Mapping the Brave New World

This feature article was written about social media before Instagram, Snapchat, filters, FOMO, election rigging, and Tiger King memes were a thing. It was a little young for its age — a snapshot in time where you could barely see the cracks. Or if you could, we weren’t articulating them.

To set the scene: Facebook, formerly just for college students, had recently opened up to the general public. Street style bloggers were the influencers of the time. And Xanga (already getting old) and MySpace (soon to be out the door) get a mention.

“I sent you a friend request,” my new co-worker told me. This was a few months ago, when we were still in the polite, I-hardly-know-you stage of working together. By being thrown together frequently in a similar setting, we were working towards a friendship, but for now, it was all professionalism.

So I kept my words in check, lest I be a little less polite — or a little more honest. Nice try, but I’m unsearchable, I thought. My full name isn’t even on my profile, and you don’t know my e-mail address. Maybe you’ll find some of my cousins instead, but I doubt you’ll find —

“I looked on Douglas’s profile,” he said in response to my incredulous expression, citing another co- worker of ours. “You’re on his friends list.”

Well, supposedly unsearchable.

“I haven’t been on,” I admitted. “I’ll check it tonight.”

When the time came to check my page, sure enough, the friend request was waiting for my approval. I was still reluctant. Could I trust that this guy wasn’t secretly a complete pervert? Was it worth friending someone I didn’t know that well in person? Plus, even if he was who he seemed to be, would I really want him to be privy to the ways I define myself?

There’s no quick answer to these questions, so I clicked on his profile page to see what I could discover. There was little to learn; he liked video games and epic battle scenes. In his photo gallery, there were the tattoo pictures Douglas had swooned about the day before, old snapshots, and handmade art. In five minutes, I knew more about his quirks and interests than I’d been able to learn in a month of working with him.

If doing quick background checks on potential friends wasn’t so commonplace nowadays, maybe it would have been disconcerting.

Yet his profile seemed safe enough, so I hit Accept and signed out, not bothering to send a message or leave a joking comment as I would for other friends.

As far as I was concerned, we really weren’t at that point yet.

It’s a place where money is no object, you don’t need to know someone’s size to gift them with underwear, and no one files for sexual harassment when they get spanked. Welcome to the wide world of social networking.

Using the Internet for learning and communicating with each other is nothing new. In North America alone, around 251 million people are Internet users, according to the latest survey from the Internet World Statistics website. E-mail and instant messaging paved the way for blogging (the online equivalent of writing a journal entry), posting photos and videos, and networking. Taking advantage of the phenomenon is only a matter of picking your poison. There’s the 140-character limitation of Twitter, the all-work-no-play business networking site LinkedIn, and sites that seem to do virtually everything, like Myspace and Facebook. Facebook is arguably the most popular, with a rapid growth rate. According to the site, 150 million people worldwide are Facebook users, with “about 70% of users […] outside the United States.” The site’s universal nature — coupled with its reputation as the “adult” version of social networking — makes finding real users a relatively easy feat, especially in the Silicon Valley. Here, most people I spoke to were technologically savvy, yet still knew what things were like before the phenomenon of social networking.

In 2003, the social networking trend in my high school was blogging on websites like Xanga (established in 1999, and rated the 231st most visited site on the Internet in 2008). The craze showed that real world relationships can prove even more tenuous in the virtual world, as the same amount of bullying and gossip — if not more — took place online. At that time, the worst case scenario was expulsion, which occurred when a fellow student’s blog was brought to the attention of the administration. In it, one post contained a lengthy description about his ten least favorite classmates, complete with their full names.

This year, a mother was acquitted of criminal charges for creating a fake Myspace profile and posing as a teenage boy to harass her daughter’s former friend. The rejection and harassment led the 13-year-old girl, Megan Meier, to hang herself in 2008. As recently as November 2009, the Chicago Tribune reported that California gang members are making use of social networking sites to recruit new members and pass on information. In Canada, Facebook photos viewed by a woman’s insurance agent led her to lose her health benefits, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The stakes of social networking grow higher as we deal with the messy repercussions of the real world meeting the virtual world, and their potential for creating headlines. Not only do we face the dangers of the virtual world, itself a relatively public place, but we face the risks that come with our own exhibition of personal information. It’s what scholar Jim Kent calls our own “gratification of publishing personal data,” in his 2005 article on social networking. A study on online privacy conducted by Carnegie Mellon University professors Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti shows a surprising number of college students willing to put personal information on their profiles which make them traceable, either directly or through deduction.

But because of the fledgling nature of the subject and the still-rising popularity of websites like Facebook, no one seems to have the answers for how to define the boundaries between the online and offline worlds, or how social networking will affect us in the future — even the users themselves.

A month in, Marcela is enjoying Facebook. She joined thanks to a friend, and easily spends up two hours chatting with him when she gets off work, a cartoon image substituting for her real picture. For her, there are no problems, except the technical kind that seems to be plaguing many other Facebook users I spoke to: “The chat keeps disappearing!”

As an ESL student, she finds Facebook’s chat feature especially useful. She tells me, “I like to practice my writing in English. It’s really good practice in school, because my friend can explain things and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

Marcela has long since graduated from college, so her own time as a student was free of the influences of Myspace or Facebook, with all the procrastination and excitement that these sites lead to. But her views of the site are similar to those of current college students I spoke to in the Silicon Valley. For them, the major benefits of social networking were reconnecting and keeping in touch with old friends, and the cons were just “the normal cons”: jealousy, miscommunication, and embarrassment. But the big things — learning of a partner’s infidelity, stalking, and sexual harassment — were stories they only heard about on the news, or from friends of friends. Most users believe they are being smart in their online interactions.

Despite being careful about what information she puts online, 20-year-old Nahal is still trying to be safer. A pretty student with a penchant for fashion and makeup, she says she still gets friend requests from strangers, despite changing her privacy settings and allowing only friends to see her profile and photos. If these precautions seem strict, it’s thanks to her past experiences. “People who I didn’t know very well would add me and I didn’t want to reject them, so I would accept their request,” she says. “One guy started talking to me on Face[book] chat late at night and I didn’t really know him that well. I wanted to ignore him, but I saw him every now and then and didn’t want it to be awkward when I saw him in person.”

If this incident were a face-to-face interaction, perhaps she could have used her body language or tone to cut the conversation short or express a lack of enthusiasm. She may have followed her instincts and stayed away. But when talking to someone can be accomplished in a few clicks, perhaps it makes others bolder. In Zizi Papachrissi’s study on the geographies of social networks in New Media and Society, social networking sites are “characterized by their ability to remove, or at least rearrange, the boundaries between public and private spaces.”

Like Nahal, graduate student Andrea also has strict privacy settings on her profile, another case of living and learning. When she first joined, she was more open to friending strangers: “I was so new to social networking and wanted to connect with people my age. However, now that there are more and more people joining Facebook, I wouldn’t accept a friend request from just anyone. You always hear those stories about 40-year-old men trying to contact young girls, and it makes you aware that you can’t trust just anyone online. You wouldn’t walk up to a complete stranger if you saw them face to face, so why would you talk to just anyone online if you weren’t one hundred percent sure who they were? You just can’t trust that people say who they are online. All you see is the computer screen and you never know who is sitting at the other end of your message. Just because you are in front of a computer screen and typing to someone, doesn’t make it safe.”

Though some users try to be safe by limiting their online interactions and ensuring that people are who they say they are, others find appeal in wearing a mask. In person, 21-year-old Bradley is a quiet but friendly college student. In “the game,” as he calls it, he is loud, aggressive, and armed to the teeth. He also uses an alias. The game — accessed with Microsoft’s XBox Live console — changes depending on his mood, but it’s usually a combat game, where he can play with anyone from his high school friends to players as far off as the United Kingdom and Japan. Bradley is a Myspace and Facebook user, but his XBox is the one thing he’ll never give up.

Aside from being fun and letting him challenge players both familiar and new, it’s easier to be himself. “You get to be you, but [show] a completely different side of you than you see in person. It’s another way to express another side that people may not get to see, without the threat of being rejected face to face,” he says. When he needs a break from the game or wants to catch up with friends, he and the other players can switch to chat mode. Though he doesn’t elaborate on what he talks about in these chats, he does note that his real-life friends are also players in the game. Sometimes it creates a “vicious cycle” of chatting in the game and carrying on the subject in face-to-face meetings. His friends who play the games are bound to get another side of Bradley, and may even know him better than the friends who only network with him through Myspace and Facebook.

Video and computer games, once thought of as a solitary pursuit, are now another form of social networking, especially when coupled with the Internet. And Microsoft is taking note by integrating Facebook and Twitter into the XBox system, allowing players to access the sites from their consoles. Only time will tell how advantageous this move will be, but it may not be something Bradley will take advantage of.

Some relationships may be built on games, but it seems incongruous to imagine real money being made from them. Unlike the XBox games or popular fantasy combat game World of Warcraft, Second Life is a virtual world founded in 2003, where people dress and socialize much like they do in the real world. While it’s free to sign up, a user has to pay (yes, in real money) for a variety of goods — including genitalia. Though this may defeat the purpose, it is surprisingly lucrative for users (or “residents”) who create games or sell land to other Second Life residents, who then charge their virtual purchases onto real credit cards. In 2006, Business Week reported that resident Anshe Chung was the site’s first millionaire, all thanks to her virtual real estate business.

While not a user of Second Life, Vicky has had years of experience as a website owner, and is now an “avid” user of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. She understands the nature of the Internet as a means to connect likeminded people from different places and backgrounds. She likes “the endless possibilities…you end up with a rich melting pot of cultures and perspectives from others who often share your interests.” It’s global interconnectedness in a few clicks.

As a recent college graduate with a job in New York that relies on constant face-to-face networking, Vicky finds this interconnectedness appealing, and an opportunity to gain understanding of our world. Yet she also admits that the greatest con to social networking is its effect on the personal relationship: “Social networking has no doubt made interactions easier and faster, but I believe it has also diminished the importance of personal relationships. As humans we can’t just be immobile beings who linger in front of a computer screen — we need to be spoken to, embraced, and I do feel that the existence of social networking implicitly says that those things are unnecessary now…when they should still be prioritized.”

Friending people online is as easy as meeting them in person. But it’s merely a jumping off point. My co-worker and I became better friends through our face-to-face interactions. How else would I know that the simple interest of “video games” on his profile would lead to half an hour of enthusiastic, hilarious conversation? Or that the photos of his art looked so good in person that I ended up commissioning one right away?

Months later, my co-worker has moved on to a new full-time job. His work schedule keeps him so busy that he doesn’t have time to focus on his other hobbies anymore, but once in a while he has the time to send a message via Facebook, our new means of virtual contact, which we both agree is much easier than Myspace. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of either profile. Maybe it’s the comments from friends, the time I spent personalizing it, the evidence that someone made a mark in this virtual space. Maybe the more profiles I have, the more sides people will get to see.

I turn back to my friend’s message. He’s been assigned a new project at work and tries to describe it to me. But he doesn’t get very far. Forget it, he writes. You really should see it for yourself.

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