Social Networks and Compromising the Natural Order of Relationships

I. Plugging in to New Technology

Recently, I attended a conference on technology detailing how Web 2.0 has revolutionized the resources available to non-profit organizations for the recruitment of members and for sustaining communication between such members and organizational leadership. As the conference focused on teenage recruitment, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and other such social networking websites were highlighted and endorsed as ways for organizations to attract this technologically-advanced generation.

During the conference, a debate arose about the benefits and detriments of online social networks, especially the resource Facebook, which is popular most among college students. One argument has resonated with me since the discussion of many-to-many communication: Naturally you go through life making friends and leaving others behind. Haven’t technologies such as Facebook reversed this natural process? Immediately I wondered: what effects does such inversion have on our relationships?

II. The Reality

I remember first joining Facebook a couple of years ago. My profile page arose from the desire to maintain contact with my closest friends as we were departing for colleges across the nation. As a result, like most I entered the world of social networking with few friends; however, I expected to maintain this number as my main purpose was to facilitate communication with my classmates as we dispersed across the country.

Subsequently, I was astonished when people I have not spoken to in years – kindergarten classmates, first grade “romances,” old neighbors, and summer camp acquaintances – requested my friendship. The exhilaration of a friend request and the Facebook addiction inspired me, as it did many newcomers before and after me, to collect friends like my parent’s generation would collect baseball cards.

Today, as I flip through the pages of my friends list, I realize that I only consider a handful of these virtual people my “friends” in real life. Although I feel embarrassed and slightly irresponsible to acknowledge such, I fear that I am not the only one.

III. The Consequences of Virtual Friendship

So… what does this all mean? How does adding strangers to your friends list differ from my father exchanging business cards with men he meets at conferences, events, and on business trips? Are in most cases these people also momentary acquaintances?

The difference is that you do not dial the number on those business cards when you are bored to see how the person on the other end of the line is doing – where they are going to college or currently employed, whom they are seeing, and what their updated interests are – as you glance at a facebook page. It is natural to leave some people behind in life as you grow older, move away, or switch professions. Just as you lose business cards or replace them with those of newer acquaintances. It is just impossible to remain friends with everyone you ever met, unless you sacrifice the quality of those relationships with the quantity – as is the sad, confused reality and misleading message of modern social networking websites.

Yet the irony that pairs this aspect of social networking is the simultaneous intimacy that they promote among members. Rarely when one meets another face to face, does he walk out of a conversation knowing that person’s interests, birthday, employment information, friends, favorite quotes, relationship status, political background, religious view and among other miscellaneous information that individuals use to describe their personality and from which they create a tangible being on a webpage. The instant intimacy gained from looking on one’s profile would take weeks, months, potentially even years to gain and understand using conventional means of building a relationship. It is astonishing that you can get to know one as quickly as the refreshment of a page.

IV. Conclusion

And so the question remains: do the benefits of social networking exceed the sacrifice?