in a coherent way that I can describe since I was about eleven--before then, I used the Internet, but I couldn't tell you what I did with it. Anyway, since then, most of my internet communication has been in the form of participation on online forums. Although they're older than the "Web 2.0" buzzword for social websites, they nevertheless represent a fairly social experience. All the content comes from the users, who generally share a common interest of some kind. They tend to lend themselves more to longer responses, and have a larger flexibility for communication. Perhaps most notably, unlike many social media sites, real names are not generally used. (Though I've looked through my various profiles and determined that five minutes on Google would be able to connect my online handles to me-for-real. I'm not overly worried about it.) One difference between this and Facebook might be the presumption. On a forum, it's assumed that the sum total of your posts don't add up to an entire person. On Facebook, because the page has pictures of a person and because it has a real name on it, maybe we have a tendency to assume that the page in front of us is a whole entity. My point here is that, while my early online experiences trained me not to think of it that way, other people use the Internet primarily as themselves, so they don't disassociate the idea of a profile or account and a person as strongly. Because, while the author of that essay talks a lot about people representing their entire life on Facebook, my first reaction is "No, we don't." It then occurred to me that just because I know how to use the Internet, doesn't mean I know how the Internet is actually used.

In fact, I'm kind of confronting my own cognitive biases here. In general, when the Internet is brought up, I tend to defend it, because I've had plenty of positive experiences and I think it's definitely helped my intellectual growth--I can't imagine me becoming the person I am (a pretty cool guy, in my opinion) without that external stimulation. Now that I think about it, I realize I should probably not generalize my own experiences so quickly. Maybe we ought to consider, though, that you get out of any system what you put in--the computer programming term being Garbage In, Garbage Out. Are relationships nowadays more superficial than they were before? Or is it just that the superficiality is easier to pick out when so many social relationships in one place? In addition, I think there's a tendency, like with every new thing, to overestimate the importance of any given element. I remember about a year and a half ago, when Twitter was surging to prominence, people talked about it replacing Facebook. What we found, though, was that they co-existed. After all, they didn't provide the same product, they didn't compete. I'm not sure Facebook supplants many regular relationships, I'm not sure it competes. I don't turn down real-life interaction because I'm on Facebook--instead, I wait until I'm supposed to be doing homework, and then I get on Facebook instead. (I'm kidding...now. An important lesson the first few months of college is that I keep that particular tab closed when serious things are supposed to be happening.) Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that the real problem isn't a lack of real-life interaction, but people overvaluing the portion of their interaction that is online, and misapplying the knowledge you gain from that. People need to understand the separation between an image and an object; a person and a profile. If that were commonly understood, I think Facebook would be a useful tool without nearly so much negative impact.

One comment I found a bit ridiculous was his implication that the current generation just wants to be liked. Personally, I'm not sold on the idea that the approval of others is all that more or less important than previous. I think acceptance and belonging are a pretty key human desire--Maslow put it in his hierarchy of needs, even.

(Sometimes I feel like all of this is a consequence of taking online socialization, which can work just fine, and trying to merge it with the already-established expectations and realities of "meatspace" socialization, but I think that would require a more thorough exploration of it all.)