Social Networking: Why Do We Use It?

In this day and age, we now have the option to sign up and bare ourselves on a whole galaxy of social networking sites. We have Facebook, MySpace, Quechup, Bebo, and now Yahoo! Mash, the newest attempt by a major company to hone in on the young and the relentless. The other great debate surrounds business networking communities like LinkedIn, but that's a whole other subject. For this post, I'm mainly going to express my points about the "social side of networking."

Deep down, we all have a desire, a need, to be connected to those around us. We want to know that we have a network of people who care about us deeply, enough to buy us a virtual drink anyways. All it takes is a friend request by a colleague, maybe an old friend, maybe even a new friend or love interest, or even a message on our wall saying something mundane like "sup?" and we feel as though we really are wanted and needed. Is that really the case though? Are we so consumed by our need to add as many friends as possible that we lose the integrity of making real friends?

It's not uncommon for us, I've seen and experienced it myself, to feel that if we're not constantly checking our profiles, we might miss out on some amazing comment about us. Or, we might miss the chance to immediately accept someone's friend request, worrying that the other person might think that we were debating whether or not to accept. Because, c'mon, who wants to be a bad friend on a social networking site? Let's face it: if you can't be a good friend online, then you certainly could be questioned in the real world.

So how many people have become so enamored with their social networking application(s) that it consumes their ability to maintain real-world connections? Does a poke on Facebook translate into a compliment at the office or hanging out with friends? Seems to me that social networking is to 2005 what instant messaging was in 1998. Remember those days when your life centered around who was online and who you chatted with for hours? Fond memories I hope.

But now it's 2007, a new era of socializing is upon us, and the marketing and advertising firms are lining up, displaying all the classic conditions of Pavlov's dogs. And naturally we feed into this, and we will continue to do so as we continue to evolve as humans learning to co-exist with machinery. So the next time you spot someone in the office casually checking their profile, keep in mind that they could be in a frenzy of anxiety over whether or not their friend poked them, winked at them, hugged them, or God-forbid, ignored them.

Here's an interesting study by the British Association For The Advancement Of Science, posted on ScienceDaily last Friday about social networking anxiety. And it's not just social networking, this has been studied and published for teens with cell phone anxiety.

Let me know what you think!