Managing Essentials

International Individual isolation in the decade of social networks

Together alone has become a prominent phrase catching the feelings of millions engaging themselves in social networks on the internet. In fact, these networks brought the people of the world together in the last decade. More than one billion individuals meet on Facebook and this number is easily surpassed when adding up the users of competitors like Twitter, Orkut or Tumblr - and of dating sites. A recent study of Pew Research shows that 67% of all US-American adults regularly engage in social networks with women (71%) leading men (62%). Just eight years ago, in 2005, less than 10% of all internet users visited such sites. In addition, the phenomenon is a truly international one. When it comes to Facebook, Orkut and Co. students in South America and Asia are even more involved than in the USA. However, the social internet has neither developed into a global self-help group nor taken humankind out of the age of anxiety as W.H. Auden labeled our century. The World Health Organization speaks of a global crises with regard to depression and made it the central topic for its World Mental Health Day in 2012. Suicide statistics indicate no change for the better. In the developed nations life satisfaction did not increase, and when it comes to friends and confidents in real life, social networks are shrinking. In real life everybody with more than two good close confidents is statistically blessed. On the surface, social networks appear to provide individuals with a social network they could have only dreamed about some years ago. The typical user has over 100 friends on Facebook and over 200 followers on Twitter. It has become a science to establish how many of them are real or just fake followers. But even if you discount for fake followers or many more not really active friends, the numbers remain impressive. At no time in history have individuals been connected as well as they are today. And, overall, these connections, as a study by the Facebook data center suggests, seem to have the form of a classical peer structure made up by friends and relatives. The majority of messages are exchanged with someone living nearby, packets travel on average only five hops on the internet, and evidently communicants share interests, hobbies and life experiences. Together alone indicates, however, that coming together on the internet evidently does not imply the emergence of real closeness. Of course, real friendships can emerge, but in the vast majority of cases virtual friends and followers remain just that, virtual. Virtual friendship is a new class in the area of social relations by choice. The classical term friend needs differentiation and while in some cultures almost everyone is called a friend, others differentiate carefully between friends and acquaintances. Virtual friends are typically distant acquaintances in real life. Their main characteristic is that one does not know much about them. Most emerge out of address lists analyzed and redistributed by the network providers. Some may be people who in fact share an interest or did so some time ago. But what does sharing an interest mean, and how close is the connection created by a shared interest? A look at the user groups shows that people share jokes, topics, hobbies or the life of often distant common acquaintances or celebrities. An analogy in real life would be riding on the same train, watching the same movie or sitting in the same bar. But Hoppers famous picture of people sitting in a bar does not symbolize the closeness of the shared space but the loneliness in it. In fact, many virtual friends are strangers.

Managing Essentials
International
That qualitative and quantitative difference between real and virtual friends reflects on the communication in social networks. Posts have become a kind of individual mass communication. In contrast to a conversation they are neither fine tuned nor directed to an individual or a homogenous group. This leads to an information overflow for everybody. What is posted and tweeted regularly lacks the quality of being interesting or relevant for the recipient. In a comprehensive study by Paul Andr and coworkers Twitter users regarded just about one-third of the tweets as worth reading, and worth reading is certainly not a high standard. To have to wade through irrelevance is one source of the feeling of together alone. Irrelevant information is not necessarily bad news, but a signal with regard to the low quality of the communication. Irrelevance indicates that the sender either does not care much about the recipient or does not know better. Besides the feeling of being individually disregarded, recipients regularly discover that they may share an interest with a virtual friend but would disagree on many other topics. Ironically a virtual friend is not close enough to cancel the friendship easily without substantial justification. Even more relevant for the feeling of loneliness is however the change in perspective connected to posting. Psychologists differentiate between the private and the public self. The private self is the personal reflection on life and the experiences it brings along. In real life this self is the basis of friendships. The public self is the side a person likes to display to others and these public selves are the ones displayed on social networks. The public self wants to shine, looks for admiration, and tries to create an impression which is helpful in the network but not necessarily a valid assessment of the actual state. Consequently, the events, experiences and impressions posted tend to be the more happy ones in life. Not surprisingly a growing body of scientific studies suggests that individuals spending a lot of time on social networks are unhappier and may become even more so studying intensively the profiles of others. The term Facebook depression may be overdone and research is just beginning, but individuals spending a lot of time on social networks may tend to be more socially isolated in real life from the outset. By studying profiles they encounter the positively biased public selves of others in a situation in which their private self is in need of support. In consequence, the big social networks bring people together but not as privately as many hope for. In a contact list the borders between real and virtual friends cannot be seen, but they are felt and the stronger the need for real friends, the more the virtual disappoint. As institutions the big social networks have now entered their stage of maturity. The slowed-down growth of some of them may indicate both, a saturation of markets and of their users. Many users want to live in a global village, not in a global Hollywood. Some big networks recognize the problem and offer the option to differentiate between classes of friends. However, in the long run a variety of small, more interactive and intimate networks may cater for this need of finding real friends better than a few global giants.
The Demographics of Social Media Users 2012 (Maeve Duggan, Joanna Brenner) www.managing-essentials.com/3dn Anatomy of Facebook (Lars Backstrom for Facebook Data Science) www.managing-essentials.com/3do

Managing Essentials
International
Is there really 'Facebook depression?' (Larry Magid) www.managing-essentials.com/3dp Who Gives a Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content (Paul Andr, Michael S. Bernstein, Kurt Luther) www.managing-essentials.com/3dq The Many Faces of Facebook: Experiencing Social Media as Performance, Exhibition, and Personal Archive (Xuan Zhao, Niloufar Salehi, Sasha Naranjit, Sara Alwaalan, Stephen Voida, Dan Cosley) www.managing-essentials.com/3dr