Quality | 2009.03.15
Comment: James Harkin on why gregarious online communities are a myth
Gregarious online communities are a myth - I want out of this fake global village
How many friends do you have, and how many do you need? I only ask because, in an orgy of promiscuous electronic friendship in the last few years, many of us have been gathering friends like they\'re going out of stock. My own Facebook friends are a diverse bunch, ranging from Ming Campbell to Garry Bushell.
The problem is I know hardly any of them. And according to Facebook\'s resident sociologist Dr Cameron Marlow, I am not alone. The average number of "friends" in a Facebook network, Marlow tells us, is 120. Most of them, however, keep themselves to themselves. The number of friends that the average male user of Facebook exchanges messages with is, apparently, seven. Female Facebookers are more gregarious, and communicate with 10.
It is easy to see how the rest mount up. There\'s something of the playground about Facebook, an instinctive, almost tribal urge to show off how many people are in your gang. Sometimes this can be quite literal; gang members in prisons, according to the Sun, are using Facebook to send out group photos and expand their limited social circle. Add too many electronic friends, however, and it rather defeats the point of having a gang in the first place.
Then there is the problem of quality control. Last week, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre, a reporter from the Sunday Express managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town and write a salacious piece about their "antics", based on information culled from their profiles. The blogosphere went ballistic, but it was too late.
What use, then, are imaginary friends like these? Set up to pass information speedily from one place to another, it is hardly surprising that electronic networks turn out to be a very potent way of ferrying our information around. Very few of us had been in the habit of phoning up numbers from the telephone book at random to impart information, for example, but now we are more than happy to pass it on to our network of weak electronic ties.
According to network theorists - those who believe that society can be analysed in terms akin to a computer network - all this should be to the good. Long before online social networking was around, network theorists were arguing that if only we kept in touch with our weak ties we would be much better off. The advantage of having a sprinkling of weak ties lay in the rapidity with which information could then be transmitted from one place to another. Since people from different walks of life were privy to different kinds of information, they maintained, weak ties would be helpful in offering tips on which jobs were up for grabs. Poor people, for example, tended to rely too heavily on strong ties for their information and too lightly on weak ones, and that was surely one reason for their continued poverty.
Put bluntly, the network theorists\' argument was that people are often more usefully skimmed - encountered lightly, but in greater numbers. As the technology progressed, so did the idea. One thing the explosion of weak electronic ties in places such as Facebook has achieved is to make the most tantalising nostrum of social network theory - the idea that we are living in a "global village" - into a triumphant reality.
But what can we use it all for? When Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook\'s CEO, was called upon to explain the site\'s exponential growth a few years back, he announced that it was like a map-maker for the "social graph" - the universe of our weak electronic ties that always existed but had only now become visible. In some ways he was quite right. Online social networks such as Facebook make for an excellent way of mapping who knows who in our extended network and laying bare the connections between us.
Just because we can take a bird\'s-eye view of who knows who in our extended network, however, doesn\'t mean that that map of connections is going to be useful. People don\'t want to bother trying to engage with a network of weak electronic ties, Facebook\'s own number-crunchers now tell us, probably because they know that those ties are usually so weak as to be non-existent. For at least 30 years, network theorists promised us that the presence of weak ties in any society would send information zipping around it bringing a bounty of new opportunities. When their hopes finally congealed in an online social network, however, that map of connections only proved useful for gawping at. If this is the promised global village, maybe it\'s time we took ourselves somewhere more exciting.
• James Harkin is the author of Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That\'s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
james@cyburbia.tv
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]line-communities-facebook-myth
