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.

I see ‘being selfish’ as a way to describe the motivation behind a person’s behaviour. And I believe that we are all selfish creatures. I am selfish, YOU are selfish, everyone is selfish…

.. how did that last statement make you feel? Bouncing around inside with joy? Probably not. But I think there has been a terrible misuse of this word over the course of history which has led it to be what it means to us today.

Let’s dive into some examples to explain why being selfish may not be such a bad thing after all:

Imagine that for some creative and highly unlikely reason there is a group of people who are about to take their last living breath in this world. You have been gifted (or cursed, depending on your outlook) with the ability of saving just a few of these people. Maybe you have a handful of antidote capsules, or a time machine, or a  ZOLL 1200B Defibrillator with limited power… whatever floats your boat .. it’s your imagination here. Also, for the sake of this example, and to further demonstrate my point, let’s throw in a few people that you care about into this group. You can’t save all of them, just a few; What would determine which of these innocent victims you would save, and which you would let die in front of you like the awful awful person that you are?

• If you saved the people you cared about the most; that’s being selfish.
• If you saved those who you thought would better serve the human race; that’s still your idea of what that means.
• If it was the people who you didn’t care about; perhaps you’d be concerned that your legacy would be that you were a ‘selfish’ person, and you didn’t want to be seen as that kind of person.
• If you saved those in Alphabetical order; perhaps you’d be so concerned with being ‘unselfish’ that you were trying to selfishly do something unselfish.

OK… so it’s an extreme example.. but what I’m trying to get at, is that no matter how hard we try to separate our choices from our sense of self, we still make those choices which are related to what we care about.

I did a quick hunt to try and find some gems of what could be considered truly unselfish people, and dug up the following opinions: Oprah, Mother Theresa and ‘Soldiers’. Not exactly what I’d call Treasure, but it’s a start.

In each of the cases above, I would imagine that they all get a certain sense of self satisfaction for doing the ‘good deeds’ that they are seen to do. So they could still be considered Selfish people.

But something doesn’t feel quite right about it. If I call my neighbour selfish for taking up two car parking spaces instead of one, how do we differentiate between their negative selfish actions and these more positive selfish actions that are performed by people we admire? I propose the following; Let’s keep the existing word for Selfish as the one which means “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself”, and create a new one that conveys the idea that it may be impossible to separate the choices we make in life from our own sense of identity. You may have your own idea of what this would could be, but for the moment, I call it “Selfy”.