Something that I’ve been fascinated with ever since being involved in the creation of one of the first social networking websites, was how the medium of the internet could enrich people’s lives. The idea of the internet used to be alien, and many people that I spoke to had this idea that the fairly anonymous person on the other end of your computer terminal was either a spotty faced social-retard or a lecherous old dude pretending to be a chick. I knew this wasn’t always the case, as none of my friends who used the internet fit these stereotypes.The motivation for creating this networking site was to allow people to communicate, with the intention of meeting up ‘out there’ in the physical world. Increase the number of people you come into contact with, and you up the chance of developing rich relationships. That was the idea at least and for a while, it seemed to work; people would report back telling us that they met their new spouse on our site, but the site eventually evolved into something that was more akin to a porn site, dating websites became popular, more serious social networking sites emerged and the ‘party’ site we had built over was left drifting somewhere in the middle, staying afloat on it’s last planks of identity.

It had been 2 years, 7 months and 14 days since I first signed my privacy to Facebook’s data-hungry servers. Then yesterday I decided to vacate the site altogether. Although I had acquired hundreds of new contacts, and at the few clicks of a mouse I could stalk any one of them…  I felt that it was diluting the quality of my relationship with people in general. The information that people choose to present to you in real life, is a fraction of what they are capable of showing you. Through all the different aspects of their personality, they limit it down to the kind of person they want you to see them as. But online, through a social networking site, this quality of communication is a minute slither of that fraction. You don’t get to study body language, there’s no chance to touch, no smells, no awkward silences, no brief glimpse of eyes darting to the side that hopefully went unnoticed when you were telling a lie. And all the time, I kept telling myself that by using this site I was strengthening the bonds of my relationships with people.

By writing this blog post online, I’m a hypocrite. Perhaps I should broadcast this conversation as a movie in smell-o-vision instead of just creating and then re-editing my words into a muted text version of my own thoughts. Or maybe we should meet up sometime soon and have a lengthy conversation about it in some overcrowded English pub with a log fire crackling in the next room, pieces of burnt ash drifting their way into the fibres of our clothes.

I feel that the term Social Networking should be renamed to Social Entertainment, and that some day during the evolution of the internet, it may give birth to a tool which enriches the quality of our relationships with other humans. In the meantime, if you’re interested in trading up the hours that you invest in Facebook for a bit more free time to phone a loved one or start a fight with your neighbour, then this might be of interest to you.

Will the Internet manifest itself in a less external manner, combining itself with the human race at a biological level? I’ve always wondered about the effects of all this binary data that is tearing through our bodies. Will we evolve to be able to hear this information, as we evolved to listen and interpret sound waves? What if we develop the ability to send as well as receive data? We’ll be walking operating systems, or maybe we’ll have grown out of physical activity by that point, and we will finally have a version of telepathic communication.

Maybe we’ll fast forward through Nature’s own plans and install mechanical devices that hook straight into our central nervous system. Maybe we’ll all be mind readers by the year 2020. Maybe we won’t survive to see any of this because, like the dominant species on the planets before us, the ride is over and we have to join the back of the queue again.

I digress… partly because I’m feeling lousy today, and partly because I went to a theme park the other day and wanted to sneak this into the conversation somehow.

An important thing to consider, is that the future of the Internet is in our own hands. It can be a way to help us manage our overflowing jar of identities. It can be the future city in which our virtu-self will live for eternity (or until someone pulls the plug). It can be the key to connecting the human race and sharing information in ways that we never thought were possible. It can be all of the above, or whatever we want it to be.