Good Sense

Melissa Dereberry's Blog

Archive for the category “Social Networking”

16 Dec 2011

What Facebook and Spiders Have in Common

According to Google Trends, the following are the ten most popular searched terms from 2004 to the present:

1. Facebook

2. Lyrics

3. You

4. Yahoo

5. YouTube

6. My

7. Google

8. Games

9. Weather

10. News

Is anyone surprise that Facebook topped the list? I’m not. But what I do find intriguing is that an internet tool based on something as fundamental and simple as human connection became a worldwide phenomenon basically overnight. Take a look at the other terms. You, YouTube, Google, My… We are a humanity literally obsessed with each other, a humanity desperate to find out more about the world and the people in it.

In 1855, Walt Whitman published a poem describing a spider spinning a web in his major work Leaves of Grass:

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

The spider, of course, is a metaphor for the narrator’s “soul,” that is lonely, yet full of ideas–”musing, venturing, throwing, seeking”–in a continual search for ways to connect.

You see where I’m going with this. We are like Whitman’s spider.

The human need for connection–to be entertained, educated, encouraged, validated, comforted–is certainly not a new concept. Yet, even in 1855, Whitman understood the necessity of building connections. They don’t just happen on their own. A spider has to build his own web.

Yet there’s another level of meaning here that perhaps Whitman didn’t recognize (or, more likely, did). A spider builds a web to survive. He builds it to trap his prey. Is communication an element of survival?

If is, if you think of communication as the survival of our self, the essence of who we are. As we build our little Facebook webs, we are not only anchoring ourselves, reinforcing where we are and who we are, but we also draw others into our web, and others cerainly shape our personalities. What’s the purpose of a status update? Do we honestly entertain the notion that we are that interesting? That people are generally curious, on a daily basis, about the comings and goings of our lives? We post our accomplishments, our fears, our complaints, our joys and disappointments, all for the purpose that one person will press on the all-mighty “like”–or, the Holy Grail of Facebookdom–post a comment. We put ourselves out there, in hopes that someone will take hold.

Sometimes we snag someone who genuinely wants to join us. And sometimes, we simply drag people into overbearing drama. But that’s another post…

What does all this really say about us? Are we lonely? Isolated? Bored? And are we, indeed, the people we present ourselves to be, on Facebook? How accurate is Facebook, at capturing character of humanity? In many ways, Facebook is about closing the gap between who we want to be and who we are.

I’ve quoted this line from the 1997 movie As Good As It Gets before, but it’s worth repeating. In a scene with Helen Hunt, Jack Nicholson describes a health ailment that he’s been ignoring. He tells her that after spending the night with her, he started taking the medication he’d previously refused to take, saying, “You make me want to be a better man.” She responds that it’s the best compliment anyone has ever given her.

All these filaments that we spin, that we tirelessly seek to connect–the ideas we have, the things we want to do, our goals and dreams… it only takes one person to make us want to be better. And sometimes, that is enough.

Posted in Culture, Misc., Social Networking | Leave a Comment
30 Aug 2011
2 Comments

All Sales Final

I was in the pet store today picking up some crickets for my son’s lizard, when I noticed signs posted all around the store:  “Choose carefully.  Live animals are not returnable.  All sales final.”  Good advice, I thought, if I ever wanted to entertain the notion of having a pet rabbit.  If you’ve ever had one, you know what I mean.

So anyway, I got to thinking about our perceptions as consumers.  Sometimes, obviously, we get what we paid for.  Other times, we get more than we paid for.  And still yet, there are times when we get cheated, or it just wasn’t what we thought it would be.  The key, as suggested by this sign—lies within the consumer.  Think before you buy.

I’m reading the book Cheap:  The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Shell, and I’m not that far into it yet, but something struck a chord.  The book details the history of consumerism in America, highlighting the various innovations in manufacturing and marketing that have shaped how and what we buy.  Shell says we have become so obsessed with getting a good deal that we have little concept of value any more.  We don’t know, really, what something is worth by looking at the price tag, which is, in many respects, arbitrary and subjective.  Retailers manipulate price, according to Shell, which “can confuse is, block the thinking part of our brain and ignite the impulsive, primitive side, the part that leads us to make poor decisions based on bad assumptions.”  I am intrigued by the phrase “poor decisions based on bad assumptions.”  The practice of making bad decisions is a result of not thinking things through, of course, or not properly analyzing our options, weighing the consequences.  Bad decisions are usually those based on emotion, the passion of the moment.   Her point is that price has nothing to do with value.  Our understanding of value only comes from our experience with the product.  Yet, the author says, “despite discounts galore, Americans habitually fret that we are paying too much.”  Translation:  We have the mentality that there is always something better, a better price, a better deal.  But does this mentality go deeper than our wallets?

This price anxiety, I would argue, is so ingrained in us that it now part of our collective psyche, so much so that it influences our relationships, behaviors, and many areas of our lives.  We are out for the best “deal”—the one that is the cheapest, takes the least amount of time and effort.  We are more interested in convenience than we are value.

Every year, McDonald’s sells 2.7 billion pounds of hot, fresh, readily available instant gratification in the form of the French fry.  Are they really that good?  Really?

I know people who have 1,000 Facebook friends, very few of whom I suspect they have ever spoken to for more than ten minutes.

Cheap.  Abundant. Worthless.

When we are on the cheap, we weaken our quality of life, our relationships, and sense of self worth.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while.  We chatted briefly, she asked how I was doing.  At the time, my dad had just been hospitalized and we were sure, just yet, what was going on, or how serious it was.  It was touch and go for a couple of days.  As I stood there telling her about it, she kept looking off to the side, not making eye contact.  It was glaringly clear that she was in a hurry, that there was somewhere more important to be, that she didn’t have time to listen.  I was going through a scary time, and she was looking over her shoulder.  I am not a body language expert, but I suspect that that particular movement is a subconscious pulling of oneself away from the situation.

Fast.  Cheap. Convenient.  Relationships were never meant to come in a pre-packaged box, one that is easy to open, palatable to everyone, and user-friendly.   They aren’t something we should hoard, nor something we can easily return.  Too often we buy into people impulsively because it seems like a good idea, then buyer’s remorse sets in and we play the time card.  Have you ever heard yourself say the words, “Well, she/he just doesn’t have time…”?   Maybe you’ve said it about yourself.

We accept busy-ness as an excuse for all manner of rude, dismissive behavior.  Granted, we don’t have time for deep relationships with everyone we meet, but we do have time for common courtesy, kindness, and empathy.  Sadly, I think we’ve gotten used to this sort of behavior in our society.  Time, after all, is a commodity, and there’s never enough of it.   And it’s true that some people are just simply bad at managing it.

There’s an older song by country singer Tracy Lawrence, “Find Out Who Your Friends Are.”  The chorus goes:

You find out who
your friends are

Somebody’s gonna drop everything

Run out and crank up their car

Hit the gas, get there fast

Never stop to think ‘what’s in it for me?’ or ‘it’s way too far’

They just show on up with their big old heart

You find out who your friends are

The message isn’t anything new.  At some point in life, we do find out who are true friends are. Sometimes too late.  More often than not, we find out who our friends aren’t.  Nearly every day, Facebook is full of posts lamenting wrong behavior or treatment.   Some may say people are simply self-centered, that they just don’t want to invest where there’s no immediate benefit.  That may be true, but I don’t think it’s strictly about “what’s in it for me.”  I think it’s about “you’re not the best deal.” Never mind value.  You might cost too much—too much time, too much energy, too much whatever.

It’s that cheap mentality—price anxiety.  There’s nothing you can buy—not a luxury trip, nor therapist, nor pill on the market that can cure it.  You know the song, “Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe?”  When you are indebted to no one but Jesus, values—not deals—abound everywhere, in every area of your life.  God gave us the gift of discernment—not price—to guide our decisions, including the friends that we choose.  After all, we are not “shopping” for friends.  Friends, like rabbits, are not just cute little fuzzy buddies in a cage. They are wild animals with claws that must be handled properly.  Choose carefully.  All sales final.

Posted in Christian Living, Culture, Friendship, Social Networking
14 May 2011
4 Comments

The Party’s Over

The Party’s Over

Have you ever noticed that Facebook is often little more than a barrage of personal vendettas, gripe sessions and complaints?  Don’t get me wrong—overall, there are a lot of positive things going on in social network central—everything from baby announcements to birthday greetings to weight loss to all manner of personal accomplishments and triumphs.  On the other hand, there’s a lot of bad news, too.  People launch indignant complaints and grievances like brooding teenagers at a sleepover.  Facebook is crawling with passive aggressive banter that can make even the most liberal of us groan with aggravated distaste. 

Here’s a paraphrase of one of my favorite Facebook grievances:

            I’m really sick and tired of so-called friends.  Yeah, you know who you are.  I’m so over it.  Moving on.

I have personally witnessed people on Facebook:

  • Criticize their spouse
  • Complain about their job
  • Slam law enforcement and public officials and administrators
  • Openly insult random people
  • Post provocative and/or crude photos or links
  • Make threatening or degrading statements to a person or group
  • Announce they are not home, on vacation, or that their spouse is not home (not a big deal amongst friends, unless your privacy settings allow your status to post to anyone who is searching or looking).

Most of the time, I am pretty open-minded.  Not much bothers me unless it is openly racist, pornographic or violent.  But I have to say, I am puzzled.  Why do people feel compelled to so willingly air their private information, thoughts and problems? 

It’s interesting, to say the least.  I mean, some of us are just more chatty or open with others.  We are the ones who never met a stranger, who wouldn’t mind sitting down with someone we just met and telling them about our crazy childhood, or our obsession with bubble wrap, for example.  We are social butterflies, flitting from one conversation to another, in hopes of squirming our way into them.

Then, there are those of us who are simply more private.  We tend to keep to ourselves.  We aren’t particularly social, but we have friends—often, we have more close, deep relationships with fewer people.  We are guarded.  It may take us months to tell a friend about a problem we have or a difficult experience we went through.

Some of us may fall in the middle.  We are outgoing and social, yet prudent in how we communicate, and in what we choose to reveal about ourselves.  We demand an understated respect from those around us.

I would classify myself amongst the second group.  I’m a private person—to a degree.  I’ve been told I’m hard to get to know, but then, once you get to know me, there’s a whole lot of deep stuff underneath the surface.  Pretty much pegs my personality, I think.  For those of us who fall into this group, Facebook can confound us.  We sit back, eavesdropping on other people’s lives, wondering, what on earth people are thinking.  The acronym TMI (Too Much Information) takes on new meaning. 

I mean, do people think no one is paying attention?  Are they firing off in hopes that the one person they’re mad at will suddenly, upon reading their post, have an “AHA!” moment and feel terrible for being such a jerk?  Are these ramblings merely cries for help?  Are they self-directed therapy of some sort?  Are they momentary lapses of reason?

Oh boy, I am probably going to lose some friends over this one…

I don’t know about you, but sometimes, I just want to check out.  Thankfully, Facebook gives me the option to do just that.  Have you ever, for the preservation of your own sanity, selected a blanket removal from your news feed of all posts by a particular person?  Have you ever just wanted to turn off the conversation?

I am going to show my age here, but when I was a kid, we had a party line.  For those of you young ‘uns who don’t know that that is, it’s a shared telephone line amongst neighbors.  In other words it’s like having about fifteen people in a house with one phone line and two telephones.  If you had a hankering to, you could pick up the phone all hours of the day and actually hear your neighbors’ private conversations.  As a kid, it could be wildly entertaining—hence the name, “Party”—until you got bored listening to some lady talk about her bunions and decided to hang up. 

Somewhere, sometime way back, a smart individual decided that party lines were a bad idea.  The whole modern day telecommunications industry was founded on the principle that everyone should have their own line because we don’t need to know each other’s business—for personal privacy, as well as safety reasons.  What a concept! 

Facebook is a little like a party line…except, I’m not eight years old, and I’m not back in my pink shag carpeted room with my Shawn Cassidy poster, muffling a giggle as the neighbors argue over dog poop on the phone.  Somehow, it’s not so fun anymore.  The party’s over.  Sigh.  Growing up sucks.

Posted in Culture, Media, Social Networking, Technology and tagged ,
16 Feb 2011
2 Comments

Nothin’ But A Bowl of Plain Vanilla

I can walk up to my refrigerator with an empty glass, fill it with cold water, and drink to my heart’s content.  I can pick up my phone, push one number and be instantly connected to someone on the other side of the world.  I can boot up my computer, type in “Is it ok for a dog to eat crunchy peanut butter?”* and have a relatively reliable answer within seconds.  I can have food, groceries, prescription medicines, clothing, books, and pretty much anything on the planet, delivered to my door.  

I live in a soft-serve kind of world, a world that can be both easy and sweet, if I push the right buttons.  Even my friends are readily available and oh, so sweet (most of the time!).  I can log into Facebook and have instant access to all of them, some of whom are joining me online at any given moment.  I am independent, opinionated, and equipped.  In other words, just give me the bowl and I’ll get it myself. 

In 1974, American author and historian Daniel Boorstin wrote an essay titled “Technology and Democracy” in which he describes the decline of community in America.  Using the story of Rebecca from the book of Genesis, Boorstin explains how we’ve grown apart from each other socially.  In the story, Rebecca offers water to the servant Eliezer, who was traveling in search of a suitable wife for Abraham.  When he takes the water, he recognizes her as the “One” he has been searching for.  The well, Boorstin says, was a prominent social gathering place in its day.  Villagers would go there daily to retrieve their water, passing people they knew, chatting and getting to know each other—essentially, creating a community.  In today’s world, water is delivered through pipes into our homes.  We don’t have to go out and get it.  The moral of the story?  Modern convenience isolates us from one another.  We don’t have to go out, and more often than not, we don’t.  And if we don’t go out, we don’t have community.

Even in 1974, Daniel Boorstin recognized this social dynamic, long before the prolific phenomenon known as social networking, and specifically, Facebook, took the world by storm.  Are we really connecting with one another?  Critics and users alike have asked the question.  I suppose my answer would reflect my mood on any given day.  There are days when I feel witty and popular on Facebook, days when I feel ignored, days when I just want to thumb my nose at the world.  All in all, I can honestly say I’ve gotten to know a few people better because of it.  I’ve learned a lot about myself.  But mostly, I’ve learned some rather mind-numbing things about how we interact with each other, in general.  Sometimes our nods and encouragements to others seem gratuitous and patronizing.  Sometimes we’re a little like whiny three year olds desperate for attention.  We collect friends, narcissistically cataloguing them into our growing arsenal.  We launch thinly veiled grievances against each other.  We gravitate toward certain friends, and intentionally exclude.  And sometimes, we brag about our lives.  None of this seems all that removed from how we interact in real life. 

But part of me likes to think that we’ve gone back to the well.  After all, many of us check in on a daily basis, often multiple times.  We catch up on what’s going on in our friends’ lives.  We post our photos and ideas.  We respond and comment ad infinitum.

We’ve gone back—but it’s not a well, exactly.  It’s more like an exotic ice cream shop with unlimited flavors, the most popular hangout in town.  In our Facebook community, we are simply brimming with unique, engaging personalities and ideas.  We are carrying on twenty different conversations at once.  It’s easier than ever before to figure out what we really enjoy in life and what we have in common with those around us.  Naysayers may want to call it something else, but it is social interaction.  We are, after all, social animals.  We are equipped to connect with each other.  But we have to watch ourselves.  If we fall into the trap that ideas and friendships are commodities, we’ve lost the community, and we’re left with nothin’ but a bowl of plain vanilla.    

 *I must give credit to Julie Mangogna for this question after she googled it and posted the answer (which is, incidentally, Yes!) on her Facebook page.  Thanks, Julie!

Posted in Culture, Friendship, Social Networking and tagged , , ,
09 Feb 2011
2 Comments

Wired In: Relationships and The Social Network

I recently saw The Social Network, and among the many things I like about it, there is one scene in particular that sums up the entire message of the film, for me.  It’s near the beginning, after Mark Zuckerburg gets upset over losing his girlfriend.  He and a couple of his friends are gathered in a dorm room, putting together an elaborate practical joke that would ultimately be the seed of the Facebook phenomenon.  The filming shifts between Zuckerburg at his computer, a voice-over of his thoughts as he hacks into the school’s database, a couple of his friends in the background, and a compilation of other images meant to represent the stereotypical college social dynamic:  A string of party-goers, lots of drinking, laughing, talking, and random debauchery.  Zuckerburg’s friends seem impatient, even bored, and at one point, one of them plops down on the bed, then, a few seconds later, is seen plopping down on the couch with a drink, flipping on the television.  At first, you might wonder:  Would these friends be having a whole lot more fun if they were at the party?

The scene is poignant because after all, social networking—and indeed, computer technology as a whole— has come under a lot of criticism for its purported effect on “normal” and healthy social interaction.  Our technology, many people argue, can isolate us from one another.  Indeed, the friends in this scene are not really interacting, are they?  Zuckerburg is immersed in what he is doing.  He is “wired in,” the idiom used to describe computer programmers at work throughout the movie.  When they are at work, it is understood that you are not supposed to disturb them.

Many of us have wondered if technology isolates us from each other. Does chatting with someone on a computer actually lead to less human contact?  This scene, for me, drives home a very different message:  So much of what we consider “normal” social interaction can be just as meaningless and isolating as spending a few hours wired into a computer.   The dynamics of human relationship become more about how we are connected rather than why we are connected.

You are familiar with the phrase alone in a crowded room.  I spent a good deal of time in my twenties caught up in the party scene.  I attended far too many parties, drank a few too many, and carried on more pointless conversations with people than I care to admit.  All told, none of it had a lasting impact on who I was, who I was to become, or who I would share my life with.  In fact, it amounted to a whole lot of wasted time, time that might have been better spent in front of a computer.  Communicating in the social network, at least, requires a bit of thought, and, if nothing else, it prompts us to explore our ideas, values, and beliefs–and that, in my opinion, can take us further than a thousand passing connections.  It might even result in a billion dollar idea.

Images:  Microsoft

Copyright, 2011 by Melissa Dereberry

Posted in Culture, Movies, Social Networking, Technology and tagged , , , , , ,

Post Navigation

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 46 other followers