Anti-social networks

I recently read an article discussing social networks and their affects on relationships.

All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline....

But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.

The author lays some of the blame on the technology used for communicating in these venues, but I think she lets it off the hook too easily.

One of the big problems is how we converse. Typing still leaves something to be desired as a communication tool; it lacks the nuances that can be expressed by body language and voice inflection....But let's face it, the problem is much greater than which tools we use to communicate. It's what we are actually saying that's really mucking up our relationships.

While I agree that we all need to take responsibility for what we say regardless of the method of communication, I think the communication method drives the content considerably.

Body language and voice inflection are extremely important in communication. I can turn an expression of sympathy into a cut of sarcasm or vice versa without the words changing at all. The sight, sounds, and physical presence of other people cannot be underestimated in communication.

That's one of the reasons we've switched to using Skype to talk to far away grandparents almost exclusively. Our children benefit immensely for being able to see as well as hear them, and I believe it has strengthened the bonds between them.

But beyond the differences between text and "physical" communication, most social networks promote vapid and inane communication by how they are set up. The very construction of the tools is part of the problem.

Take Facebook. What's the first thing you see after signing in? A list of status messages, game scores, causes joined, quiz scores, etc. for all your friends. Most of which say nothing even remotely important. At the top of this list, I'm invited to type a short response to the question "What's on your mind?" Who cares what's on my mind? (Wait...I shouldn't say that on my blog.) What I mean is - shouting a sentence out to the world while everyone else is shouting doesn't exactly invite a meaningful dialog. Sure you can write longer notes, but they are not the focus of the tool - not by a long shot.

How about Twitter? While it reduces some of the noise compared to Facebook by providing only the equivalent of status messages, it only allows extremely short statements of 140 characters or less. Again, its the equivalent of shouting a 140 character sentence out the world while everyone else is shouting.

You'd think that the small messages allowed by these tools would encourage us to do everyone a favor by choosing our words carefully. But it seems to have the opposite effect. We've decided that quantity is better than quality - better to say the first thing that pops into our mind than to attempt to think of something meaningful to say.

Beware of the tools you use - their construction promotes certain uses over others.