In the past few weeks, I've noticed that online "social networking" seems to be exploding, exponentially. For example, a year ago Facebook was out in the hinterlands, so to speak, and now it appears to be taking over the world. That may be just a slight exaggeration, but only just.
It's ironic, because after several years of sometimes intensive presence online, including owning and administering a message board, I've scaled back my own Internet socializing to a minimal level. When I do participate (by commenting on a blog or posting in a forum or contacting someone), I do so very deliberately. I'm at a point where I need to exercise more conscious control over whom I let into my life, and in what manner and to what extent.
Today I logged into my Yahoo email account several times, and each time I'd get several "pop-up" messages that said "[username] wants to add you as a contact." They were all from people I haven't spoken to in quite a while ... mostly the kind of situation where I've moved on and expected that they had as well. One of them was a member of a message board I moderated a few years back, a person whom we had to ban, so I'm fairly certain he wouldn't actually want to chat with me. Yet here he was. Here they all were, asking me to be their chat friend.
I use my Yahoo address as my Windows Messenger ID -- that's for MSN Internet relay chat, IRC for short -- and apparently today Yahoo did some sort of big push to get people to switch to their own version of IRC. I'm not sure exactly how Yahoo presented it, but it looks as though many people are simply instructing Yahoo to mass migrate their contacts; in other words, to send chat invitations to everyone on their MSN contact list, without bothering to check and see who that is. There are people I used to chat with who told me they have hundreds of people on their contact list, so very likely they don't have any real idea who is on it. Maybe they don't care. I guess it's not surprising that they wouldn't want to make the effort to go through the names and choose, but ...
The nearest analogy I can come up with is this scenario: one year, you decide to outsource your personal holiday greeting card-sending, so you give your address book to the person you've hired to handle it. Even though your address book is the same one you've used since you were ten years old, which means that many of the people have long since departed your life -- some under not-so-pleasant circumstances -- you tell the person, "Oh, I don't have time to go through it. Just send a card to everyone in there."
Actually, it may not be the lack of time or desire to bring one's list current. It almost looks to me as if our new cultural motto is, (s)he who dies with the most 'friends' wins.
"Friends" not meaning actual people you spend quality time with, unconditional love and all that jazz, but names on your Facebook or MSN chat or Yahoo buddies lists. I've heard about similar things on Facebook; people from the far past (such as grade school classmates) appearing out of the blue after 40 years and wanting to be buddies.
Being of a mystical inclination, I am aware of the fact that we're all connected, we're all part of one whole, similar to branches and leaves on the same tree. I'm speculating (hoping, perhaps) that this latest trend in social networking may have to do with some sort of spiritual evolution of the species, where that concept is reaching the mainstream human consciousness, and that this is how it's initially being translated into "real world" practice.
To describe it using another metaphor, you can't run before you can walk, and you can't walk before you can stand up, and you can't stand up before you crawl. And preceding all of that is the desire to walk and run. So maybe we're now experiencing the desire to know our connectedness more fully, and this is our first enthusiastic but clumsy attempt to do so. It's not being done with much awareness of what we're doing, or with any sense of boundaries, but at least we're on our way.
Your speculation "that this latest trend in social networking may have to do with some sort of spiritual evolution of the species" is the most optimistic perspective I've heard. I hope you're right.
Posted by: Sharon | Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 07:08 PM
I've kept my internet networking only to blogs; no facebook, no twittering. I like the connections with blogs, where it seems more of a dialogue gets going, almost more of a letter writing feel to it.
Posted by: Joanne | Friday, March 20, 2009 at 06:13 AM
Wow, this is a really interesting post, and something I've been thinking about, too, for a while. Being a community person -- in the 3D sense -- I worry that we are all spending SO much time online (Twitter, text messages, e-mail, Facebook, and blogging) that we are losing the art of real, face-to-face conversation and contact. Lately I've been feeling overly connected -- or sucked into spending way too much time hugging my computer. With that in mind, I have made a deliberate attempts lately to schedule lunch dates and coffee dates with my neighbors and friends.
Online connections are wonderful, and i love how the Net brings the world to me. But there is the danger of losing touch with reality. Literally.
Posted by: Cindy L. | Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 07:04 AM