Social Networking and Me

With everyone getting onto the social networking bandwagon, I think it is high time I explain why I’m still very skeptical about the whole thing.

Being an Internet freak, I must confess that I am quite an old hand at these Social Networking sites. I was member of Orkut in mid 2004, when it was just beginning out, and I had very few real life friends on it. I was on Facebook, when it was opened up to the general public, just as everyone else was getting on to Orkut.

Some people have called these sites, Walled gardens, but that is not why I don’t get them.
The main problem I have with these sites is the absence of compartmentalization and the possibility of only one profile, which may or may not be public.

Let me explain. Being a wannabe polymath, I lie at the intersection of almost disjoint social circles.
I have interests ranging from Geeky ones like Physics and maths to not so geeky ones like Biking and Hindi movies. Besides that, I also have professional interests like .Net and GIS.
And my social contacts tend to lie in such kinds of broad categories. I know what you are thinking. These are not my social contacts. These are people I know.

Ok, then lets talk about my social contacts. I could basically categorize them as people from my primary school, those from my secondary school; Some from my JC while others from Xaviers, and some more from SIG. And this doesn’t even take into account the friends I have first met randomly: Either online, or in person via other people I have known, or just plain randomly.

Friendship is rarely transitive, when it comes to me, and most of my friends hardly know any of my other friends. I have such narrow and small sets when it comes to interpersonal relationships, that with many people I share no other common friend.
In this kind of situation, the usual purpose of S.N.S. is wasted on me. I can hardly put up pics and have 20 different friends tagged in it with 20 more commenting.

Further more social network is all about sharing. And what I have to share totally depends on my mood at that time. And what is on my mind at that moment will not be interesting to all my friends. Let me try to explain.

• There are certain fora I frequent, where it is perfectly alright to type out DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS, while at others I could easily begin with Fuck You, two of my friends died… If I did this in real life, or did it somewhere else, people might question my sanity.
• Often during the weekdays, I am mostly thinking about work, or have found an interesting thing while programming. If I share that, most people wouldn’t get it.
• This is not only with me. If A friend sends me a link to her companies website, asking me to check out their product, I will mark it as spam in a jiffy.

The other major problem I have, is with my worlds colliding. I show a very different face to different kinds of people. Many people think I am quite serious and decent. I don’t want to relieve them of this illusion, and would rather not show them my pictures taken while drinking and other wild things.

I think the problem stems from the fact that we as a society have shifted from having deep meaningful relationships with a few people, to having shallow relationships with a lot of people. The times when a person was your best friend, just because he lived next door,are gone. Gone are the days when your friends group, of 10 to 15 people, would do something together and be happy with that.

We now tend to select friends based on common interests and shared ideals, rather than physical proximity. And our Friendship with everyone is different. We are infact a different person for each one of them.