Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
 
Christine Rosen
 
For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjectsâ014professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits, as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as â01Cpainted anthropology,â01D with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the culture in which they were created.
 
Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.
 
Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attentionâ014and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.
 
Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promisesâ014a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracleâ019s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracleâ019s advice might be show thyself.
 
Making Connections
 
The earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Earth â019Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand started in 1985, made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (Now owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was â01Cthe primordial ooze where the online community movement was born.â01D) Other websites for community and connection emerged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by high school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site founded in 1997; and Epinions, founded in 1999 to allow users to give their opinions about various consumer products.
 
A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online communities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Friendster uses a model of social networking known as the â01CCircle of Friendsâ01D (developed by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends and acquaintancesâ014that is, people they already know and likeâ014to join their network.
 
Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-2003. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003, quickly to surpass it. Originally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as well as videos and photos. It is now the behemoth of online social networking, with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2005, Rupert Murdochâ019s News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.
 
Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site is Facebook, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebookâ014which takes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming freshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new peopleâ014soon extended membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most popular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the site as their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their friendsâ019 activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about.
 
There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Yahoo 360º. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer â01Can entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online.â01D (It is noteworthy that Microsoft refers to social networkers as â01Cconsumersâ01D rather than merely â01Cusersâ01D or, say, â01Cpeople.â01D) Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering forums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids pretend to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earning virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networking sites connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people to share their personal goals. Click on â01Cwatch less TV,â01D one of the goals listed on the site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network who want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network but donâ019t know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users locate the proper online social networking community for their particular (or peculiar) interests.
 
Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their livesâ019 work to get your attentionâ014namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incidents of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are legion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and brand icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called â01CMiss Irresistible.â01D As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to â01Cspice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card.â01D The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as â01CI wanna get fresh with youâ01D or â01CPucker up babyâ014Iâ019m getting fresh.â01D A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are â01Cgoing to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.â01D
 
As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidates have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has official pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpace (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twenty-three different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer social networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of the GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.
 
Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popular sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the process of setting up oneâ019s online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, address, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and youâ019re up and running and ready to create your online persona. MySpace includes a section, â01CAbout Me,â01D where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status. There is also a â01CWho Iâ019d Like to Meetâ01D section, which on most MySpace profiles is filled with images of celebrities. Users can also list their favorite music, movies, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can also blog on their pages. A user â01Cfriendsâ01D peopleâ014that is, invites them by e-mail to appear on the userâ019s â01CFriend Space,â01D where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below the Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allows users to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; indeed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visual and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and clip-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an overdecorated high school yearbook.
 
By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides general personal information, Facebook users have a â01CWallâ01D where people can leave them brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Facebook e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general, unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Facebook friends tend to be part of oneâ019s offline social circle. (This might change, however, now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send â01Cpokesâ01D to friends; these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Facebook group with over 200,000 members is called â01CEnough with the Poking, Letâ019s Just Have Sex.â01D
 
Degrees of Separation
 
It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word networking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites â01Cconnectâ01D users with a networkâ014literally, a computer network. But the verb to network has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, especially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first came into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Back then, â01Cnetworkâ01D usually referred to television. But social scientists were already using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculate just how closely we are connected.
 
In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a study about social connection that he called the â01Csmall world experiment.â01D â01CGiven any two people in the world, person X and person Z,â01D he asked, â01Chow many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?â01D Milgramâ019s research, which involved sending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a particular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that we are all connected by â01Csix degrees of separationâ01D (a phrase later popularized by playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.
 
But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, has embarked on a new small world project to test Milgramâ019s theory. Similar in spirit to Milgramâ019s work, it relies on e-mail to determine whether â01Cany two people in the world can be connected via â018six degrees of separation.â019â01D Unlike Milgramâ019s experiment, which was restricted to the United States, Wattsâ019s project is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science, â01CTargets included a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a veterinarian in the Norwegian army.â01D Their early results suggest that Milgram might have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on average. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallness of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-László Barabási enthuses, â01CThe world is shrinking because social links that would have died out a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six,â01D Barabási writes. â01CWe could be much closer these days to three.â01D
 
What kind of â01Clinksâ01D are these? In a 1973 essay, â01CThe Strength of Weak Ties,â01D sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain kinds of information than networks of close friends and family. Watts found a similar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely professional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individuals, for example.
 
Todayâ019s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak tiesâ014no one who lists thousands of â01Cfriendsâ01D on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.
 
Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgramâ019s small world experimentâ014our supposed closeness to each otherâ014was the swiftness and credulity of the public in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when she delved into Milgramâ019s research (much of which was methodologically flawed and never adequately replicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermine the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed those barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing their own digital small world experiment, â01Cmore than half of all participants resided in North America and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian.â01D
 
Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be asking isnâ019t how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and friendships are we creating?
 
Wonâ019t You Be My Digital Neighbor?
 
According to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgroundsâ014or wastelands, depending on oneâ019s perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable generational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anecdotally correct; I canâ019t count how many times I have mentioned social networking websites to someone over the age of forty and received the reply, â01COh yes, Iâ019ve heard about that MyFace! All the kids are doing that these days. Very interesting!â01D
 
Numerous articles have chronicled adultsâ019 attempts to navigate the world of social networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter when she joined Facebook: â01Ceveryone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks,â01D her daughter instant-messaged her. â01Cunfriend paige right now. im serious.... i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually.â01D In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than half of the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the first generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. Whatâ019s more, the proliferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, suggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual space for the foreseeable future.
 
What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography. As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites of a decade ago used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boasted thirty virtual â01Cneighborhoodsâ01D in which â01Chomesteadersâ01D or â01CGeoCitizensâ01D could gatherâ014â01CHeartlandâ01D for family and parenting tips, â01CSouthBeachâ01D for socializing, â01CViennaâ01D for classical music aficionados, â01CBroadwayâ01D for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, todayâ019s social networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person, with individual profiles that list hobbies and interests. As a result, oneâ019s entrée into this world generally isnâ019t through a virtual neighborhood or community but through the revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, where one usually has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking sites are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of communityâ014geographic location, family, role, or occupationâ014have little effect on relationships.
 
Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a â01Cfriendâ01D who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someoneâ014do you defriend the ex? If someone â01Cfriendsâ01D you and you donâ019t accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.
 
Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertaining; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of social space. As Danah Boyd, a graduate student studying social networks at the University of California, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled, social networking promotes â01Cinformal learning.... Itâ019s where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact with others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy.â01D This is more a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isnâ019t asked is how the technology itselfâ014the way it encourages us to present ourselves and interactâ014limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities expect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transient communities that form in public spaces obey these rules, for the most part; for example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New technologies are challenging such normsâ014cell phones ring during church sermons; blaring televisions in doctorsâ019 waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietlyâ014and new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?
 
Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era; they serve a protective function. I know a young womanâ014attractive, intelligent, and well-spokenâ014who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, they both updated their relationship status to â01CEngagedâ01D on their profiles and friends posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.
 
But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was over, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he changed his status on his profile from â01CEngagedâ01D to â01CSingle.â01D Facebook immediately sent out a feed to every one of their mutual â01Cfriendsâ01D announcing the news, â01CMr. X and Ms. Y are no longer in a relationship,â01D complete with an icon of a broken heart. When I asked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was something disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchange initiated by her, it was devoid of contextâ014save for a helpful notation of the time and that tacky little heart.
 
Indecent Exposure
 
Enthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; they see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, rendering quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers â01Clayouts, graphics, background, and more!â01D to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.
 
This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: itâ019s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, â01CSince there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustusâ019 MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.â01D And he wouldnâ019t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.
 
The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of oneâ019s own and othersâ019 lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: â01CYou might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. Itâ019s like an embodiment of your personality.â01D
 
It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internetâ019s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to â01Cstake their claims as unique individuals,â01D users enumerate personal information: â01CHere is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.â01D Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites â01Cvast celebrations of solipsism.â01D
 
Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. â01COne cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be,â01D Carnegie Mellon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross â01Cdetected little or no relation between participantsâ019 reported privacy attitudes and their likelihoodâ01D of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacyâ014the ones who worried about â01Cthe scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they livedâ01Dâ014about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.
 
This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBCâ019s Dateline featured a police officer posing as a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.
 
There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that â01C40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook.â01D Yet college studentsâ019 reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and â01C64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.â01D
 
This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when oneâ019s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.
 
In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called â01Cprotean selves.â01D Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces â01Cmockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor.â01D (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that â01C23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.â01D) Also, Lifton argues, â01Cthe emotions of the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target.â01D So, too, with protean communities: â01CNot just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating,â01D Lifton writes, â01Cremoved geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence.â01D This is precisely the appeal of online social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.
 
The New Taxonomy of Friendship
 
There is a Spanish proverb that warns, â01CLife without a friend is death without a witness.â01D In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: â01CLife without hundreds of online â018friendsâ019 is virtual death.â01D On these sites, friendship is the stated raison dâ019être. â01CA place for friends,â01D is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook is a â01Csocial utility that connects people with friends.â01D Orkut describes itself as â01Can online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.â01D Friendsterâ019s name speaks for itself.
 
But â01Cfriendshipâ01D in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.
 
The hypertext link called â01Cfriendshipâ01D on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: â01CYou have 1 friends,â01D along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.
 
This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, â01CI always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number.â01D An associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpace is, â01CThanks for the add!â01Dâ014an acknowledgment by one user that another has added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your page from an attractive person posing as your â01Cfriend.â01D As the founder of one such service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to â01Cturn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets.â01D
 
The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is â01Cmanaging.â01D The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that â01Cteens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.â01D There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: â01CChange My Top Friends,â01D â01CView All of My Friendsâ01D and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, â01CEdit Friends.â01D With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.
 
To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friendsâ014often without having ever met them in person.
 
Status-Seekers
 
Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking â01Cfriendsâ01D and friends they see in the flesh. The use of the word â01Cfriendâ01D on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook â01Cfriendsâ01D is so confused as to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many â01Cfriendsâ01D as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for status. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone era would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, social networking websites allow us to create statusâ014not merely to commemorate the achievement of it. There is a reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities donâ019t need legions of MySpace friends to prove their importance. Itâ019s the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.
 
But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, which, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling oneâ019s status, maintaining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year-old wrote in a New York Times essay, â01CI am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship.... Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign.â01D
 
The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies â01Cpersuasion strategiesâ01D used by social networking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, â01CThe secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and statusâ014spoils that humans will work hard forâ014to activities that enhance the site.â01D As Fogg told the magazine, â01CYou offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status.â01D Network theorist Albert-László Barabási notes that online connection follows the rule of â01Cpreferential attachmentâ01Dâ014that is, â01Cwhen choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page.â01D As a result, â01Cwhile our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns.â01D Our lemming-like pursuit of online status via the collection of hundreds of â01Cfriendsâ01D clearly follows this rule.
 
What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for community and friendship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional communities, to â01Clifestyle enclavesâ01D which were defined largely by â01Cleisure and consumption.â01D Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into â01Cpersonality enclavesâ01D or â01Cidentity enclavesâ01Dâ014discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends.
 
Beyond Networking
 
This past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural Institute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. â01CI noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking sites,â01D Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sites been useful to Nichols students? â01CIt has relieved some of the stress of transitions for them,â01D he said. â01CWhen abrupt departures occurâ014their family moves or they have to leave friends behindâ014they can cope by keeping in touch more easily.â01D
 
So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson observed that â01Cfriendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.â01D Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. â01CItâ019s a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,â01D as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker. And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you havenâ019t heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch withâ014it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people.
 
But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exposé, Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have greatly facilitated friendship. He writes, â01CProust once said he didnâ019t much care for the analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, because you could shut itâ014and be shut of itâ014when you wished, which one canâ019t always do with a friend.â01D With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social networking sites (which Epstein says â01Cspeak to the vast loneliness in the worldâ01D) have a different effect: they discourage â01Cbeing shut ofâ01D people. On the contrary, they encourage users to check in frequently, â01Cpokeâ01D friends, and post comments on othersâ019 pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.
 
This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. â01CThere is a sense of, â018if Iâ019m not online or constantly texting or posting, then Iâ019m missing something,â019â01D he said of his students. â01CThis is where I find the generational impact the greatestâ014not the use of the technology, but the overuse of the technology.â01D It is unclear how the regular use of these sites will affect behavior over the long runâ014especially the behavior of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no research has explored how virtual socializing affects childrenâ019s development. What does a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adolescent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenager who spends her night gossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that â01Cpeople want to live their lives online,â01D as the founder of one social networking site recently told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger ages, these questions are worth exploring.
 
The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users â01Cfeel less socially involved with the community around them.â01D He also found that â01Cas individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases.â01D Another recent study conducted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University of the Pacific found that â01Cthose who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and self-esteem.â01D
 
The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social networkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs when we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least worth asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?
 
We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contactâ014and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogatesâ014Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: â01CThe social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,â01D he wrote. â01COften it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.â01D To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, â01CI consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.â01D That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires riskâ014the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.
 
{Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center}