Category: Essays

We all know that “social capital” is a phrase used to describe the influence, reputation and connections a person has in a particular social context. Like money, it’s something that’s hard to come by but easy to lose. Tara Hunt, a person with greater than average insight into the social web, explores this area in ‘Social Capital and the Influence of Social Networks‘. I suggest you read it as it will help you to understand my slant on this subject. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. It appears to me after reading that, and much more written about the rise of social networks and the blogosphere, that we’re not talking about anything new. In fact this stuff is as old as Google itself. Why? Here’s why:

Social Capital is … complex and includes … the Social Capital of those who you have relationships with

So if you have a relationship with someone of high social capital (related trivia: my second ever subscriber on FriendFeed was Hugh Macleod) that raises your social capital. Where have we heard that before? Oh yes, search engines.

Search engines, at least the traditional ones such as Google, have a fairly simple method of working out how important you are. Let’s say someone searched for the word “trombone”. If you have the word “trombone” then you’re almost certainly going to appear somewhere in the search results. How high up depends on how important and relevent you are – your “web capital”, if you will. Let’s look at both these parts.

Relevance

The relevence is dependent on a) the searched words appearing on your web page and b) how often the appear and c) where they appear. Actually it’s a lot more complex than that, but for this simple illustration it’s enough. And I want to move onto the more important topic:

Importance

On the web not all websites are created equal. Those which have few links going to them are, to put it bluntly, less important than those to which many people have linked. So sites such as BBC and Amazon are massively important, as they have been linked by so many people. A link to a website is like a vote of confidence in that site – it translates almost directly into pure importance. OK, it’s more complex than that, but you get the idea.

So if you’re a little unimportant site, and you get linked from an important site, it has a positive effect. Suddenly Google says “Well, I thought that little site was unimportant, but look who has just linked to it! I’d better push it up the search results a bit.” And a few links from a few high-profile sites is like a Hollywood A-lister calling round your house and saying “Hey, come on, I’m taking you out drinking with my A-lister buddies”. It has a positive effect.

So what has this to do with social networks? A lot, as it’s exactly how social networks operate as well. The more people you have as “friends” and have you as a “friend” the more important you are. Great, fame and fortune awaits.

Except it’s all bullshiitake (to borrow a phrase from Guy). For more information on that see my recent post about social engineering.

A few weeks ago I had a message from one of the popular social networking websites of which, for some reason, I’ve found myself a member. The message stated that someone wanted to be my friend – someone whose name I recognised. I read the message and for a brief moment was happy that this person had contacted me after several years.

But then I read the message carefully and realised something was wrong. It was an automated message; there was nothing personal in it at all. My friend, who I haven’t spoken too in a few years, simply pressed a button and a series of digital widgets started the process to make us “friends”.

It would be easy to blame my friend, but he’s only doing what thousands if not millions of people are doing every day. These social networking sites make it very easy to create these digital connections, and the very fact that the numbers of friends that a user has on these sites is displayed turns it into a kind of competition. Remember, human beings are by nature competitive – it’s how we’ve survived for tens of thousands of years. But online social networking websites, on the whole, are putting quantity above quality when it comes to relationships.

The fact is that social networking is a poor substitute for real, tangible friendships. Can anyone really have hundreds or thousands of friends with whom they have a meaningful relationship? I doubt it, even if you discount a large percentage as being the online equivalent of those people you know by sight but wouldn’t necessarily say more than “alright?” to them if you saw them in the street.

The problem lies in the glut of information available online about people. If you’re a fully committed member of a social networking site then the chances are you’ve added details such as your name, age, sex, location, education, likes, dislikes, recent experiences and much more. That will be all there in searchable, copyable format, possibly in the public domain. Rather than evenings spent chatting and comparing upbringings over a few pints, you can get to know the basics about someone by reading an online crib sheet on them without ever having met them. In my view that doesn’t make for quality friendships, but rather shallow connections.

You may think I’m entirely against social networking sites, but that is far from the truth. I’m a big believer in the Internet acting as the conduit along which real relationships can be forged and grow. After all, I’ve created several social networking sites and I continue to write on this blog which invites comments from any reader. However I do believe that any online system can only act as one of the threads tying people together in friendship. While the global nature of the Internet means that friendships can occur across potentially insurmountable physical distances, the danger is that physical distance will mean emotional distance as well.

Anyone can create a profile on the Internet and with judicious writing and careful management present a “face” to the Internet which is entirely incorrect. That’s not unheard of in the physical world, of course, but it’s a whole lot easier to do online. So your collection of hundreds of friends may contain duds, and who knows how many?

In the past I’ve not been as careful as I might have with what I have said online. Even with the most rudimentary searching skills it’s possible to find things I’ve written going back over 10 years, not all of it necessarily words I would endorse now. On the whole, however, I’ve been careful about what connections I make – and many of my online friends I’ve met in person several times. Bearing in mind my recent experiences with the friend-who-nearly-was I’m going to continue to be careful who I forge relationships with online. Perhaps the word “friend” should not be bandied around so lightly.