I wonder what it means for social institutions. In the last few months, I feel as if I've started seeing the seeds of a radical shift in social networks, thanks to the nexus of Facebook and Twitter. Now, Washington has always been, at least for the wonk population, a pretty small town: a friend and I recently estimated the mean time from first date to showing up at a party and having someone you barely know ask where the other person is at about 10 days. But Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, have supercharged those networks.Marc Pesce delivers a few facts and a lot of breathless prose.
Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's time we've gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.
...fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty...each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously...Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule...the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes...All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw. Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.
Pesce claims that cultural change is going to accelerate. I wonder what this means for educational and political institutions.
Last Friday, I was supposed to meet an old friend from New York at a bar at 11th and U Street at 7. By 5:30, thanks to IM, I was already having drinks with another friend, so we wandered over early together. By 7:30, two other DC friends had found out about us on Twitter and wandered over. Julian Sanchez joined us from the Subway a block away, then Dave Weigel stopped by. Several random friends drifted past and sat down. By 11, drinks for two had turned into drinks for 12, basically all courtesy of Twitter.
Yes, yes, I might as well just get a latte and a copy of Finnegan's Wake tattooed onto my bicep. But there's also the fact that Facebook is keeping me updated on people I haven't seen since high school. The big city--hell, the whole coast--is starting to feel a lot more like a small town. Last night, one of my friends said, "I love Twitter. I go out a whole lot more because there's always something going on."
I suspect that Twitter, Facebook, and whatever comes after them will mean denser, richer social networks in the future. Already, email is holding people together after college a lot more tightly than the people I graduated with--the last graduating class, basically, before the Web. People know what's going on in the lives of a whole lot more people than the mobile coastal types of yesteryear.
This has its downsides, of course, which is why so many people flee small towns. I've encountered widespread regret that it's becoming impossible to have a small party anymore, because the people you didn't invite always find out. Or unwanted guests show up to your intimate soiree. Or the broadcast invitation puts two people together who really oughtn't to be in the same room under any circumstances--someone I know in New York recently discovered that her twitters were allowing an unwanted beau to quasi-stalk one of her friends.
We're going to need to re-evolve the manners that smoothed these ripples in an earlier, more intimate time--a sort of willful blindness to the social activity going on without you.
I am constantly fascinated by the actions and thoughts of the extraverts who make up about 75% of the population.
As an introvert, I simply cannot imagine such a scenario happening. I'm one of those people who turns on the cell phone only to make outgoing calls.
Simply fascinating.
Dare I say a Brave New World? Bell let the genie out of the bottle it is just a matter of time until it reaches the event horizon. We may be very close.
It helps that HuSi (as we call it) is fairly small, and thus manageable. Sort of like Slashdot was 10 or so years ago before it got popular.
I think the border line on using the new social tools is whether you are married and have children. I pretty much know exactly what my weeknights are going to involve, so having a twitter saying "fixing dinner, getting ready to put the little guy to bed" every night is useless. Nor can I be spontaneous and take up last-minute invites or random get togethers.
For those with the freedom and inclination to take advantage of the new social tools, the benefits far outweigh any of the disadvantages you note. I think in the future, you'll have a very small group of extremely close friends, and a vast network of acquaintances. You'll note the special status of the close friends by having occasions that are off the grid and were communicated verbally rather than electronically.
I am constantly fascinated by the actions and thoughts of the extraverts who make up about 75% of the population.
As an introvert, I simply cannot imagine such a scenario happening. I'm one of those people who turns on the cell phone only to make outgoing calls.
I'm very extroverted, but my use of Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace is reactive at best (I think I have a Twitter account, but I'm not sure). I don't look at them except to respond to someone's friend request or message, and then I might look around and perform profile maintenance or something.
There are extroverts who are so extroverted that we need actual human contact, in-person or over the phone. Interestingly enough, my introverted husband has many more Facebook friends than I do, and spends more time on the site. But he goes and hangs out with his (relatively few) flesh-and-blood friends rarely, while I have a far busier social calendar.
I have come to the conclusion that the advent of email, social networking sites, and text messaging have pretty much decimated any reasonable excuse one might have for NOT keeping in touch with friends. Basically, if you aren't talking to someone it's because you really don't care.
I share Rex's introverted confusion. That sort of unplanned snowballing into a 12 person event sounds almost frightening to me. And speaking of frightening:
The implications of this whole "publish my life on the web" thing have been looked at quite a bit, especially in the context of personal party pictures perused by professional prospects. (sorry, got caught up in the alliteration there)
But this intuitive repulsion we have at someone studying all our comings and goings and watching what we do (stalking) seems kind of at odds with the decision to publish lots of your personal life online. Much like the problem of paparazzi and celebrities, someone who has stepped into the public eye finds that some of the public glares much more closely than expected or desired.
Maybe I'll download Thorogood's "I Drink Alone" as my ringtone.....
The problem with sites like Facebook is the false perception of privacy. On the Internet, nothing is private forever. Persons famous enough to get dozens of hits when Googling their own name (like our host) may not be affected, since the information is already out there; but more importantly, they also know it is out there and can take the appropriate precautionary steps. The average person who thinks they are operating in a private atmosphere is often much less wise in this regard.
Scottstev also has a good point -- only young singles and DINC-types are free to engage in the kind of impromptu social wallflowering described in Megan's post, and generally always have from the advent of the telephone forward. The only difference as I see it is the extentions to the communications medium. Before the 1990s, it was either telephone or favorite hangouts. By the mid 1990s, you telephoned your friend's pager and they knew to call back. By the late 1990s, cell phones and email were taking over from land-line and pagers. Then SMS started to replace alot of email functions.
Now the Crackberry and web apps like MySpace/Facebook/ Twitter, are altering the structure again -- but with the same general results.
None but the naive have a "perception" of "privacy" on Facebook. That's the whole point of it: share with the world what you're doing. Those who wish not to engage need not do so.
Persons famous enough to get dozens of hits when Googling their own name (like our host)
What planet is this on? Even I get dozens of hits when I google my own name. Megan would get thousands if not tens of thousands.
My parents are from the Animal House cohort, just too young for hippiedom, and they have an amazingly coherent network of "college friends" that can gather in very large numbers on short notice, using lines of communication sustained for decades almost entirely by hand-written correspondence with occasional supplementary phone conversations.
I think there was a period between the death of postal correspondence and the emergence of email where written correspondence became a "lost art" the rediscovery of which, with a zesty technological sauce, seems like "a radical shift in social networks."
None but the naive have a "perception" of "privacy" on Facebook. That's the whole point of it: share with the world what you're doing. Those who wish not to engage need not do so.
Point being, the social-networking structure of the medium can seduce people into believing they are having conversations with friends, not realizing that what they are really doing is posting on a highway billboard that not everyone has looked up at, yet. The "naiive" by this definition might be more numerous than you suppose.
What planet is this on? Even I get dozens of hits when I google my own name. Megan would get thousands if not tens of thousands.
About 200,000 exact matches for "Megan McArdle", actually. Probably quite a few more if I cared to try all of the popular mis-spellings.
Interestingly enough, the term "dozens" is a colloquial and highly indefinite number, typically used to express "some large quantity I haven't bothered to check". Maybe to you it impliess less than one gross or something, I don't know.
I think geography has something to do with your experience as well. Your experience of the Twitter-enabled snowball of friends gathering at the coffeehouse could happen in DC or NY, where most of your friends are living and working in the same neighborhood. That wouldn't work for my life in LA. If I saw a Twitter that a friend was in the Starbucks on Main St in Santa Monica, it wouldn't cause me to jump on the freeway for 45 minutes or more to go meet him.
Interestingly enough, the term "dozens" is a colloquial and highly indefinite number, typically used to express "some large quantity I haven't bothered to check". Maybe to you it impliess less than one gross or something, I don't know.
Yes, less than a gross, more than a score.
For the record, my name gives 374,000 hits, with about one hit in ten actually being me, rather than someone else of the same name (based on my count in the first several pages).