http://packetonline.com/articles/2008/05/16/cranbury_press/opinions/doc482da0fdba495542770556.txtlet me know what you think?
Tangents: Virtual connections
Networking sites expand a circle of friends
Friday, May 16, 2008 11:23 AM EDT
By John Saccenti, News Editor
I’ve got about 31 friends. That includes a few people I’ve worked with and a few from high school. That’s it. No one from college, no family members, no neighbors and no one who was in my wedding party.
How do I know this? Well, MySpace and Facebook are specific. They let you know exactly how many people have decided to call you friend, and then post their photos just in case you’ve forgotten what they actually look like.
I signed up for both social networking Web sites a little more than a month ago to see what all the youngsters we keep hiring as reporters are doing and because I was beginning to feel a little left behind, like that housewife who still needed to “learn computers,” 15 years ago.
Thirty-one friends. That’s not bad for the real world, where keeping up with just a few can be exhausting. But, it’s a drop in the bucket for the Internet’s big two of social networking Web sites, both of which allow users to select “friends,” post photos, send messages, share music and likes and dislikes, blog, and keep each other up to date on everything from the mundane to the mildly interesting. You see, keeping up with friends when you’re on MySpace or Facebook is simple, because once you’re there, you’ll find that all you ever do is hear about what you’re friends are up to. Oh, that and fill out surveys. You’ll probably fill out a lot of surveys.
I began by posting my profile information, which included where I went to school, where I work, and allowed me to list my favorite books, music, movies and other interests, enabling myself and other users to find potential friends based on similar tastes. Both sites operate pretty much the same in this regard.
I then put a nice picture of me doing something goofy, which seems to be a requirement for most MySpace and Facebook pages, and I was ready get down to some serious friend-finding.
I started where most people probably start, trying to find old high school and college friends, friends that I’d thought about occasionally, but had few ways — and sometimes little interest — to hunt down. It turns out that MySpace and Facebook were about as useful as Google and Yahoo! had been over the years, and I got a sick feeling that my friends and I had somehow missed the U.S.S. 21st Century, or that we just couldn’t be bothered with it.
But I eventually did fine someone, a friend from high school and someone I’d known since first grade. I “friended” him (yes, friended is now a verb. Get over it.). Soon after, and because of that one connection, I discovered more former classmates, all connected to each other via Facebook. Right now I have four friends from high school, and I don’t expect to find any more, but judging by the way it works, if someone I know stumbles on someone else I know, then a connection of our own is just a click away.
A bonus of making these friends is that I don’t ever have to see them, spend time with them or deal with the social pressures that come alone with human interaction. All I have to do is send them the occasional updates on my existence, and read the same updates they send me. It’s great, I can be friends without any effort at all.
I realize that I’m getting on the boat late, and that the MySpace and Facebook have changed from the cool, hip sites they were a few years ago. MySpace was created by an already successful company called eUniverse that held contests among employees to see who could get the most subscribers to the new site. MySpace is now a media giant owned by News Corporation (that’s Rupert Murdoch to you and I). Facebook, created by a couple of Harvard University students, began as a site that was open to just college students. It now boasts more than 60 million subscribers.
I’m an old man when you think of who the intended audience probably was for these sites, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying it. I get to blog, post photos, search for friends, fill out surveys (wow are there a lot of surveys) and keep up with friends via bulletins and Facebook’s news feed, which plucks info from your friends’ sites and posts it on your page in the form of headlines.
It is this way that many users are able to make sure their friends know what they up to, taking the game of “hey look at me” to heights as yet unseen. Both sites allow users to join groups, select celebrities as friends, post blogs and poems and photos and a lot of other things. It becomes the ultimate in narcissism, with some joining groups for no other reason than to let others know how “in” or “hip” or “artistic” they are. Everyone who has ever spent any amount of time on these sites understands what I’m talking about and has likely done it to some extent.
Still though, these feeds and bulletins are helpful, and I usually know when someone I know is in a good or bad mood, which I like a lot, since it usually precipitates an e-mail, or note to them.
Which, when it comes down to it, was kind of my intention to begin with. Sure I wanted to see what the youngin’s were up to, but what I really wanted was to see what my friends were up to. Now I know.
John Saccenti is news editor of The Cranbury Press and the South Brunswick Post. He can be reached via e-mail by clicking here. Visit him on the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press Facebook pages.
