Social networking

Several articles social networking have caught my attention recently.

First, a British court sentenced a twenty-two year old woman to twenty one months in a high security prison for frequent texting while driving. She had sent twenty text messages in the hour before the crash. (Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Driven to Distraction - Britain Sets Tough New Laws for Texting While Driving,” New York Times, November 1, 2009)

Second, new businesses such as Factery and branches of existing businesses such as Orkut are now competing to become the dominant social networking search engine. Each hopes to achieve the same spectacular success that Yahoo and Google have achieved as internet search engines.

Third, how much work or learning can a person really do while concurrently engaged in social networking? Researchers divide over the answer. Some stress that the current generation of young people excel at multitasking and summarizing issues in a single sentence for which older colleagues require a paragraph or even an entire page. Other researchers argue that constant social interaction translates into superficiality and poor face-to-face skills. Indicative of the scale of social networking, almost a quarter of today’s teens check Facebook at least ten times per day. (Jeffrey Zaslow, “Can Obsessive Networking Make You a Good Employee?” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2009)

Obviously, social networking has become an integral element of modern society. The phenomenon poses some risks. Over involvement in social networking may jeopardize one’s ability to perform on the job or in school; social networking at the wrong time may also turn one into a hazard for others, e.g., in the case of texting while driving.

I wonder how introverted teens and college students feel about social networking. As an introvert who values private time, social networking feels very intrusive. Much of life is boring; why inflict on that others? Much of life is mundane; why would anyone else care about the mundane in another person’s life? A compulsive need to know what another person is doing seems more akin to stalking or in appropriate control than a healthy human relationship.

I wonder to what extent the brevity of social networking is an attempt to compensate for information overload. More information bombards me daily than I can process. Reducing some of that flow to a few brief words or a sentence at most is one way to attempt to reassert control.

I wonder to what extent the seeming omnipresence of social networking is an attempt to compensate for too busy lives that do not allow time for healthy human relationships. People, especially in the face of recession driven job losses, now work longer hours than ever before, often desperate to demonstrate the employee’s indispensability. Parents feel pressure to attend events and activities in which a child participates, increasing demands on their time.

New patterns of human interaction are not inherently bad. Social networking can afford people opportunity to meet others whom they would probably not encounter apart from social networking. I certainly know of healthy monogamous unions that social networking birthed. Social networking can also promote the sharing of ideas, enhance project collaboration, and create an awareness of new opportunities.

In other words, social networking is a relational tool. As is true for any tool, a person may improve or diminish the quality of life through using social networking. The challenges are to employ social networking for those tasks for which it is especially well suited while maintaining a healthy balance in one’s life by developing and employing a multiplicity of relational tools.