social networking

What is social networking? Do we really need to tag our content and format our messages in order to broadcast our communication to select strata of our friends lists?

What is a friends list? Is it a standing reserve of opportunities for fun, meeting up, getting to know you, getting to know me, staying in touch, maintaining friendship?

Aristotle saw friendship as the highest form that human relations could attain. In friendship one could achieve virtue. I suspect that much of what these social networking sites do is to reduce friends to a list, a stacking list, a standing reserve.

The potential for scripted, tagged, and formatted conversations are quite rife in the vast architecture of a social network. That's not virtue. That's an engineering fix for a problem that he's defined from the outset, a problem of how to relate with as many people as possible.

That sounds like marketing to me.

And that's probably all that it is in the end.

I read that social networking technologies enabled grassroots democracy uprisings like what occurred in Egypt. They also enabled a presidential hopeful reach millions of young and enfranchised Americans. He was elected, and it was the biggest advertising, branding, and marketing campaign the world has seen.

Welcome to the future.

We've left Aristotle's views on friendship in the dustbin of the history of ideas. We've replaced that with the marketing savvy companion. The person who you think looks better when she's wearing name brand shoes. A connection like that requires psychoanalysis, and I'll cut to the chase.

Over years of having advertising messages drilled into your head, you've come to believe that you're experiencing the fleeting feelings conveyed in the flash-bang media spreads for fashion items. Now that you're older, your response to seeing these shoes is almost Pavlovian. You drool at the site of that stack of french fries. The smell alone conjures up the moments of fun in the sun you had with your mother, when she still smiled, before the cancer stole her from you. Now you take your child to the same restaurant and recreate the same event.

Now that we've had advertising messages grafted onto our very being, we're ready to do the advertising for the company. Social networking is an authentication vehicle for product marketing. If it isn't happening yet, oh it will. Twitter reduces conversation to soundbites. Facebook turns our online identity into a homepage with interface points, walls, for marking, and tools for saying hello. As we stack our friend list high and take to the game of networking socially like an addict takes to his drug, we're poised to market not only ourselves and our lifestyles, but the very products, which enable it.

There is no Aristotelian virtue in my friends list. It's merely an opportunity to exploit that network of friends as a resource, a resource who we confusingly believe that we've shared an experience with. No, we've only authored that experience by applying standard nomenclature, a narrative genre, and a mark-up language for broadcasting this story to that list.

In Schindler's time the list was a tool of bureaucracy to expedite the mass slaughter of an ethnic group, keep it orderly, and measure progress. Now the list is a standing reserve of potential opportunities for contact. The social network is an interpellation mechanism. After all, how persuasive is it to get an automated message letting you know that your friends have joined, and why don't you?

There is no virtue in exploiting humans as a resource. There is no virtue in the standing reserve, just potential, potential energy. How will this potential energy get tapped? Probably to further ensconce us in technical relations, and little more.

Only in a context of vast separation and a diurnal rhythm dictated by a 'schedule' where everyone has their own personal contact interface with a vast database of media, fame, friends, funny, facts, and the like would we need to use such a social networking tool. As a sign of the times in which we live, the pragmatic use of this tool is clear. It's hard too coordinate meeting, and maintaining contact when we need each other so little.

How sad that the challenge of living doesn't require so much of our partner. Love and attraction once weren't calculated by psychological algorithms. They were incidental to a relationship of necessity. We need each other to raise a family, feed the chickens, and harvest the crops. The farming community was a great ribbon of cooperation that emerged out of absolute necessity. With machines running on energy tapped from millions of years of the sun's rays, we let the robots substitute for the necessary contacts we once maintained. They help us to deal with the increasing complexity of our society. As an organism we are being flung apart at the speed of combustion. We compensate for this rapid pace by speaking at a faster pace, the speed of electrical conduction. That approaches the speed of light.

Here we are, under the ceilings of theoretical limits, relating via machines with others. Rarely do we consider them other than the number of common interests we share with them. Rarely do we consider them other than the pictures they post.

There is no virtue in this social network of ours. Its artifice cheats us of serendipity, chance encounters, chance meetings, chance itself.

In chance's stead we now have random. Random emerges in interface design as shuffle. And we purposely shuffle our list of friends according to some criteria dictated by the tags that we choose. Some friends hear about our sports. Others hear about our socialization habits.

In the face of complexity, the rapidly growing stack of friends, we let the machine do the thinking for us. Shuffle.

The irony? Here I am using a blog intended to be shared with no one. I'm using one of a sundry collection of social networking tools to journal, no more. I have no list other than that represented by my phone contacts. I've yet to use the function that allows me to send texts to more than one at a time. I fear dipping into that deep stream. It may wash me away .