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2006年07月23日

Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, and the New Social Capital

I go through phases being reclusive and being social. I think I am naturally social, but often circumstances, that I have yet to completely understand, push me into withdrawal. During the reclusive periods I find myself gravitating towards the social networking sites, a wonderful artificial universe of digitized acquaintance.

For readers of generations past, social networking sites allow you to create a personal profile and form connections, often listed as "friends", with other members of the site. Usually you can view the profiles of your friends friends through their profiles and sometimes people at further degrees of separation depending on the site. Besides your account ID or user name, the information that defines you varies greatly between platform.

One aspect of social interaction online is the lowered barrier of entry. One finds much less inhibition when striking up conversation with a stranger on the Internet as one does in real life. Most people feel some intimidation at the idea of sitting down at the same table as a stranger in a food court or ringing someones doorbell expressly for the purpose of making acquaintance. I think there are a few reasons for this.

Online, there is no public rejection and therefore no embarrassment at an unreciprocated overture. If you approach someone in the cafeteria who does not want to talk to you, there are probably a few people around to notice, online, no one will know.

There is also no perceived intrusion on a person's time or space (for better or for worse) when communicating on the Internet. If you message someone when he's busy, he need not respond and, though he may find the message annoying, he will not likely be as disturbed as if it were an unsolicited physical letter or phone call.

Another reason is that you and your new friend share the same virtual space. Much like you feel less awkward talking to someone standing at the same watercooler, it seems less awkward talking to someone who is using the same website, even if you are in opposite hemispheres of the globe.

Adding social networks to the Internet is like adding alcohol to the party. The inhibitions are even lower. With social networks, everyone has a "mutual friend". Now, the girl from last night's party who's phone number you never would have asked for in real life, is probably on your friend's list and one add-as-friend click away. The really interesting people, however, are the ones you will never meet in the real world, or better yet, the ones who you have seen in the real world but have no reasonable way of meeting.

There are sites like LinkedIn or OpenBC which have a businessy focus, but most are strictly social. The real voyeuristic gold mines are the social ones. Never in human history have we been able to know so much about people we know nothing about.

People post photo albums, stories, opinions, and a whole host of personal information. Age, sex, location, relationship status. You can know more about a person with a few clicks around a profile than you could with days, maybe years, of traditional conversation. I can lose myself for hours in this sea of intermutual information. The information may not even be self-produced. Anyone with friends who have a flare for digital publication can have, on their behalf, much of their own information promiscuously exposed.

My favourite pages, though I seem to come across less these days, are the ones describing someones love (hopefully unrequited) for another. When you find this kind of material, it's like a fantastic Jon Malkovich ride into someones head. These pages often disappear or become severely edited probably when "another" or one of her friends finds them. You are also more likely to find them on the older blog or journal style sites like xanga because people seem to gain a false sense of privacy when the journal, rather than the network of connections, is the focus.

You might (ostensibly) disapprove of the pleasure I take in perusing peoples' lives, but before you go labelling my voyeurism as deviant, I would like to remind you that it takes two to tango. I am not the one creating all this information. Actually, I am. It's like a trade.

In fact, before scaling back, I had a lot of personal photos online. Through these pages, I still have a fairly detailed account of my recent history exposed on this site.

Some people produce a lot of boring content. Boring or not, however, people produce it. A lot of it. Scads of it. People like to share and, to a certain degree, they are forced. The social network sites require a minimum degree of information to sign up and they certainly encourage addition of information above and beyond the minimum.

Despite our love of picking through other peoples' lives, the most important person to you is you. That is why all those photos and vacation stories and love lives are deemed worthy of publication. With printed newspapers, books, and movie theatre movies, there are editors, publishers, and producers deciding what is valuable for public consumption. Online, when the author becomes the publisher, everything is valuable for public consumption.

While traditional notions of friendship, acquaintance, and the production and consumption of intangible goods are relatively easy to gauge, the complexity of interaction on the Internet warps these notions. Online, social capital can be viewed as the number of connections between people multiplied by the value of those connections. The formula is conceptual and, even if you found a way to assign numbers to the value of connections, it would still be unmeasurable.

Social network sites formalize the connection between people. A number or two in a database somewhere indicates that Alice is connected to Bob. Online connections, however, need not be formal. Whenever you read, view, or listen to something online, there is a connection.

The value of connections is also greatly varied. If Jack reads an inspiring blog entry from Jill, even if Jill is unaware of Jack's existence, there is value in the connection. The value of the connection is diminished by lack of mutual awareness, but still of greater value than the formalized connection of two people on MySpace who have never met, never will, and never inspire each other.

There are connections between people online which would not exist or would not be maintained if the Internet were missing. Through online connections there are exchanges that take place which are valuable but would not make it past the threshold of traditional exchange. Where the Internet is making the world a more exciting place lies in the intersection of those two realms.

Posted by William at 2006年07月23日 08:14

Comments

Posted by: Jeff at 2006年07月23日 21:06

Posted by: William at 2006年07月24日 04:32