Social network fuels isolation
If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.
Montesquieu T he Social Network is up for best picture Oscar tomorrow. The movie chronicles the birth of Facebook. What began as Mark Zuckerberg's somewhat vengeful attempt to rate the pulchritude of female students at Harvard University led to a social networking website for Harvard students.
Six years, and half a billion friends later, Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history, not without personal and legal complications. As the movie tagline puts it, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." I hopped on the Facebook bandwagon when it was still a young person's network, mostly to keep in touch with my kids. It still serves that purpose, along with connecting with a larger cyber circle of friends.
Social networking makes it so easy for us to connect and chat and organize that it is literally changing the world. Protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain and Libya, for example, have used Facebook and Twitter to share both their rage and their response.
We are, of course, social creatures. Not unlike our closest relatives among primates, gorillas and chimpanzees, we have relied on group effort to survive, to feed ourselves and fend off enemies.
Our socializing has evolved into much larger and more complex networks. We have cliques, clubs, cabals and congregations. Proof of our need to socialize is found in the ultimate punishment of the criminal short of the death sentence: solitary confinement.
The good news is we can now organize without an organization. We can instantly mourn death and celebrate birth. We can share pictures of our vacation or our grandchildren with those who might somehow find our vacation or grandchildren interesting.
Social media creates ways of finding and interacting with one another we never imagined five years ago. You can't easily dismiss such powerful tools.
But here are two caveats. The most obvious one is having to deal with the vanishing boundaries these tools have left in their wake. If you write on Facebook about something you did that you shouldn't have done, it makes life easier for police or future employers. If a notorious or noxious picture is taken and falls into the wrong hands, it is fuel for the fires of revenge. Common sense dictates discretion in view of the ubiquity of social media.
The other caveat, less obvious but more serious, is that social media may be having the exact opposite of its intended impact. Rather than socialization, Facebook and Twitter may be fueling isolation.
Intimate relationships take work. You can't bail out when it gets tough. Despite its promises of connectivity, social networking can make us lonelier by preventing true intimacy. Kids prefer text over talk, even on the phone. Rather than being in the moment, we bow our head and head somewhere else via the Internet, fostering perpetual adolescence and superficiality.
Isolation is exacerbated by the temptation to put your best face on Facebook. We artfully curate our friends, photos, history, achievements, pithy observations and the books we say we like.
Here I am with my 500 friends. Here I am at this great party.
Except for mourning the dearly departed, sadness and blandness will not do. Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character," one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.
Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. She writes, "Just because we grew up with the Internet, doesn't mean the Internet is grown up." The fault is not with the Internet. Technology is amoral. The fault lies in how we use it. Facebook connects us, but it may be time to step back and reconsider what it's doing to us. While social media makes it easier to engage people, it also makes it easier to avoid them and easier to create a phony persona people can connect with.
In the end, Marc Zuckerberg's creation may leave us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.
Montesquieu T he Social Network is up for best picture Oscar tomorrow. The movie chronicles the birth of Facebook. What began as Mark Zuckerberg's somewhat vengeful attempt to rate the pulchritude of female students at Harvard University led to a social networking website for Harvard students.
Six years, and half a billion friends later, Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history, not without personal and legal complications. As the movie tagline puts it, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." I hopped on the Facebook bandwagon when it was still a young person's network, mostly to keep in touch with my kids. It still serves that purpose, along with connecting with a larger cyber circle of friends.
Social networking makes it so easy for us to connect and chat and organize that it is literally changing the world. Protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain and Libya, for example, have used Facebook and Twitter to share both their rage and their response.
We are, of course, social creatures. Not unlike our closest relatives among primates, gorillas and chimpanzees, we have relied on group effort to survive, to feed ourselves and fend off enemies.
Our socializing has evolved into much larger and more complex networks. We have cliques, clubs, cabals and congregations. Proof of our need to socialize is found in the ultimate punishment of the criminal short of the death sentence: solitary confinement.
The good news is we can now organize without an organization. We can instantly mourn death and celebrate birth. We can share pictures of our vacation or our grandchildren with those who might somehow find our vacation or grandchildren interesting.
Social media creates ways of finding and interacting with one another we never imagined five years ago. You can't easily dismiss such powerful tools.
But here are two caveats. The most obvious one is having to deal with the vanishing boundaries these tools have left in their wake. If you write on Facebook about something you did that you shouldn't have done, it makes life easier for police or future employers. If a notorious or noxious picture is taken and falls into the wrong hands, it is fuel for the fires of revenge. Common sense dictates discretion in view of the ubiquity of social media.
The other caveat, less obvious but more serious, is that social media may be having the exact opposite of its intended impact. Rather than socialization, Facebook and Twitter may be fueling isolation.
Intimate relationships take work. You can't bail out when it gets tough. Despite its promises of connectivity, social networking can make us lonelier by preventing true intimacy. Kids prefer text over talk, even on the phone. Rather than being in the moment, we bow our head and head somewhere else via the Internet, fostering perpetual adolescence and superficiality.
Isolation is exacerbated by the temptation to put your best face on Facebook. We artfully curate our friends, photos, history, achievements, pithy observations and the books we say we like.
Here I am with my 500 friends. Here I am at this great party.
Except for mourning the dearly departed, sadness and blandness will not do. Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character," one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.
Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. She writes, "Just because we grew up with the Internet, doesn't mean the Internet is grown up." The fault is not with the Internet. Technology is amoral. The fault lies in how we use it. Facebook connects us, but it may be time to step back and reconsider what it's doing to us. While social media makes it easier to engage people, it also makes it easier to avoid them and easier to create a phony persona people can connect with.
In the end, Marc Zuckerberg's creation may leave us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.
