Commentary Essay: DRAFT

Two years ago, a student I work with told me something terrifying. A recruiter at a job fair had told her she’d never get a job without a MySpace page. She wanted to know how I got a job without a MySpace page. I told her the truth: connections. I knew the person that hired me. I’d worked with him before.

“So, you networked,” she said.

“Um… yeah, I guess.”

She explained that this is what MySpace was for: networking. I guess I didn’t get it. And I still don’t. I don’t get the networking value of social networking sites. Social networking sites have given me something valuable: a replacement for my outdated address book, where the entries update themselves and I can always find who I’m looking for. They haven’t replaced much else though, so why are they such a big deal?

Danah Boyd, an ethnographic researcher, just published her essay on class issues in social networking Web sites. First, though, she gives the history. In 2003-2004, MySpace went from being a 20-30-something site to a teen site that helped bands promote themselves. In 2004, Facebook started at Harvard University. Before them, Friendster and other social networking sites could show you who you knew, and who they know (that’s what networking is, right?). MySpace and Facebook took off because they had plenty of space for the users to talk about themselves. The theory is that you can list your favorite hobbies, or movies, or books on your profile and make friends with people with the same interests. It doesn’t work that way in practice though. Most people just write about themselves. These sites are called “Social Networking Sites,” but very little social networking really goes around. I can list my friends and you can list yours, and if we have friends in common, it will tell us. But how is that really changing anything? Are we meeting new people? Are we finding people with similar interests? Aren’t these things we could do before the Internet? And was it better then or is it better now? It’s pretty much the same, only now, we’re not always sure who we’re meeting.

I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but I’m not exactly the same person on the Internet that I am in real life. It’s not like I’m really a middle-aged man from Indiana in real life, but I’m less polished in person than I am on the Web. The Internet affords one luxury of communication you don’t have in person: time. I have time to cleverly concoct and assemble my lists of likes and dislikes for my social networking profile. It’s like writing your resume. You get to work on it for months, and your interview might last 10 minutes. Even though I’m not any smarter, I sound smarter on the Internet. But if people were trying to network with me based on my interests, they might be out of luck. Sure, my Facebook profile may list my favorite movie, but you know what? I lied. My favorite movie is “Caddyshack”; the profile says it’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” “Tenenbaums” is one of my favorite movies, so it’s not an entire untruth, but it changes my entire online persona. Stoned frat boys like “Caddyshack,” but cool people like “Tenenbaums.” Did I do this consciously? Kind of. I thought of the movie that would give me something in common with the people I know. But was it the Internet that influenced the decision to fib? Kind of. If I was at a dinner party with my hip, educated friends, I probably wouldn’t admit to be the type of philistine that enjoyed the story of golfers and an overzealous gopher. At a sports bar with my college-football-watching friends, I wouldn’t admit to being the hip poseur that likes “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Everybody fibs. It’s like that saying; On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not cool.

And that’s the draw. That’s the attraction. You can talk endlessly about yourself, and make yourself so cool. And that’s also exactly why these sites aren’t promoting networking. People are all too busy making themselves look cool, and showing their intelligent and fascinating interests and hobbies, great photos of themselves where they look thin and pretty, and listing how many friends they have. The features that made MySpace and Facebook popular (photo sharing, detailed personal profile pages, etc.) are the exact things that are preventing people from meeting anybody new. The social networking site is the new Narcissus’ pond. Let’s try not to drown ourselves.