The sociologist Stanley Milgram developed what he called the "Small World Hypothesis", which stated that everyone was connected to everyone else by six degrees or less.
That’s the basic idea behind the multiple social networking sites that are mushrooming all around like Friendster, Tribe and the more recent and selective Orkut (by the way, if you want to join this one, Jill and Vika get you an invitation).
The internet and these social tools are just amplifiers to a natural phenomenon; people are social actors who interconnect and share contacts and knowledge.
I believe these will be useful tools and the aim should be to reach the model proposed as the Augmented Social Network:
Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age.
The major barriers for these tools to succeed, from what I have gathered from my readings, are:
• Achieving critical mass;
• No payback to for someone to share their business contacts (as one’s business contacts are obviously one big professional competitive advantage);
• No integration with other systems that might use the social network data;
• No interoperability between the systems which means having to share the same information repeatedly;
While as a business/citizenship tool this really appeals to me, on a more sociological level the concept of Computer Based Friendship creeps me out. When I joined one of these sites I was taken back to my teenage years instantly. A big singles party, a “do you want to be my friend” first-grade flashback.
It’s always fun to know other people, especially if they share the same interests; the internet provides a wider audience for meeting new people of any nationality, race and creed; and I’m not questioning the social software suitability for the maintenance of close social bonds but, to be honest, I wouldn’t call the people I’ve met through the internet “friends”. They are just internet acquaintances. Some are really interesting and I’m happy to have found them, but there’s no real significant attachment. I’m just concerned about the decreasing ability of people to socialize “normally”; the building of relationships seems more and more difficult. Maybe we need a cultural shift on the relationship building dynamics. The offline social capital and civic engagement are probably not that easily replaceable by software. And not half as fun, I must say :-)
Well, at least people are establishing ties, have a feeling of belonging to a group, sharing beliefs and interests. And maybe that’s a way to prevent the durkheimian anomie attendant upon living in modern urban-industrial societies.
Update: Orkut is down.
Here’s a list of interesting links about social networks.
An interesting debate between – Richard Stokes and Jeremy Zawodny;
A must read: The Social Construction of Reality
Studying online social networks here;
Social Networks: deodorants for the soul?