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.

For a week, I see what life would be like without logging on to Facebook. I turned off all my notifications, turned away when my girlfriend was logged on watering her virtual plants and avoided all temptation. At the end of the week, I wanted to identify a difference between the useful and non-useful things that social networking provides.

Staying in touch
It turned out that there were only people that I stayed in touch with via Facebook, I didn’t have their current phone number or even email address. I don’t see this as a benefit of Facebook, but a lazy hook that they use to drag you in to their realm. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have someone’s email address, they must have one to use the site in the first place, so the onus of this one is on me.

Direct Contact
The only new direct information that I learnt was that 4 different people like the photos that I take and I also discovered that a youtube video that I thought was a fake, turned out to be… well… a fake. I understand that you have to give to receive, and maybe with a week of zero interaction, I couldn’t expect much, but  I have to ask; is the time invested in priming these responses really worth it? In the short term, I feel like I get some kind of reward from this feedback, but it feels like a can of diet soda; a nice sweet taste, with zero calories in the long run.

Useful information
Just news that my sister has a cold, and my girlfriends brother posted an interesting dance music blog. I was kind of hoping for more, since all week I’ve been teased with my girlfriends cute little snickering as she checked her profile. I had dreams of side-splitting anecdotes and golden nuggets of enlightenment, but there didn’t seem to be any. What I discovered instead, was a desire to add a few more people to my ‘hide’ list, and that I will strive to post less throwaway comments.

The flip side
In my estimations, I must have diverted around 7 facebook hours, or if I stop lying to myself; 15 hours. So what did I do different this week, that I didn’t do for the past few months? I swam a kilometre at my local pool, went for a hygienist appointment at the dentist, took my cat to the vet to get spayed, created 6 new portraits (cat chappell, kara cabados, phineas kibbey, sue kibbey, magnus huckvale, dj bissen), and paid some attention to the neglected Guitar Hero that has been collecting ageing rocker skin cells in the corner.

I didn’t get a feeling of instant reward at first, where were the people telling me that they liked my photos, where was the feeling of satisfaction when taking my cat to a strange place to be poked and prodded? I learnt that the reward system that I’d become reliant on from Facebook was no more real than the rewards that I eventually derived from myself, but the one big difference, is that I was in control, not some external source. That I can live with.

I still agree with my previous post about life being how you choose to waste your time, so if I was to say that choosing to do things other than check my posts at hourly intervals was any better than playing an imaginary guitar based video game, I’d be a hypocrite (oh wait, I am a human… isn’t it in our nature to subscribe to Hypocrisy?). All that happened this week, is that I chose to do something different, and I enjoyed it. In that sense it was a success. If you are so inclined, I suggest that you make up your own life experiments and put them into practice.

Why do we use Facebook, in particular? I asked a couple of people why they used it, and got some interesting responses. Some people get dates, some get business contacts, some get a sense of connection with friends that live too far away and some people simply get entertainment from it. I liked the way one of my friends said that it was like sending a bulk email, but without the guilt of feeling like a spammer (has Facebook managed to simply re-brand the bulk email into something less annoying?). The common thing here, is that we all ‘get’ something. So because we are continuously being provided with ‘rewards’, we continue to use it. There are a limited number of things that we can do on the site, which makes it easier for the other junkies to respond with an encouraging message or a ‘I like this’. Where are the ‘dislike’ links, may I ask? And why is it that we can only ‘like’ something? If we can only respond in this manner with either a neutral (not clicking the like link) or a positive (clicking the link), then where did the negative go? Is the neutral now taking on the role of the negative, and if so, does that mean that the hundred or so people that don’t click that they like the link, actually mean that they don’t like it?

I was going to suggest that Facebook mirrors how we interact with people in our lives outside of our browser portals, but in a fast paced way, driven by the speed of communication that the advent of the internet provides us. It could be regarded as a tool to fish for rewards, except this is the trawler that sucks up a whole load of shrimp in one go. If this was truly a reflection of our normal daily lives; just another step in the progress of man rather than a shift in direction, then why are we encouraged to make only positive comments? I know the option is still there to make negative ones, it’s just not as easy to do so. I imagine that if there was a dislike link, then the number of possible reward catches per day would be reduced by the number of negative dolphins that you caught in your net whilst scraping the bottom of the ocean. I would imagine then, that people would use Facebook less, and that doesn’t seem to be something that this Business would want to happen. So, it’s a controlled system… not exactly a surprise…

Do I want to be getting reward from a system that reflects an over simplified version of communication? I like life, I like it’s complexities. I’m not saying that Facebook is a bad boy and should be sent to his room without any supper, I’m just saying that if you’re going to play together, then just remember that he is slightly retarded and despite it being fun to beat him at Junior Scrabble, don’t neglect your other more intelligent friends, who although won’t be so easy to beat at word games, could provide a much greater reward over a longer period of time (and will actually tell you if they don’t like something).