提供超市式友谊的社交网站

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  lama 组长 楼主 2007-10-12 12:36:59

  HERE'S LOOKING AT US

  If the Summer of Love captivated San Francisco in 1967, and the Summer of Sam scared New Yorkers half to death in 1977, London in 2007 was most definitely the summer of Facebook. In the space of only two months, Facebook.com exploded into a kind of electronic ectoplasm which found its sticky way into almost every organisation, every dinner-party anecdote and every budding romance. In the febrile atmosphere which followed, it seemed that each conversation I had was punctuated with lines such as “How many friends do you have?” or the slightly more sinister “Consider yourself poked.” (The poke, Facebook's signature function, is a kind of electronic “wassup” which Facebookers send to friends and acquaintances for fun.)

  Facebook is not the only social-networking site which likes to think of itself as the new, new thing. It is not even the biggest; MySpace boasts 114 million residents, while Facebook is home to fewer than half that number. This year, however, has undoubtedly belonged to Facebook, and nowhere more so than in London. By July, 882,000 Londoners had migrated there, double the number who were signed up in May and an almost twofold increase in just two months. So speedy was Facebook's rise that Rupert Murdoch, who had shelled out $580m for MySpace just two years previously, was reportedly worried that he might have backed the wrong horse.

  But where the Frisco hippies ushered in a new, liberated era and the New York serial murders cast a fearful pall over Manhattan, the stampede of young urbanites to Facebook.com may have had a less dramatic effect on London life. If anything, the craze may have changed our social lives for the worse: sucking us into a false sense of comfort and popularity.

  So why did Facebook become so devilishly infectious so quickly, just about the most exciting place on the web to see and be seen? And why were otherwise rational adults so evangelist about getting non-members to join? Like most people who spend time on Facebook, my first encounter with it was by invitation. One morning in the middle of June, a journalist friend summoned me by e-mail to join the site. For those who haven't tried it or had it excitedly explained to them already, the site works like this: new users enter their name, a few details about their career (if they so wish) and are then presented with an internet page on which to share their photos, their likes and dislikes, and announce their comings and goings. (“James is contemplating lunch,” or “Emma is feeling nauseous.”) Facebookers around the world spend an average of three hours 41 minutes on the site every month. For young people new to the world of work, hanging out on Facebook seems to have soaked up much of what we used to think of as workplace gossip, those tall stories you might tell about the weekend, those half-hearted attempts at flirtation that help pass the working day.

  Time spent on Facebook, however, is not just idle chitchat between friends, because the architecture of the place lends itself so easily to voyeurism and exhibitionism. This is a crucial part of its appeal. On Facebook it is easy to keep tabs on your friends, and also to find out about the lives of your acquaintances and even your enemies. By modifying personal privacy settings, one can, at least in theory, choose to give out information only to those who are in one's friendship network. Inevitably, there are some who only want to watch: one woman I know, a civil servant, confesses to have become a Facebook cyber-stalker, frittering away her working day stalking the profiles of others while keeping her own invisible to all but four close friends.

  Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, the young American creator of Facebook, made the site even more attractive for watchers and those who want to be watched when he launched a “news feed” feature. This systematically hoovers up all the information on the site for each person in any given bunch of friends and translates it into a very primitive news ticker for everyone else to see. Some residents groaned about the implications for their privacy and more than a few complained, but very soon most grew to love the new set-up. Facebook rapidly became a vast micro-publisher of the quotidian scribblings of its millions of inhabitants.

  Zuckerberg set up Facebook just three years ago at the age of 19, when he decided that the mug-shots printed on the walls of his university administrative offices at Harvard could do with being transferred online. Within a day of its launch in February 2004, 1,200 of Zuckerberg's fellow students had signed up. From there the idea spread like wildfire to other American universities, and from there to colleges around the world. Just a year ago this month, Zuckerberg opened Facebook's doors to non-students, which made a formerly exclusive electronic neighbourhood suddenly available to the masses. In June this year he took a deep breath and relaxed control over its programming code, allowing outside developers to build into Facebook funky new things to do – the ability to play Scrabble, for example, or to ask all your Facebook friends a question at the same time.

  There's something of the playground about Facebook, an instinctive, almost tribal urge to show off how popular you are and who's in your gang. For this reason, the decision of whether to offer the hand of friendship or accept someone as a friend is fraught with the potential for snubs and faux pas. If you refuse an offer of friendship, you clearly offend, but if you accept too generously, it defeats the purpose of a private group of close acquaintances. Add to this the fact that no one wants to be Billy No Mates and you have the recipe for an explosion of transient and threadbare friendship.

  A global study of 18,000 young people commissioned by MTV and published at the end of July found that respondents were connected to an average 53 people they considered to be online “friends”. Just six of those 53 were real-life close friends, the study found, while a further 27 came from a wider circle of friendly acquaintances. The remaining 20 were purely online buddies; the young people, however, considered them proper friends despite the fact that they had never met in person.

  After only a couple of weeks on Facebook, I'd acquired nearly 20 friends – some people from work and some friends of theirs, a few acquaintances I'd accumulated in the past but had fallen out of touch with and a couple of rather sinister-looking randoms. Unable to think of anything else to do, I searched under my own name and discovered that there are at least 15 other James Harkins on the site. Inspired by the realisation of a possible common interest, I set up a group called “James Harkins” with the catchy subtitle “James Harkins of the World Unite”. Within a single day, I'd rustled up three James Harkins and another two had asked me to be their friend.

  Still at a loss for anything to do, I went hunting for some famous Facebookers and found someone claiming to be the new foreign secretary David Miliband. Despite my repeated pokes and my forwarding him a special message saying that I was his biggest fan, Miliband refused all my offers of Facebook friendship. His loss.

  Ray Pahl, a professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, spends his time carefully tabulating small changes within the sociological firmament. He believes that people who regularly spend time on Facebook and similar sites get into problems when the distinction between real and imaginary friends gets blurred, because it inevitably eats into the time you should be spending with your real nearest and dearest. “Anyone who think they've got 200 friends,” Pahl says, “has got no friends.”

  One way of making sense of the kind of friendship offered on Facebook is via the fashionable new discipline of network theory, a way of thinking that was borne out of trying to understand what happens when computers are hooked up with one another but which has now expanded its empire into the social sciences. Back in 1973, long before Facebook existed, the American sociologist Mark Granovetter borrowed the tools of network theory to argue that “weak ties” – those people you meet at parties or who you sit beside on planes; the kind of people whose telephone number you took to be polite but who you forgot about as soon as you parted – were more important in the ferrying of information than we had previously imagined. These were the kinds of people, Granovetter pointed out, who might well help you find jobs or give you helpful tips. Precisely because you didn't know them very well, they could catapult you into new experiences.

  Granovetter's argument was dubbed “the strength of weak ties” and it quickly became the first commandment of social-network theory and its defining rationale. At least for those in the know, its lesson seemed to be clear – get more loose and fleeting acquaintances, because people with too many strong ties and not enough weak ones might end up being stuck in a rut, and that in turn leads to social atrophy. Thirty years later, this idea seems to have arrived at its reductio ad absurdum with sites such as Facebook, places in which people pile on friends as if they were at the supermarket. Real friendship, after all, is measured in quality rather than quantity, and cannot be managed by computer – it is based on trust, reciprocity and real knowledge of the other person's life, which is why friends are so good at providing support whenever the time comes.

  But if weak ties are too flimsy to offer us much in the way of real support, why are we so keen to have them? Maybe the best way to see Facebook, and the social-networking sites like it, is as natural, more democratic successors to the lure of celebrity culture. Just as many of us have begun to follow in obsessive detail the lives of celebrities as if we really knew them, Facebook and places like it tease us with the suggestion that we are spending time catching up with a real group of friends. Maybe the architecture we have built ourselves in Cyburbia has made it into the kind of place in which everyone becomes a mini-celebrity for everyone else. Bring on the paparazzi.

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