Web networking limits interaction

WITH LAST WEEK’S “News Feed” stunt, I think Facebook might have effectively siphoned a good portion of attention away from its major opponent in the world of online social networking, the ever-popular MySpace.

The controversial upgrade— which allows users to, from their homepage, immediately track any changes their friends have made to their profile as well as any changes or additions in group registration, group message board activity, or any other of the number of features the network now offers to its users— went into effect last Monday, and drew a hailstorm of criticism almost instantaneously as well as catalyzing the formation of hundreds of groups on all sides of the argument.

Ironically, the very feature in contention seems to have facilitated the proliferation of these groups, as well as other, less politically-minded organizations, including “If This Group Reaches 100,000 My Girlfriend Will Have a Threesome,” whose creator, by the way, reached his goal in a little more than three days and is now shooting for 300,000 members, at which point his girlfriend has agreed to allow cameras.

I don’t mean to argue either in favor or against the addition, but rather simply to acknowledge that the move drew more focus away from MySpace (not to mention the interest that it must have taken from less popular networks like Xanga and Friendster) than any single event in the world of online social networking that I can think of in recent history — which extends at least as far back as last month— and to suggest that perhaps this redistribution of attention was unnecessary.

With the proliferation of all the various online social networking and blogging communities, it’s difficult, for me at least, to keep track of all of my accounts and the idiosyncrasies of each ones username and password combinations, as uniform as I try to make them. This is why I’m advocating the creation of a larger network from which we should be able to manage each of these accounts.

Besides the matter of convenience, there is a way in which such a network might help lead to a fuller understanding of those friends that we seem to desperately feel the need to be connected to in as many ways as possible.

Simply because of the tendency for these networks to vacillate between the realm of the popular and the unpopular, each account we create on each new network can invariably only capture a portion of our lives, and even a smaller portion of ourselves.

Beyond this though, it feels to me as though users — especially those that I am connected to on multiple networks -— try actively to craft each of their personas, shaping and forging new identities on each new network that may or may not have any real resemblance to any person we know, and maybe not any person they know either.

Of course, when I first began thinking about this article and how to approach this topic, I wondered if this was just speculation, so I asked a friend, Derek, whether it had any anchor in truth.

“I use Xanga and Blogger to highlight different aspects,” he said, “Xanga being more random, Blogger being more passionate and relevant.” Despite my disagreement with Derek’s interpretation of the word “random” (as humans do not — indeed cannot — perform randomly, he means something along the lines of “spontaneous” or “irreverent” or “inane”), his comments help to confirm what I’d suspected — what are good friends for, anyway?

So, as he puts it, Xanga is the place to put [spontaneous] thoughts, Blogger is the place to put relevant ones. MySpace is the place to post a number of ridiculous and suspiciously identical surveys about yourself (and send it to all of your top eight within the next 33 seconds, lest you have bad luck in love forever), Facebook is the place to post pictures of underage drinking, and Friendster is the place to put — well, nothing anymore.

Derek suggested the whole thing might be viewed in the light of being simply a means of entertainment.

Like the popular online game, “World of Warcraft,” he says “You don’t go on it to find out about people or converse or do anything socially significant…you have an avatar representing you — at least what you want it to represent you as. It’s not you.”

The crucial difference, of course, is that the game does not purport to reflect any real identity, while online networking communities do— and we actively maintain those various identities we have, catering our personalities and sense of self on each network to the parameters of that network, compartmentalizing seemingly infinitely what we might like to try and think of as a root identity.

Given any one of these networks, one might be led to believe we are all alcoholics, or we are all deeply serious all of the time, or that we have terrible short term memories (because, your favorite color and birthday and whether you’ve been skinny dipping in the last month— didn’t I read it all yesterday?)

We network and we network and we network, desperately trying to keep track of all the people who’ve been important in our lives at some point — and even a few that haven’t, really — but ultimately, there’s no one person we’ve connected to, only personas. Perhaps if we were able to consolidate all the others, and track them all at once, we would have a fuller portrait of those people that are ostensibly important to us.

But we’d need another network.

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