Drew DondelingerWrit 1133

Assignment 2

Facescreen

Howard Rheingold and Neil Postman agree that the relatively new fad of online

communities is changing society as we know it. Second Life, Facebook and other social

sites allow people to have a social experience beyond real life. Facebook focuses on

sharing, talking and interacting with friends primarily not in your vicinity. Facebook is

just a way to convey your real life and share it with friends, while Second Life, gives

people the opportunity to completely “start over” and create a new online life.

Rheingold believes that online community interaction will ultimately benefit society in

general, especially online. Postman however argues that ultimately technology and

online interaction will have an overall negative impact on society. Based on Postman’s

theory of negative impact, and Rheingold who expects to find social benefits, I will test

online communities for myself to see what I find. I will be going in with the

expectation of negative effects. As for my specific expectations, I will test my belief

that online communities have created a society that is increasingly based solely on

person to computer interaction and not face to face human contact. Because online

interaction is “easier, more convenient and better” in the opinion of many twentieth-

century leaders, the next generation, the “technoration” as Jeffery Gitomer puts it, is

becoming very inhuman and exceedingly worse at face-to-face interaction and real

world communication. I assume to find many people that rely on the computer as

their main source of social interaction, that is spend more time on online social

websites that socializing in the real world. Inversely I would expect to find at least

one, likely more, examples of how technology has benefited society and created social

ties as Mr. Rheingold suggests. Also with more time and resources I would enjoy

observing the difference in how people interact socially and professionally between

technology and the real world. I would venture to hypothesize that most people

struggle being professional and interacting face to face in current times in comparison

to twenty years ago, which would suggest disevolution instead of forward

advancement of society. However for this case study I will focus on the amount of

time spent between online social interaction and real life interaction and the activities

that take place online and finally analyze their effects on the real world.

I will be using my experiences and conversations in Second Life along with some

insight from Facebook users. I have a Second Life account and have begun immersing

myself into the unique culture. To measure and get meaningful information out of

Second Life I will need not only to be a random person walking around but I will have

to befriend other people and develop relationships where people respect me enough

to talk to me and give personal information. I would plan to set out looking for

information like, what do people do in Second Life? What do they do in “First Life?”

How many people to you communicate with regularly in each society? Do you find

experiences simpler in one life than the other? Do you find it easier to be outgoing in

either situation? Which life do you spend more time in socially? This type of

information would lead me to a better understanding of why people use Second Life

and more importantly how their Second Life relates to the real life.

To gather information about Facebook I will have to draw on others’ experience.

I have no personal Facebook experience, but from past observation my information

will look towards the difference between friends on Facebook and friends in real life.

Some people have upwards of a million friends on Facebook and my initial feeling tells

me that those people aren’t friends with all of those people in real life. My guarantee

would be that in general people interact far more, both in number of people and

amount of time, on Facebook than in real life. Types of questions I will ask Facebook

users will be geared toward finding out the difference between how often, why and

with whom users interact with. I will do this both by inquiring regular users of

Facebook and by exploring the world myself by using a rented Facebook profile to

explore the new world myself. How many friends do you have on Facebook? How

many of those friends do you interact with regularly via Facebook? How many of those

friends do you regularly interact with face to face? Do you have friends on Facebook

you’ve never met in person? Do you find it easier to communicate socially with people

face to face or on Facebook? How much time do you spend on Facebook versus

socializing face to face? I will interview a few subjects and try to find other general

statistics about Facebook in addition to my observations to contradict my hypothesis.

Through my interaction on Second Life I learned a lot about the culture and also

about the people of Second Life. One of the biggest things I noticed was that the users

of Second Life are a proud group of people that identify with their social network.

Many people became defensive at first when I asked them about the difference

between their Second Life and their real life, most interviewees were taken aback at

first and then came back on the attack by responding with something close to, “What

are you talking about? Are you saying Second Life isn’t real?” This feeling of having to

defend their site and opinion that Second Life is real was common among users. I

interviewed around twenty-five avatars in Second Life, with varying lengths of time

interviewing because often if a question offended someone, or if they felt I was a

waste of time they would just fly away. I talked to people in a very diverse group of

places, everywhere from a baseball game to an art gallery, someone at the roller disco

and even someone at the strip club. On average Second Life users said they spend

between two and five hours a day interacting in their 3D online community, with a

range from half an hour to ten hours a day. The majority of users actually engage in

similar activities in Second Life that they do every day in real life, however with some

exciting activities they’ve never done in real life. The reason for this was almost

always because respondents found it safer to try out a fantasy in Second Life rather

than taking a chance in real life, users agreed that it may be awkward in person but

very easy given a computer screen. In general most Second Life users said they met

entirely new people in Second Life and their friends in Second Life were hardly ever

their friends in real life. In fact no one I talked to said they have ever gone beyond

Second Life in actually meeting with any of their Second Life friends in real life. Eight

of the twenty-five responders admitted that Second Life is a bigger part of their social

life than time they spend actually interacting with people.

My Second Life experience was eye opening. People said they have completely

different friends on Second Life than in reality, which means Second Life gives you the

opportunity to expand your social network, however, it is hardly ever used in that way.

Instead Second Life seems to be an activity based community. There is no arguing that

Second Life is a community, as the definition of community is ambiguous in itself, and

if Second Life users believe they are part of a community, then technically they are. I

would agree that Second Life at least gives the opportunity to create and be a part of

an online community where you can meet people, hang out and have ongoing

meaningful relationships. However in my experience that’s not how users put the site

to work, instead on the aggregate it seems like people simply go there for something

to do and never build anything out of it. When you ask an avatar why they use Second

Life you would most likely get an answer related to, “Because” or “Cuz it’s here.” Not

many relevant actions come out of Second Life. Interaction occurs solely from behind

a computer screen and hardly ever expands from that.

All of this supports my hypothesis and Postman’s ideas because this example of

an online community does not benefit society, but rather is just an activity to fill time

in people’s lives. Activities that are just time fillers can be useful as stress relievers

but have no more benefits, and in my opinion the negatives of time fillers outweigh

the positives. My hypothesis is supported by this evidence and social site in general;

this site I would argue is damaging to society because there is no societal benefit and

is therefore just an activity for fun. While fun can be beneficial to societal needs, in

this case I (and I assume Mr. Postman would agree with me) would consider spending

excess amounts of time on this site as a waste of time and therefore a waste of money.

Time is money and a waste of time and money can be labeled as inefficiency, both

threatening to take over society without benefit and destroy face to face real life

society.

While I don’t personally have a Facebook account I was able to find many of the

over 410 million people that do and interview five of them. My sample wasn’t pleasing

to me because it consisted of five college aged users, but at least I feel it’s a good

range of taste of my generation’s use of Facebook. All of my interviewees admitted to

spending at least an hour, most of them were more, on Facebook every day. Just to

put that into perspective that’s about 365 hours a year, which equates to over 15 full

days of time spent on Facebook every year, for a one hour a day user. Of the people I

interviewed the group had a range of between 431 and 1,496 friends, one of the most

shocking things to me when gathering this specific statistic was not the sheer numbers

but that four of the five subjects knew their exact number of friends without even

looking online. When I asked, “Are you sure?” They opened up their profiles and

proved my skepticism wrong. I found this astonishing, but when I asked how or why

they knew that off the top of their heads, I got the same look I get when I tell someone

I don’t have a Facebook. Kids nowadays can memorize all 150 Pokémon or the number

of Facebook friends they have but not the US Presidents or acquaintance’s names.

While browsing this site one of my main observations was what a “friend” really

entitles, a friend in Facebook means that a person requested you as a friend and you

hit the accept button. Most of the people you “friend” are friends you know in real

life, but not all of them, often they’re people who have mutual friends with you or just

other random people. Every person I interviewed admitted to having friends on

Facebook that they’ve never even met; the average per interviewee was 27. Of their

hundreds of friends each interviewee only consistently communicates with between

ten and twenty-five of those friends on Facebook. Of all the Facebook “friends” each

interviewee only regularly communicates face to face with five to ten of them.

This would seem at first to support my hypothesis if out of hundreds of friends

there is only regular face to face communication with five to ten people. With this

evidence it seems like the online social network of Facebook is becoming the main

reliant for college social interaction, however every respondent said their real life

social activities are far more important than their online social life. However another

constant comment was that Facebook is a huge part of their social life and they

couldn’t imagine their lives without Facebook. One of the biggest uses of Facebook is

connecting with and staying in contact with people you can’t regularly communicate

with or lost contact with over the years; this is the reason I find this site refutes my

hypothesis. Even though the average user spends aggregately over 15 days on

Facebook and only communicates with 5% of friends face to face, Facebook can be

socially beneficial. For example college students are increasingly leaving their home

state to go to school across the country; this I believe is in large part thanks to the

advancement in technology, specifically cell phones and online social communication,

that allow kids to keep in touch with family and friends, first MySpace and now

dominantly Facebook. Of the five interviewees two are from California, one is from

Minnesota, one is from Missouri and one is from Connecticut. Each interviewee notes

that most of their Facebook friends are friends from high school and their home town

that they want to keep in contact with when they start new journeys. Also one

interviewee was able, only through Facebook, to find his best friend from middle

school who moved away before high school and reconnect with him. Facebook does

have some very useful social tools, but it is also shows evidence for my hypothesis.

Two friends live on the same floor of a dorm building, their rooms are about 35 feet

from each other, and when they want to have a conversation, they both log onto

Facebook. Instead of walk 35 feet and give the other person the satisfaction of their

sole attention, both prefer using Facebook to communicate, because it’s “easier” and

“you can do other things at the same time.” This was the biggest support of my

hypothesis, talking over the computer is easier than walking 35 feet and talking face to

face? You can’t give another person the respect to talk directly to them because you

can get other things done while talking to them? An older gentleman would likely find

this offensive and a hunch tells me your boss wouldn’t appreciate your logic if that was

your excuse. Another piece of evidence I uncovered to support my hypothesis, while

trying to disprove my hypothesis, had to do with the picture sharing aspect of

Facebook. Users all admitted to spending a significant amount of time browsing

through pictures on their attractive female friends’ profiles specifically looking for

beach pictures and commenting on them. I asked if they would ever observe girls on

the beach and comment on them to their face. No. Again this just exemplifies the

differences between online communication and real life.

I view my experiences as two separate examples. I feel my time in Second Life

was confirmative to both my hypothesis and Mr. Postman’s ideas. The site was not

socially beneficial and in fact threatened to turn people’s social lives totally electronic

where they would eventually completely lose the ability to communicate in the real

world, slowly taking over and destroying society. Facebook however seems to be more

of a supplement rather than replacement to social life. Facebook has beneficial

qualities, and communication in Facebook is most often derived around or about real

life, not threatening to take over society. While Facebook may be contributing to the

face to screen relationship, as I’m trade marking it, it seems to be more beneficial than

hurtful; however this correlation depends completely on the individual’s choice of how

to use Facebook. As for my hypothesis I would denounce that Facebook is socially

harmful if taken summative because of the evidence from Facebook that suggests real

world social growth. However Mr. Postman’s ideas and my hypothesis do hold true in

many cases. My initial hypothesis was that online social sites are ruining real world

communicational skills, and I believe this is partially true, there certainly seems to be

evidence for both sides. The argument I would add to Mr. Postman’s ideas is that it is

not social sites nor technology that threatens to capture, manipulate and control

society; but rather the people using the technology. Technology is a tool made by man

and for man, and though technology has developed it is still a tool man controls. That

being said guns are a tool controlled by man as well and they have become destructive

to society and man himself. However guns are not to blame nor is the technology that

led to innovation, but the choices man makes on how to use his inventions, and

specifically how man abuses each. If used to further your social life in the real world,

find lost friends or keep up with friends you’ve parted ways with, Facebook can be very

beneficial. But if used to have a conversation with someone down the hall from you or

to just browse for hours on end, these networks can have a negative impact on society.

Second Life has the same basic potential as Facebook, however at basic nature

Facebook is set up for man to make more constructive choices with it. My addition to

my and Mr. Postman’s hypothesis would be the same: that technology and online

social worlds do have the potential to aid in the corruption and harm of society, but

the biggest threat technology gives man is yet another way to abuse his own tools and

destroy society himself. This can be seen in reflection of Rheingold’s hypothesis as

well, because while technology gives man the potential to destroy society it also gives

him the opportunity to better society. Technology can be useful and benefit society

but it is ultimately man’s choices that will decide the fate of his society, and in my

prediction ultimately destroy society, technology is just another possible tool for the

job.