What is Social Networking anyway?

I don't know, is it just me or does it seem like social networking (SNg) has become a pass time kind of like "day dreaming" in school. Do you find yourself checking stuff on Facebook when you know you should be listening, or doing homework, or working on a report or business presentation? When you finally look at the clock, is there a split second of panic when you realize what's been done, which is pretty much zilch. I suspect 9 out of 10 social networkers (SNrs) would admit to a comparable experience. In the end, it may have been the consequence of just a "brief" communication with your friends...each of them, and maybe see a few of their recent pics or maybe even a short social connect with someone you really didn't know that well. It's especially that if your Twittering! I mean is this addiction, infatuation, harmless but meaningful human activity, or what? What is this globally compelling phenomenon?

Outside of the keyboard skills essential to the SNg, this experience is like the psychological phenomenon known as extra sensory perception (ESP). Those other equally sentient beings with whom you have had no frequent contact, somehow you know they want to talk to you and oddly enough, you know what they'll want to say. OK, well maybe it's more like talking to the oracle at Delphi, but in some totally cool way the universe is saying something to you from a source behind the curtain, but whose manifestations are all over the screen - pics, video clips, PDF attachments, links to other worlds in cyberspace...there's just a rich diversity of stuff you get back from inquiring of the infinite. It's an eerily silent form of visual communication too. Words show up. Almost immediately or when you come back later, more words show up. You get to view anything that fellow SNrs can upload or post. They too, like an armada of Voyager spacecrafts are out there in the great beyond, searching, exploring, "boldly going where [someone] has gone before". There's no doubt about it, fascination is at the root of social networking. And I suppose the less you know about how it works, the more fascinating it is - kind of like NASA.

Blogs are perhaps the next most craveable webspace applications of SNg. that captivate human attention. They promote some of same feelings as watching a movie trailer, except that you can interact with it. Who doesn't want to know more about that college grad couple who are now in the Peace Corp and what they're doing in exotic West Africa, or the latest adorable baby shots, and toddler tumbles among your sister's kids? Who among your friends wouldn't want to examine your explorations of the enchanted and clouded peaks Machu Picchu? The mystery of SNg comes partly from your own bottomless interest in things you always wondered about and the seemingly limitless expanse of things to know and experience. Web 1.0 SNg was mostly framed in one-dimensional text accumulations, but the Web 2.0 environment connects the SNrs together in multi-dimensional shared or shareable human experience as they hurtle together through the ethereal cosmos of the web.

In another way of looking at it, we've all become prospectors of "cool stuff", consumers of online content because there are personalities behind it. In a way you see, were leaving behind the mundane and profane world of time demands and uttered commands and pass through the monitor screen to the never-place of pseudo-reality, wherein we become part of the story.

But why? Why do we want to go there? Duh! It's fun. It's also psychology as I alluded to earlier. It's what people do, or will do. The truth is though, not everyone wants to surf the web, or read a blog, or catch up with people you didn't like all that much 20 years ago anyway. Not everyone cares about what's out there on the net or what your old girlfriend is doing these days. The latter especially may be better left alone. Wisdom and discretion are as needful in SNg activities as any other human endeavor. It's simply a compelling thought that you can communicate with anyone in the world with similar interests.

You can learn as much as you'd like on the net, as much as you have time for, as much your life will permit. That's part of the richness of the experience. Perhaps that's a key to comprehending the strength of the motivation for SNg, that feeling of wealth. It's a fact that the vast majority of us, fortunately or unfortunately, will never win the lottery. I have a sister-in-law whose goal in life was to be rich. It hasn't happened yet, and that is very likely to be the the same outcome for everyone else who plays the lottery. I'm not being pessimistic or seeking to spiral inward towards the "life's not fair" lamentation. I'm just pointing out the statistical probability which most of us recognize and for reasons we don't completely comprehend, we ignore. But the net, there is wealth, there is a kind of treasure trove that we can sift through our fingers and find pearls and doubloons. Chests filled with golden nuggets of knowledge and pleasant secrets for our own discovery. The thing is, when the adventure ends, not only are the characters still around, but they're real.

However, SNg is a kind of quasi- or pseudo-reality in that it is an escape from the tyranny of reality. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch, or at least that's the mantra of the work-a-day world in which we are obliged to make a living. SNg is a seemingly timeless activity in the midst of a unidirectional and insufficiently compensated march to senescence. Nobody wants to think about that for very long. So SNg provides a pleasant place to go, but not to kill time, at least not consciously. Its only quasi-real because of its appearance as a timeless world. But it's still reality, with real people, and real stories, an real experiences to share. Yet, it's "day dreaming" nonetheless, when compared to the unavoidable consequence of entropy. That is, unless you can turn your day dreams into a living. Now that, I suspect, is the essence of creativity that filled the day jobs of Wordsworth, Edison, and Einstein.

The fact is, SNg is fun. SNg is feeding an appetite, and one we didn't know we had - sort a'. Its like family gatherings, or high school reunions, there's just something meaningful and powerfully attractive about catching up with others you care about, and with whom you shared experiences, especially in foxholes. It's easier to describe however, than it is to explain this phenomenon.

When I was a freshman in college I was attending a university in the great American west. I grew up in Missouri and eastern Kansas and when we took a family vacation to the Colorado Rockies, it was like going to Mars. I couldn't get enough of Yellowstone National Park or the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. So when I had the opportunity over spring break that freshman year to live life deliberately, in a cabin, in the mountains near Idaho City, ID, I jumped at the chance. Just me and the tall Ponderosa pines, with Columbian ground squirrels as my neighbors. It was a glorious three days of solitude. The potbelly stove glowed red at night after stuffing it with firewood and I kept my cot close by to keep warm. When the three days were up and my buddy returned with his parent to retrieve me, I was so happy to see another human being I uttered a typical (though not for me) and unusually loud explicative at the emotional greeting that startled everyone, including myself.

It seems that truly non-social mountain men only want to send letter bombs to their friends. I'm not sure which comes first however, a deranged mind or relinquished social habits. But as careful was we ought to be against sweeping generalizations in the name of science, there are few I believe who would disagree with the statement that human beings are social creatures. It is our nature, our biology. We simply desire for some innate pre-existent and/or perhaps evolutionarily stable reason to know what the neighbors are doing.

The question is can we take advantage of this natural inclination? Can we employ SNg to accomplish real work? The answer is unequivocally, yes, and it's the next blog adventure.