Coming back to social networks

As I wrote a few posts ago, my friend and I recently decided to take a month off the social networking
parts of the Internet. We decided that sites like Facebook, tumblr, last.fm, and Twitter were making our lives too complicated, and affecting the way we perceived ourselves (since everything we wrote could be viewed by large numbers of people).

Well, the month ended last Thursday, on April 9th. I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the experience:
- My friends' reactions were pretty interesting. One friend got angry: "Do you know how painful it is to see one’s measly 244 friend count drop to 242? You should warn me!” And another one was hurt: "I’m blocked from your Facebook. Is it something I did?”
- I was a lot more focused in getting my work done -- I didn't have the option of switching back and forth between the essay window and my Facebook window.
- I felt like I got to know people in a different way. I'm naturally an introvert, so I value one-on-one conversations more than I do large announcements (which I'm sure played a role in inspiring me to do the experiment to begin with). I found myself getting to know people I had assumed I "knew" because I was Facebook friends with them.
- I thought that leaving last.fm would cause me to listen to music in a different way -- I wouldn't be waiting for tracks to "scrobble" to a public profile. However, my listening habits didn't change. I listened to the same bands, and the same quantity of music.
- My phone plan? Allows 250 texts/month. My month off from Facebook? I used 502. Whoops.
- I didn't miss Twitter at all. In fact, I haven't logged back in, and I don't plan to.
- I didn't plan it this way, but the month overlapped with Spring Break (3/15-3/21) as well as my birthday (3/31). One would think I "missed" a lot of hanging out with old friends over break, and "missed" the slew of birthday wishes that show up on everyone's Facebook. But I was super busy over break, and my birthday felt more special when it was just the dozen or so friends who remembered.

My friend ended up going back to Facebook and Twitter after a couple of weeks; but as I said earlier, she's an intern at Newsweek and needed to find contacts for a story. (That, I think, says something about how much these social networking sites are a part of our lives.) I stayed away for the whole time, and I don't recall ever missing Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, or tumblr. However, that could be because I knew I was only going to be gone for a month.

In the end, I'm glad I took the month off. It convinced me that I don't rely on the internet to have a meaningful life (in fact, some dimensions of my life grew away from the computer), and it reminded me that I always have control over my relationship with new technology. Everyone should have that feeling.

Options

tumblr
My good friend, who is currently an intern at Newsweek, called me up two nights ago. After I caught her up on the more mundane details of my life, we turned to discussing the internet: "Take a look at my tumblr," she said. "How does it seem to you? I'm worried that I'm coming off as too scatter-brained, like an nineteen-year-old kid who doesn't have her tastes together. It's not cohesive enough, it doesn't have the right aesthetic."
"Well, you are a nineteen-year-old kid. And why are you worrying about aesthetic? Who reads this, anyway?" I asked.
"The people at Newsweek. The ones I really want to impress."

Facebook
"I'm worried about how I come off on my Facebook," I continued.
"What do you mean?"
"I made some new friends this weekend, and they wrote on my wall about certain things that I wouldn't want employers to see. Now I have two choices: I can either delete the wall posts (and risk alienating the people who wrote them), or I can leave them up (and take the chance that an employer might deny me a job.)"

LiveJournal
"Yeah, I guess I don't have that problem," my friend said. "I just post potentially sensitive things in my lj."
"That's a good way to do it."
"I guess. But it's also hard to decide who should read what, even in the LJ community."

last.fm
"I don't have an LJ, but what really drives me crazy is last.fm," I went on.
"Oh last.fm is the worst!"
"I know, right? I completely rely on it now to make my playlists. I use it to find out about new music, instead of talking to people or asking for mix CDs like I did in high school."
"With me," my friend said, "I just can't stop listening to a song until it scrobbles on my profile. I'm obsessed with the number of tracks I've played."

Xanga
"Hey, remember when everyone had a Xanga?" I asked.
"Yeah, haha, that was ridiculous."
"If I remember correctly, you went through several usernames."
"(Yeah, Xanga was wild.)" My friend is maybe a little embarassed by this.
"I wonder what happened to mine? I haven't logged in in years... It used to be so important to me. Did you know that that's how I became friends with Jon? I had always seen him around school in ninth grade, but it wasn't until I started commenting on his Xanga that we actually started talking in person. And now he's one of my best friends; how weird is that?"
"I feel like Xanga changed the way we made friends or met people. Before, if you wanted to get to know someone, you actually talked to them. You found out who they were. Then Xanga came along, and suddenly it was so easy to know someone without saying a word to them."
"I would argue that we don't even know people with this new method. I mean, with Facebook or any of these other websites, you know someone's favorite movies, bands, or authors, but that doesn't mean you know the person."
"Ugh, you don't know how many times I've assumed someone's going to be my best friend based on their profile, and then found out I didn't like them at all," my friend said.
"I believe it."

Twitter
"I hate Twitter," my friend said.
"What, why? You do realize the only reason I got one was because you had one, right?"
"Yeah, and the only reason I have one is because of Newsweek. All journalists feel pressured to get one, just to show that they're on top of everything. But it's so stifling; I can't be consistently witty in 140 characters or less several times a day."
"Right. And half of the things I write on there aren't very important or necessary, in retrospect. And as for seeing what you're up to, I might as well just send you a text message."

The problem
"Or an email."
"Or a Facebook message."
"Or check your scrobbles on last.fm."
"Or read your tumblr."
"Oh my God."
"I know," I said.
"This is terrible!" she said.

The experiment
"What if we just quit everything for a month?" I joked.
"Haha, nice."
"I mean, we can't though. Too much of our lives are on these sites; we need them to find out when things are happening, what our friends are doing."
"Yeah, that's true. ...But maybe that's the problem. We need them."
"What?" I said. She couldn't be serious.
"Let's do this." She was.
"Give everything up?"
"Yeah, just for a month. We would still keep our emails, and of course our phone numbers -- but I feel like anyone who really wants to reach me can do it through means other than Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, last.fm, or LiveJournal, can."
"It would certainly simplify everything."
"And I wouldn't spend hours worrying about how I look to the internet."
"It wouldn't be an issue."
"Excellent."
"Excellent."

__________________________________

So that's the plan. For the next month, my friend and I have blocked ourselves out of: Facebook, LiveJournal, tumblr, Twitter, and last.fm. We're not doing this for Lent, we're not doing it because we need to study for midterms, and we're not doing it because we're addicted. We're doing it because we constantly worry about the online versions of ourselves, and because the very nature of social online networking turns you into a sort of public figure, whether you want to be one or not.

I once said in class that I believed online social interaction was merely an extension of our real-life social interaction. I'm wondering if I should revise this statement. The energy that goes into maintaining an online representation of yourself is different than that of choosing an outfit or making small talk. Or perhaps it's the same kind of energy -- but expending more of it online than you do in the real world is, I think, not necessarily a good thing.

We'll see what happens. All I know is, the past two days have been far less stressful for me than they have been for the handful of friends who have emailed me, frantically asking, "Where did your Facebook go?"

The new, new, new Facebook

Yesterday at 3:17 pm, Mark Zuckerberg (the creator of Facebook) published a post on Facebook's official blog, objectively titled, "Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect." He discusses several (more) changes that will be made to Facebook, such as new celebrity Pages that look more like user profiles. He also includes a somewhat cryptic promise of changes to come for the Home page: "You can find out what it is your mother, your high school classmate or President Obama are doing, thinking and sharing right now just by logging into Facebook."

Now I care as much about Facebook itself as the next person (in fact, I probably care less if that person is your average college student), but I'm not as interested in this post as I am in the user response it has elicited. Facebook has changed its format dramatically since it began in 2004. There were Applications, which excited some and annoyed others (including myself) who had left the busy look of MySpace for the more minimalist design of Facebook. There was the now-infamous Newsfeed, which showed exactly what your friends were doing (as well as where and when they did it).

In true social-network fashion, these changes were not met passively. As if rebelling against some oppressive government, users self-organized into groups, circulated virtual petitions, and updated their statuses (and other immediate information) to show their disapproval. Of course, others liked various incarnations of the "new" Facebook, and they too got on discussion boards and argued it out with dissenters.

Now I may be wrong, but I don't remember a Facebook blog existing at those times. Facebook didn't provide us with an official forum for discussing these changes that so affected our Facebook-lives; therefore, Facebook itself became its own forum. (How many of you are still in groups protesting the "new" Facebook?) But with the blog, users are able to provide immediate feedback to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Some comments from yesterday's post:

"Facebook has come a long way. I like what I am seeing and looking forward to seeing how it all evolves. "

"Can Facebook go 8 months without radically changing something? Just as I get used to the new homepage, you change it again! >:("

"I HATE THE NEW HOME PAGE!!!!!"

"I love you facebook!!!!!!!"

Also interesting: a text search reveals that "twitter" (or some form of it) is used 20 times in the comments -- but not once by Mark himself.

In my opinion, the Facebook blog is necessary and useful: not only because it alerts users to changes before they happen (as opposed to surprising them one day with a Newsfeed), but also because it centralizes Facebook discussion. I didn't scroll through all 700+ comments left on the post, but from the few I did read, it looks like users are not only responding to the blog post but also to other users.

While I'm not sure how wild I'll be about the new-and-newer Facebook -- especially since it will probably change again in a few months -- I am definitely a fan of the Facebook blog. Mark Zuckerberg should sleep easy at night with the knowledge that he's done at least one thing unequivocally "right."

Your own piece of internet

I have two Twitters, three email addresses, two RSS feeds (through my two Google accounts) and two blogs. If I could get away with having more than one Facebook, I probably would. Our class has discussed these communication tools at length, and more times than not, conclude that these are great ways to reach a large number of people in a relatively small amount of time. Instead of calling a dozen friends for a movie, I can send a single email (or Facebook message). Instead of spending half an hour on the phone with each of my friends from home, I can send out short messages on Twitter.

But sometimes reaching a large number of people is a problem. I've had a Twitter for about a month now, but I recently set up a second account to stay in touch with my parents. Why? Well, the first Twitter is for a few close friends, and sometimes has updates like "I think I failed that test" or "That was a great concert" (posted at 3 am) -- both things I don't want my parents to see. The same goes for my email addresses: one is for school/professional contacts, one is for websites and acquaintances, and one is for close friends. And while the blog I'm updating right now is for my HONR229F seminar, "New Media Frontiers;" I have an entirely different one for writing about music. ...So even though I started out with one Twitter, one email address, and one blog, I've found that I have to add different versions of the same tools depending on my "audience."

The necessity of creating multiple online personas is no more clearly demonstrated than in the case of Facebook. Time and time again, we college students hear, "Be careful what you put on Facebook, employers can and will find your profile." While I don't have any innappropriate photos up, I've deleted several wall comments because a well-meaning friend hinted at something I'd rather keep private. Creating one internet profile that all the world can see solves a lot of the old problems, but also creates new ones.

Likewise, communicating through multiple Twitters, emails, and blogs can get confusing. It's a hassle to constantly sign in and out of Twitter, and when I feel like procrastinating, it's pretty tempting to rotate through my various email inboxes. And I'm not the only one; most of my good friends (you know, the ones I write to from email address #3) do the same thing.

What I find really interesting: even though all these communication tools aim to reconcile our contacts into one all-inclusive, "convenient" social network, we still naturally separate people into categories.