Episode 1: The social networking Menace.

Its funny how much modern society has become more closed off in some ways, and yet so open in others. The average person probably barely knows their neighbour, has minimal contact with their relations outside of their immediate family, yet opens up all sorts of details about themselves elsewhere. And where is that elsewhere? You guessed it, the Internet.

Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In*, the list goes on. All of these sprung up from nowhere and just exploded in popularity. BUT WHY? I've signed up for a few of them and I still don't fully understand the attraction. I'll go through them in turn.

Myspace is a social networking site catered for the teen, early twenties level. It just shows a profile, a blog and a place for people to leave comments for that person's friends. A homepage with a guestbook from 1998 with a template is effectively what it is.

Facebook is similar, but it focuses even more on the relationships between people. It wants to know who you know, how you know them, when you knew them and so on. Again you fill out your profile and theres a place for people to leave comments. It is funny how quickly people find you on Facebook. Within 2 days, I had 8 friends add me without me telling anyone about it. I remember in the old days of ICQ that everyone wanted to be on each others lists so you could say you had the biggest set of friends. Facebook is similar in that it keeps a tally of how many friends you have and it feels like everyone is trying to increase that number.

LinkedIn is effectively the "business" version of Facebook. It tracks who you worked for, and who also worked for that company and its meant to help "career networking". I say all this in inverted commas, for as important to your career as Linked In propents to be, in reality, its the social equivalent of a chain letter. This article by Jeff Atwood from codinghorror.com sums up my feelings about how useful LinkedIn is. I encourage you to read it.

Twitter is...quite possibly one of the dumbest fads I've seen on the Interweb. Its bite sized snippets of what people are doing. I stared in naked fascination at the idea of people posting what they are getting up to... For about two minutes before I realised that people who 'twit' to a internet site are essentially boring.

prozach Cleaning the house, less than 10 seconds from web
hawaii5 Sleepy. less than 10 seconds ago from txt

I cannot entirely understand the Twit phenomenon, but I'll endeavor to analyze. I believe we all like the idea that others are interested in us. Its that small narcissistic side that must be satisfied by the possibility that someone is interested in what we are doing.

We Bloggers aren't immune from this trend either. After all, we all blog to be read, to be heard and loved for our 'insight'. But I hope to think that most bloggers attempt to at least impart something back to the community who reads them, more than "oh man, I got so wasted last night but I scored with that spunk Ray. Anyways gtg sleep, xoxoxo".

What frightens me is how invasive these sites are. Wake up and smell the roses people. You're freely depriving yourself of your privacy! Wouldn't it scare you if a random person came upto you and they knew everything about you from your interests, to who your friends are, to where you work. This is an advertiser's paradise. Each time you sign up for one of these sites, who are you really benefiting?

I know there are meant to be benefits to social networking. Maintaining friendships, meeting new people and so on. But think, for each person who finds love on Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of lonely hearts without any hits, and probably a few thousand nutbag stalkers reading your profile. I'm going for the vast majority of all the encounters you'll have on LinkedIn will go nowhere useful for you.

People are social beings and we thrive off feeling loved and important. Hell this might explain why I still have a Facebook account. But this isn't the way to do it. Real relationships are those in real life and they are hard, and require more effort than hitting "Confirm this person as my friend". For each moment you spend in updating your Facebook profile, maybe spend a few minutes ringing a old friend. It'll take you a lot longer, but you'll feel better about life guaranteed**.

*Its not accidental I didn't link ANY of these sites. They ain't getting any page rank from this site.
** disclaimer: guarantees not guaranteed on this website.