Mark Zuckerberg has done wonders in creating the world we now know as Facebook. He has tapped into the human unconscious and identified what we are looking for in creating and maintaining relationships online and how to go about doing that. And for all that genius, I feel Zuckerberg dropped the ball on one aspect of the revolutionary social network: poking. It was all fun and cute when I first joined Facebook four years ago but I was recently reminded of this now little used application when my roommate announced her cousin in Lebanon had so indiscreetly prodded her. It was her first poke; she was no longer a poke virgin and didn't know how to feel about it. Mostly because she didn't know what it was.
Or for that matter, what it meant. The significance of poking differs across social groups and age ranges. When I first started using Facebook, when I was fifteen, if a boy poked you, woah. hold the phone. he totallyyyyyyyy liiiiikes you. Amongst the older, college crowd, it was a guy's way of letting you know he wanted in your pants. Or so I heard. Beyond that, there were the infamous Facebook "poke wars" and we should just leave it at that because I get annoyed just thinking about it.
When Facebook was opened to the general population a few years later, poking opened a whole new can of worms as relatives, thinking “poking” was a fun, charming, yet hip means of communication, began bothering their grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. For the children who were obliged to “friend” their older relatives at the insistence of their parents, like myself, they faced a conundrum: do I poke them back, risking them poking me again and beginning a never ending back-and-forth of obnoxiousness or ignore the poke and risk getting called out for not returning the gesture at Thanksgiving dinner? It sounds trivial, but at least in my high school mind, it was a heavily-weighted problem.
Thankfully, the issue was resolved, interestingly enough, with the emergence of Superpoke!, an application which allows users execute various actions upon their friends from hugging to defenestrating to seasonal options such as giving a reindeer. And while it caused more awkward moments, such as getting body slammed by your boss’s boss at the city Recreation Department, Facebook’s original poking was quickly forgotten about. And with the site’s reconfiguration soon after, applications such as Superpoke! became difficult to find and thus off the radar. And was I happy to be done with that…
But this story still doesn’t answer the question of WHY poking really existed in the first place. Facebook attests that they wanted to have an application that had no real purpose whatsoever; that could be used to attract attention, or just say “hi”, without having to say anything at all. But what is weaker than having the technology do it all for you? If somebody poked me today, I think I would just be annoyed—why is this person bothering me like this? What am I supposed to do with this? I figure if a person really wants to talk to me, they will reach out in some other way and say something, in real words. If Zuckerberg intended to have Facebook create and enhance relationships, he certainly took a wrong turn with poking, further giving people an excuse not to actually interact with others and instead put in the minimal amount available: a click of a button. The media often suggests that the internet is stunting our social growth and in some ways I would agree, especially in reference to poking. But thankfully for our generation, I think we’ve already avoided this threat.
