Digitally Lame
This is a draft of an article I’ve been working on concerning the accelerating affect that online social networking has had on cultural mores. I would love thoughts and comments.
John Fischer
Associate / Infinia Foresight–
Digitally Lame: How Internet Popularity Lapped Me
The first day as a senior in High School was a premonition of things to come.
Having spent the previous year digging out from a decade of social ostracization—carefully cultivating a key set of friends and acquaintances—I coasted into homeroom confident that the black sheep had finally been sheared. That is, until lunchtime.
One of the privileges bestowed upon the graduating class was the right to leave campus at lunch. This coincided all too conveniently with the recent mass-coronation of student drivers. The sand had moved under my feet. The school’s balance of power had shifted—quietly, intractably, invisibly: Those with cars became sacred cows, those without were relegated to gladiatorial bloodsport that passenger seating demanded.
When the clock struck noon, I found myself suddenly alone in a vast locker-filled hallway. Tumbleweeds drifted by. There was not a car in the parking lot. Despondent, I ate lunch in the library. Even as the librarian came to chastise me for bringing in food, I could see the pity in her eyes. She wouldn’t kick me out; I had nowhere else to go. My social standing had been drop-kicked back to middle-school standards.
Four years later I was happily ensconced as a Senior in college. Liberal Arts school agreed with me: I had a close circle of friends, the options of upward mobility, and a meticulously managed public face. I made cameos at the right parties, I knew whom to call for the best drugs, I had the ear of the student liaison to the President. I had hunted down my former self in a dark alley and slit his throat.
And then, Friendster happened.
As a former computer dork, the calculus of social networking came easily. While my peers flailed in newly charted waters, posting their life stories, hopes, dreams and vulnerable aspirations, I had long since learned the technique of on-screen adaptation. A lack of punctuation might imply casual indifference. High-resolution photos were the hallmark of embarrassing sincerity. Brevity was key. Like anything traditionally teenage, the trick was to suggest that involvement was purely accidental.
In just a month my Friendster friend-count jumped from four to forty. I took this as proof of my newfound social aptitude. The average joe had twenty, maybe thirty, and was often stigmatized by a glut of ‘new’ friends: those sad profiles still struggling with the baby-fat of novice presentation. It was comforting to be in the front ranks, but it also meant keeping my ear closer to the ground; the more people online, the more treacherous the terrain became.
Soon sensitive testimonials no longer seemed appropriate, subsumed by jokes about my scrotum and one-liners from foreign films. As Friendster’s swelling ranks laid claim to the same art and music, nuance became paramount—like customizing a school uniform. Clever cadence replaced verbosity, obscure tastes muscled out the safe resonance of universal likes and dislikes. Friendster was no longer appropriate lunchtime conversation but a silent fact of life.
Thank God, I thought, I was a step ahead of the unwashed masses; I had gotten my digital adolescence out of the way before anyone had noticed. I could sit back and watch others squirm for a while.
The beginnings of my rude awakening came in the form of rumors. Even though Friendster was never spoken of except as a joke (“Oh my GOD, we’re like best friendsters!”), word of a strange phenomenon whispered through the dining hall and across the quad: having friends was passé.
It was only natural that as Friendster grew, people collected friends like one would postcards, claiming hundreds upon hundreds of connections. Evidently someone had decided that enough was enough, and had deleted all but his closest friends. Nearly overnight the pruning had become endemic. Friendster didn’t explicitly notify you of your severance, it simply adjusted your friend count. Some people, I was told one morning over a bowl of soggy Cocoa Puffs, were checking in only to find their former popularity in single-digit shambles.
My hunger vanished. I excused myself, lamely pleading late for a class and rushed back to my dorm. My hands shook when I switched on my computer. Air whistled through my teeth as I checked my stats. I was a victim. My friend count which had been nearing sixty just the other day had shrunk by half. Somehow exclusivity had trumped populism.
What in retrospect was a brutally obvious turning-point seemed at first like a short-lived fad. I had certainly not suffered as extensive a disgrace as others. Virtual breakups were simply an unavoidable growing pain of an online world that had only recently discovered its social life. And in no time at all the blight of de-friending passed.
But Friendster’s social landscape was growing bizarre and unrecognizable. I was too busy, I told myself, to be concerned with its day-to-day mood swings. I had finals, job hunting and graduation fast approaching. I pointedly ignored the odd fact that my friends were now connected to fake profiles like Tonya Harding and Cracksmokers Anonymous. I even heard rumblings of a site called MySpace that kids were switching to. I remember thinking: what a retarded name. That’ll never catch on.
By graduation, all hope was lost. Even if I had wanted to put the pieces back together, I wouldn’t have known where to start. The incoming class was on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and a number of other sites with names I couldn’t pronounce. Friendster had since become a dinosaur. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
By degrees I began to gather that social codes varied drastically from site to site. Being friends on MySpace was the equivalent of a casual acquaintance; perfect for someone you met at a party and might try to sleep with. At the same time, people were becoming friends with car brands, garage bands, and superfans, transforming their profiles into a public diary of consumable aspirations.
Facebook’s commenting feature, similar to Friendster’s testimonials, had metastasized into something more sinister: the number of comments left for your friends could be tracked and viewed by anyone. Comment too frequently and you seemed pathetic; too sporadically and you seemed fake. The rate of commenting associated with true friendship was in constant flux while the content of messages became nearly irrelevant. You were effectively advertising your prowess as a friend to your entire social circle.
New sites popped up every day. Some involved GPS, others musical taste. One for cats. One for dogs. One for rich globe-trotting socialites. And to my horror, a pattern began to emerge: not one had fixed social mores. They were always evolving.
So I gave up.
These days at parties someone will occasionally ask for my MySpace page and go a little pale when I announce loudly that I don’t have one. Sometimes I even deliver an animated diatribe in which I compare twentysomethings with MySpace pages to middle-aged men who hang out at the Mall. But it’s just an ugly trick to hide my shame. My digital corpse has begun to contaminate my real life with the smell of decay.
Dating—now nearly impossible to negotiate without social networking—has become a nightmare. Asking for someone’s email address seems like the equivalent of inviting myself in for coffee and then dropping my pants. Mention Friendster, and I might as well say that I live with my mom.
Every day things get a little bit worse. Before long online socializing will be a critical component of assembling a resume for a career. It will be the way deals get done and hands get shaken. It’s already where fame and prestige are earned and displayed. Soon, parents will start their children on social networking like they would preschool or piano lessons.
Maybe I deserve to be digitally lame. Maybe I laughed too hard at the Baby Boomers who have struggled for a decade with computers. Maybe I made a terrible mistake of assumption. The true electronic generation gap may not lie between those who can use a computer and those who can’t. It’s irrelevant who has the tools, what matters is understanding the rules.
I brazenly assumed that shifts in social hierarchy were as rare as strikes of lightning. Sure, every once in a while a crop of high school seniors suddenly drive cars, but as far as I knew, the social game as old as time itself was to scramble up the pyramid to a comfortable spot and hang on like hell when the foundation shook. Rule changes were infrequent and anathema.
But on the internet, rules change daily. In fact, social mores evolve faster than traditions can take root. For people like me, this is terrifying; since there is no corpus of understanding to learn from, there is no way to catch up. But for children who are natives of online social networking, this flux is a given, a fact of life. It’s the new truth of the schoolyard. I might as well be an immigrant: just hoping that my kids will have a chance to make something of themselves in an unfamiliar country.
So it looks like I’ll be eating lunch in the library for a while longer. But with any luck, you’ll be joining me soon.
