The Internet: The Next Cell Phone

Understandably, this post is entirely based upon personal opinion and informal, anecdotal evidence. Reflecting upon the concluding questions of our discussion of social media's effects and ethics, it practically goes without saying that the internet is at the beginning of its life. I wouldn't quite call it a newborn, but more like an obnoxious 5 year old who is running and screaming everywhere, always getting in your business and consuming nearly every  moment of your existence. I know there is so much more growing to be done for the internet and most especially social media. Unfortunately, as I find myself contemplating what else there could possibly be invented in the world (for everything MUST be taken by now), along comes something ingenious and fresh like Groupon forcing me to banish those thoughts. I should just come to terms now with the fact that I will probably never be one of those internet moguls down in Silicon Valley, thrust into the life of a m/billionaire by the luck and skill of a great idea. But while I have no revolutionary concepts, only 1 out of every 20 of those great ideas that turn into startups ever get off the ground. I admire anyone with the entrepreneurial spirit but it may not be for me, unless of course, I have a really great idea. But I digress...

Like a 5 year old, the internet is not essential. At least, not to my existence. I don't need a screaming child in my life right now. Let's not take that first statement too seriously; I love kids, I love 6 year olds, but 5 year olds are a whole different story. In the early nineties, when the cell phone began to expand within the consumer market, a portable telephone seemed superfluous. Why would you need to pay all that money just to have people follow you around all the time? Fast forward fifteen years and most people today can hardly imagine life without it. Based on how much planning I do and information I send and receive via my phone, life becomes a "struggle" when it becomes incapacitated for whatever reason for more than a day. As far as I'm concerned, the internet has not quite reached this point...yet. As social media becomes more ingrained and interconnected with every aspect of our daily lives, the internet will become increasingly less separate from us. The effects are already apparent but the direction things are turning are quickly towards one mass connected site to which you have access to at all hours of the day, anywhere on earth and can do anything on. If the image of a screaming 5 year old doesn't scare you, how about Facebook as your best friend and confidante, your financial planner and real estate agent, your personal trainer and cardiologist? Social media could quickly become your everything.

It's a personal issue.

So I had a really good idea for a blog post this week. But like most things you think of right before you go to bed, I forgot it by the time I woke up the next morning. I’m telling you, the topic was actually insightful, deep, and worthy of debate. In attempting to resurrect the idea, I found myself procrastinating by surfing all my usual procrastination-worthy sites.  And the site I ended up at was none other than my own 15 year old sister’s Tumblr.

Ask any of my friends, I am super creepy. I won’t remember your name or half of your face, but if I drove to your house once, just once, in the most generic suburban development, at night, I will forever remember where you live. That kind of creepy. The creepiness I’m talking about today has been introduced by the internet. Because of our infinite newfound abilities given to us by the internet, the government, corporations, and individuals now have a whole new assortment of norms and protocol to establish. Thanks to my creeping, I have a decision to make as to what I’m going to do with the unanticipated information I have about my sister. Stay with me for a minute as I tell you, strangers of the internet/College Writing 108, a little bit of personal information about myself and my family. As is to be expected, my sister and I are very different. Not to say either of us is unintelligent or socially-stunted, but to put it simply, I am more book smart and she is more socially inclined. That is, my sister is the life of the party, except in her own home, where upon arrival, she immediately goes upstairs and shuts her door.

Getting to the relevant part of this post, my sister posts many things to her Tumblr, an average of 5 posts a day I would say. But the content of these posts are what worries me and leaves me with a moral decision. Her website feels like a diary; the day I first happened upon it, I immediately felt guilty, as though I had maliciously snuck into her room and broken the lock on a fuzzy pink notebook. But obviously, that is nowhere near what Tumblr is. It brings in the notion of “privately public” and “publicly private”. I never kept much of a journal myself when I was her age, but even just four years later, it seems the things she posts about are far more weighty and emotionally scarring than what I ever experienced when I was 15. If what she posts is true, my sister has far more going on in her life than she has ever let on to me or my parents. The moral conflict is in what I do with the information I am given. Is this all true? Does she need help or is she merely being a hormonal teenager? Do I tell my parents? If I do, what do I tell them? Is this a good outlet for her and if I let on that I know about it, will she stop posting? I am comforted by and proud of some of the maturity she displays in some of her posts and thus far, I have chalked most of the dramatics to teenage angst. I occasionally have a good laugh about it.

What do we do with all of this new information? The CIA and the FBI get hundreds of calls each day about suspected terrorist attacks or UFO sightings. How do they know which ones to take seriously and which to disregard and choose with 100% certainty? I’m not concerned about my little sister, but it is true that the media has published dozens of stories about kids who posted their troubles on the internet, were not taken seriously, and ended up hurting themselves or committing suicide. The internet provides an anonymous forum and eliminates crucial tools of communication like body language and voice tone. It’s an old question, but one that is relevant to everyone, online and offline: who do we believe and why do we believe them? The internet exponentially increases the doubt.

So I met this guy...on Facebook...

A number of social network founders have stated that the purpose of their sites is to not only maintain relationships, but to create and develop them as well. Today, there is a website and a social network for everything under the sun. Blogs and other online communities allow people of obscure and niche interests and hobbies to connect. But in terms of making relationships, is the internet really as magical as many make it out to be?

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is one of the aforementioned founders that stated their networks allow others to form new connections. My personal opinion on this topic falls into an area most internet-related opinions fall into—the gray area. In an open forum such as Facebook, establishing new relationships are next to impossible. I only have one friend on Facebook that I have never met in real life and she’s an author I met on a group discussion board a few years back…and wait…now I have no friends I’ve never met. Problem solved. On a site with a broad bonding agent—friends, music, television, etc.—I wouldn’t want to be friends with people I don’t know personally. I’ve heard stories of people meeting on large social networking sites and in the early days, of MySpace and whatnot, it was a legitimate concern of parents to be worried about their children meeting strangers online. Don’t even get me started about the time in the 10^th grade I was responsible for a girl who decided to go off and meet a guy she met on MySpace in a Home Depot parking lot while we were on a YMCA trip…she was a piece of work if there ever was one.  There is no ability to trust on sites like Facebook and MySpace. You are there to connect with your classmates, family, and coworkers and it is the real life connection that allows you to come together online, that is your bond.  You are able to grow and develop your relationship via these sites by realizing other common interests posted on each others’ profiles.

On the other side of the social networking spectrum are the niche interest and hobbies sites. People rally together for everything you can imagine, from ship-in-a-bottle building to gastric bypass surgery recovery to widows of the U.S. Navy. Such sites have allowed people with unique personalities and situations to come together and find solace in the fact that they’re not as weird/hopeless/out of place/alone as they previously thought they were.  That is awesome. And it’s one of the greatest things to come out of the internet revolution. While I’m skirting the topic, I feel I should also address the harm the internet has caused by such sites, where naysayers have attacked and bullied site members, for whatever reason. We’ve been hearing much about online bullying lately with the tragic occurrences of gay teen suicide due to harassment on social networking sites. These stories are indeed heartbreaking to hear and should never happen but the stories we hardly ever hear are those about the lives the internet has saved, simply by connecting people and creating a network of support. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that there are two different kinds of connectivity in the social networking world. The first is one I would never want to meet people through because the audience is far too large and ambiguous. The second however, has the potential to make the world a much smaller place for those in its furthest and funniest reaches.

Nobody likes to be poked in real life.

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.