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befriending
Aug. 30th, 2010 02:08 amOver the last few years, we've seen the rise of Facebook, allowing people to connect with their friends in a fairly effective way. This has come at the expense of various other online networks - individual web forums are losing traffic, MySpace has obviously been cannibalised by people moving to Facebook, older haunts like Yahoo and MSN Groups have become deserted and closed down respectively, ICQ and Yahoo Messengers have lost favour, postings to Livejournal have dried up a lot, and so on.
All these other sites and services were a bit more anonymous. You could find interesting people and join their community or subscribe to their page and get to know them that way. Because they were mostly anonymous there weren't so many concerns about privacy and so you'd make new friends quite easily, by searching based on interests or whatever.
Now, we have Facebook which is big on having your real identity. In itself I don't think that's a bad thing, as there's definitely a place for networking with your real life friends and having a web site dedicated to facilitating that. But with real identity comes a need for privacy, which in turn means it's actually quite hard to find new friends on Facebook based on what they do or like. If you don't already have a mutual friend, you may never come across them, and even if you do, chances are high that their profile will be mostly closed off to you so contacting them is just a stab in the dark really. So as people have abandoned other services for Facebook, they've disappeared off the public web into a more private area.
I used to meet lots of people through online gaming. There was something really cool about going onto an online game and ending up on these make-believe adventures with people from England, the USA, Holland, Canada, none of whom you'd met before, but who you would get to know. But games things aren't the same any more either - it seems like most of the online games these days are carefully set up so that you can enter what is nominally a 'massively multiplayer world' and yet have as little to do with anybody else as possible, except for meeting up with your real life friends to go and play in a dungeon reserved especially for you.
I don't think any of this is a particularly good thing. It feels like the internet has lost some of its appeal in letting people form communities that ignore geographical distance, in favour of becoming something that just makes real world communities a little more efficient. It's a bit of a shame, I think. A lost opportunity.
All these other sites and services were a bit more anonymous. You could find interesting people and join their community or subscribe to their page and get to know them that way. Because they were mostly anonymous there weren't so many concerns about privacy and so you'd make new friends quite easily, by searching based on interests or whatever.
Now, we have Facebook which is big on having your real identity. In itself I don't think that's a bad thing, as there's definitely a place for networking with your real life friends and having a web site dedicated to facilitating that. But with real identity comes a need for privacy, which in turn means it's actually quite hard to find new friends on Facebook based on what they do or like. If you don't already have a mutual friend, you may never come across them, and even if you do, chances are high that their profile will be mostly closed off to you so contacting them is just a stab in the dark really. So as people have abandoned other services for Facebook, they've disappeared off the public web into a more private area.
I used to meet lots of people through online gaming. There was something really cool about going onto an online game and ending up on these make-believe adventures with people from England, the USA, Holland, Canada, none of whom you'd met before, but who you would get to know. But games things aren't the same any more either - it seems like most of the online games these days are carefully set up so that you can enter what is nominally a 'massively multiplayer world' and yet have as little to do with anybody else as possible, except for meeting up with your real life friends to go and play in a dungeon reserved especially for you.
I don't think any of this is a particularly good thing. It feels like the internet has lost some of its appeal in letting people form communities that ignore geographical distance, in favour of becoming something that just makes real world communities a little more efficient. It's a bit of a shame, I think. A lost opportunity.
