Thingy 4: Social Networking

At the invitation of my fellow Officer of Library Law, I joined the site LinkedIn--which I had never heard of before. I'm familiar with FaceBook and many of my friends use it, but I want to wait until I'm actually proud of my life before I post its details out there for the world to see ;-). You know, like getting it together in time for your 20th high school reunion.

I found LinkedIn to be rather dry in terms of format and content, but I suppose that's better than the salaciousness of MySpace. It is nice to get those subsequent invitations to link up from fellow SPL employees (who, of course, are probably simply trying to complete their assignment rather than extending bonds of eternal affection). The 10 Things tutorial for this item described a key winsome aspect of social network sites as their being "a quantifiable manifestation of their social network." Bragging rights, in other words? To me, these online social networks do lay out the structure of connections, and it is nifty to see the "degrees of separation" between an ever expanding group of people as you consider your connections' connections' connections. However, what they do not provide is the dynamism that leads to interconnectedness. You can see who others are, some basic facts about them, and their contact info, but still you have to be the one to walk across the room and strike up a conversation with a virtual stranger (did you catch that double entendre? Do you care?). Slightly warmed up cold-calling, I'd call it. I suppose that if you had some compelling reason to work the network--such as looking for a new job, which we can't very well admit here, can we?--then that might help overcome the inertia of these virtual networks.

In the meantime, I'll be content to actually talk to these people in person, and seeing as how I barely like my friends, I'm not terribly interested in my friends' friends. ;-) And why, you ask, are these sorts of websites so popular? Perhaps 'tis naught but a contrived means to stave off the encroaching, immobilizing sense of our lonely place in the vast universe, to fixate the flux that is human sociality.

Now back to my Camus...