How Facebook Ruins Friendship

Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.But I don't give a hoot that you are "having a busy Monday," your child "took 30 minutes to brush his teeth," your dog "just ate an ant trap" oryou want to "save the piglets." And I really, really don't care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)Here's where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to "instant messaging" or "texting." We "friended" each other on Facebook, and began communicating by "tweeting" our thoughts—in 140 characters or less—via Twitter.All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And insome ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back intouch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline.Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress—and send well wishes and support—thanks to a Web page his mom created for him.But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.Like many people, I'm experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I'm tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts. ("Anyone know a good restaurant in Berlin?")One of the big problems is how we converse. Typing still leaves something to be desired as a communication tool; it lacks the nuances that can be expressed by body language and voice inflection. "Online, people can't see the yawn," says Patricia Wallace, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth and author of "The Psychology of the Internet."But let's face it, the problem is much greater than which tools we use to communicate. It's what we are actually saying that's really mucking up our relationships. "Oh my God, a college friend just updated her Facebook status to say that her 'teeth are itching for a flossing!'" shrieked a friend of mine recently. "That's gross. I don't want to hear about what's going on inside her mouth."That prompted me to check my own Facebook page, only to find that three of my pals—none of whom know each other—had the exact same status update: "Zzzzzzz." They promptly put me to "zzzzzzz."This brings us to our first dilemma: Amidst all this heightened chatter,we're not saying much that's interesting, folks. Rather, we're breaking

a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends."It's called narcissism," says Matt Brown, a 36-year-old business-development manager for a chain of hair salons and spas in Seattle. He'sparticularly annoyed by a friend who works at an auto dealership who tweets every time he sells a car, a married couple who bicker on Facebook's public walls and another couple so "mooshy-gooshy" they sit in the same room of their house posting love messages to each other for all to see. "Why is your life so frickin' important and entertaining that we need to know?" Mr. Brown says.'I Just Ate a Frito Pie'Gwen Jewett, for her part, is sick of meal status updates. "A few of my friends like to post several times a day about what they are eating: 'I just ate a Frito pie.' 'I am enjoying a double hot-fudge sundae at home tonight.' 'Just ate a whole pizza with sausage, peppers and double cheese,'" says the 49-year-old career coach in suburban Dallas. "My question is this: If we didn't call each other on the phone every time we ate before, why do we need the alerts now?"For others, boredom isn't the biggest challenge of managing Internet relationships. Consider, for example, how people you know often seem different online—not just gussied up or more polished, but bolder, too, displaying sides of their personalities you have never seen before.Alex Gilbert, 27, who works for a nonprofit in Houston that teaches creative writing to kids, is still puzzling over an old friend—"a particularly masculine-type dude"—who plays in a heavy-metal band and heads a motorcycle club yet posts videos on Facebook of "uber cute" kittens. "It's not fodder for your real-life conversation," Mr. Gilbert says. "We're not going to get together and talk about how cute kittens are."James Hills discovered that a colleague is gay via Facebook, but he saysthat didn't bother him. It was after his friend joined groups that caterto hairy men, such as "Furball NYC," that he was left feeling awkward. "This is something I just didn't need to know," says Mr. Hills, who is 32 and president of a marketing firm in Elgin, Ill. "I'd feel the same way if it was a straight friend joining a leather-and-lace group."And then there's jealousy. In all that information you're posting about your life—your vacation, your kids, your promotions at work, even that margarita you just drank—someone is bound to find something to envy. When it comes to relationships, such online revelations can make breaking up even harder to do."Facebook prolongs the period it takes to get over someone, because you have an open window into their life, whether you want to or not," says Yianni Garcia of New York, a consultant who helps companies use social media. "You see their updates, their pictures and their relationship status."Mr. Garcia, 24, felt the sting of Facebook jealousy personally last spring, after he split up with his boyfriend. For a few weeks, he continued to visit his ex's Facebook page, scrutinizing his new friends.

Then one day he discovered that his former boyfriend had blocked him from accessing his profile.Why? "He said he'd only 'unfriended' me to protect himself, because if someone flirted with me he would feel jealous," Mr. Garcia says.Facebook can also be a mecca for passive-aggressive behavior. "Suddenly,things you wouldn't say out loud in conversation are OK to say because you're sitting behind a computer screen," says Kimberly Kaye, 26, an arts writer in New York. She was surprised when friends who had politelydiscussed health-care reform over dinner later grew much more antagonistic when they continued the argument online.Just ask Heather White. She says her college roommate at the University of Georgia started an argument over text about who should clean their apartment. Ms. White, 22, who was home visiting her parents at the time,asked her friend to call her so they could discuss the issue. Her friendnever did.A few days later, Ms. White, who graduated in May, updated her Facebook status, commenting that her favorite country duo, Brooks & Dunn, just broke up. Almost immediately, her roommate responded, writing publicly on her wall: "Just like us." The two women have barely spoken since then.Band-Aid TacticsSo what's the solution, short of "unfriending" or "unfollowing" everyonewho annoys you? You can use the "hide" button on Facebook to stop getting your friends' status updates—they'll never know—or use TwitterSnooze, a Web site that allows you to temporarily suspend tweets from someone you follow. (Warning: They'll get a notice from Twitter when you begin reading their tweets again.)But these are really just Band-Aid tactics. To improve our interactions,we need to change our conduct, not just cover it up. First, watch your own behavior, asking yourself before you post anything: "Is this something I'd want someone to tell me?" "Run it by that focus group of one," says Johns Hopkins's Dr. Wallace.And positively reward others, responding only when they write something interesting, ignoring them when they are boring or obnoxious. (Commenting negatively will only start a very public war.)If all that fails, you can always start a new group: "Get Facebook to Create an Eye-Roll Button Now!"

The Limits of Friendship

Robin Dunbar came up with his eponymous number almost by accident. The University of Oxford anthropologist and psychologist (then at UniversityCollege London) was trying to solve the problem of why primates devote so much time and effort to grooming. In the process of figuring out the solution, he chanced upon a potentially far more intriguing application for his research. At the time, in the nineteen-eighties, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social BrainHypothesis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse. It held that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal’s neocortex, the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that animal.Looking at his grooming data, Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. “Wealso had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see whatsize group that relationship might predict for humans,” he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number. Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels. For the last twenty-two years, Dunbar has been “unpacking and exploring” what that number actually means—and whether our ever-expanding social networks have done anything to change it.

The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party. (In reality, it’s a range: ahundred at the low end and two hundred for the more social of us.) From there, through qualitative interviews coupled with analysis of experimental and survey data, Dunbar discovered that the number grows and decreases according to a precise formula, roughly a “rule of three.”The next step down, fifty, is the number of people we call close friends—perhaps the people you’d invite to a group dinner. You see them often, but not so much that you consider them to be true intimates. Then

there’s the circle of fifteen: the friends that you can turn to for sympathy when you need it, the ones you can confide in about most things. The most intimate Dunbar number, five, is your close support group. These are your best friends (and often family members). On the flipside, groups can extend to five hundred, the acquaintance level, andto fifteen hundred, the absolute limit—the people for whom you can put aname to a face. While the group sizes are relatively stable, their composition can be fluid. Your five today may not be your five next week; people drift among layers and sometimes fall out of them altogether.When Dunbar consulted the anthropological and historical record, he found remarkable consistency in support of his structure. The average group size among modern hunter-gatherer societies (where there was accurate census data) was 148.4 individuals. Company size in professional armies, Dunbar found, was also remarkably close to a hundred and fifty, from the Roman Empire to sixteenth-century Spain to the twentieth-century Soviet Union. Companies, in turn, tended to be broken down into smaller units of around fifty then further divided intosections of between ten and fifteen. At the opposite end, the companies formed battalions that ranged from five hundred and fifty to eight hundred, and even larger regiments.Dunbar then decided to go beyond the existing evidence and into experimental methods. In one early study, the first empirical demonstration of the Dunbar number in action, he and the Durham University anthropologist Russell Hill examined the destinations of Christmas cards sent from households all over the U.K.—a socially pervasive practice, Dunbar explained to me, carried out by most typical households. Dunbar and Hill had each household list its Christmas card recipients and rate them on several scales. “When you looked at the pattern, there was a sense that there were distinct subgroups in there,”Dunbar said. If you considered the number of people in each sending household and each recipient household, each individual’s network was composed of about a hundred and fifty people. And within that network, people fell into circles of relative closeness—family, friends, neighbors, and work colleagues. Those circles conformed to Dunbar’s breakdown.As constant use of social media has become the new normal, however, people have started challenging the continued relevance of Dunbar’s number: Isn’t it easier to have more friends when we have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to help us to cultivate and maintain them? Some, like the University of California, Berkeley, professor Morten Hansen, have pointed out that social media has facilitated more effective collaborations. Our real-world friends tend to know the same people thatwe do, but, in the online world, we can expand our networks strategically, leading to better business outcomes. Yet, when researchers tried to determine whether virtual networks increase our strong ties as well as our weak ones (the ones that Hansen had focussed

on), they found that, for now, the essential Dunbar number, a hundred and fifty, has remained constant. When Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington looked at whether Twitter had changed the number of relationships that users could maintain over a six-month period, they found that, despite the relative ease of Twitter connections as opposed to face-to-face one, the individuals that they followed could only manage between one and two hundred stable connections. When the Michigan State University researcher Nicole Ellison surveyed a random sample of undergraduates about their Facebook use, she found, while that their median number of Facebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average of seventy-five as actual friends.

There’s no question, Dunbar agrees, that networks like Facebook are changing the nature of human interaction. “What Facebook does and why it’s been so successful in so many ways is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear,” he said. But one of the things that keeps face-to-face friendships strong is the nature of shared experience: you laugh together; you dance together; you gape at the hot-dog eaters on Coney Island together. We do have a social-media equivalent—sharing, liking, knowing that all of your friends have looked at the same cat video on YouTube as you did—but it lacks the synchronicity of shared experience. It’s like a comedy that you watch byyourself: you won’t laugh as loudly or as often, even if you’re fully aware that all your friends think it’s hysterical. We’ve seen the same movie, but we can’t bond over it in the same way.With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests offar more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up anactual friendship requires resources. “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,” Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If yougarner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.” If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups. Traditionally, it’s asixty-forty split of attention: we spend sixty per cent of our time withour core groups of fifty, fifteen, and five, and forty with the larger spheres. Social networks may be growing our base, and, in the process, reversing that balance.On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace. This wouldn’t surprise Dunbar, who discovered his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs among primates through grooming. Over the

past few years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of touch in sparking the sort of neurological and physiological responses that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship. “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said. With a light brush on the shoulder, a pat, or a squeeze of the arm or hand, we can communicate a deeper bond than through speaking alone. “Words are easy. But the way someone touches you, even casually, tells you more about what they’re thinking of you.”Dunbar already knew that in monkeys grooming activated the endorphin system. Was the same true in humans? In a series of studies, Dunbar and his colleagues demonstrated that very light touch triggers a cascade of endorphins that, in turn, are important for creating personal relationships. Because measuring endorphin release directly is invasive—you either need to perform a spinal tap or a PET scan, and the latter, though considered safe, involves injecting a person with a radioactive tracer—they first looked at endorphin release indirectly. In one study, they examined pain thresholds: how long a person could keep her hand in a bucket of ice water (in a lab), or how long she could maintain a sitting position with no chair present (back against the wall, legs bentat a ninety degree angle) in the field. When your body is flooded with endorphins, you’re able to withstand pain for longer than you could before, so pain tolerance is often used as a proxy for endorphin levels.The longer you can stand the pain, the more endorphins have been released into your system.They found that a shared experience of laughter—a synchronous, face-to-face experience—prior to immersion, be it in the lab (watching a neutral or funny movie with others) or in a natural setting (theatre performances at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival) enabled people to hold their hands in ice or maintain the chair position significantly longer than they’d previously been able to.Next, in an ongoing study, Dunbar and his colleagues looked at how endorphins were activated in the brain directly, through PET scans, a procedure that lets you look at how different neural receptors uptake endorphins. The researchers saw the same thing that happened with monkeys, and that had earlier been demonstrated with humans that were viewing positive emotional stimuli: when subjects in the scanner were lightly touched, their bodies released endorphins. “We were nervous we wouldn’t find anything because the touch was so light,” Dunbar said. “Astonishingly, we saw a phenomenal response.” In fact, this makes a great deal of sense and answers a lot of long-standing questions about our sensory receptors, he explained. Our skin has a set of neurons, common to all mammals, that respond to light stroking, but not to any other kind of touch. Unlike other touch receptors, which operate on a loop—you touch a hot stove, the nerves fire a signal to the brain, the brain registers pain and fires a signal back for you to withdraw your hand—these receptors are one-way. They talk to the brain, but the brain doesn’t communicate back. “We think that’s what they exist for, to trigger endorphin responses as a consequence of grooming,” Dunbar said.

Until social media can replicate that touch, it can’t fully replicate social bonding.But, the truth is, no one really knows how relevant the Dunbar number will remain in a world increasingly dominated by virtual interactions. The brain is incredibly plastic, and, from past research on social interaction, we know that early childhood experience is crucial in developing those parts of the brain that are largely dedicated to socialinteraction, empathy, and other interpersonal concerns. Deprive a child of interaction and touch early on, and those areas won’t develop fully. Envelop her in a huge family or friend group, with plenty of holding andshared experience, and those areas grow bigger. So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.” Dunbar himself doesn’t have a firm opinion one way or the other about whether virtual social networks will prove wonderful for friendships or ultimately diminish the number of satisfying interactions one has. “I don’t think we have enough evidence to argue either way,” he said.One concern, though, is that some social skills may not develop as effectively when so many interactions exist online. We learn how we are and aren’t supposed to act by observing others and then having opportunities to act out our observations ourselves. We aren’t born with full social awareness, and Dunbar fears that too much virtual interaction may subvert that education. “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” he said. “On the internet, youcan pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makesus have to learn.” If you spend most of your time online, you may not get enough in-person group experience to learn how to properly interact on a large scale—a fear that, some early evidence suggests, may be materializing. “It’s quite conceivable that we might end up less social in the future, which would be a disaster because we need to be more social—our world has become so large” Dunbar said. The more our virtual friends replace our face-to-face ones, in fact, the more our Dunbar number may shrink.

Lets Really Be Friends

In 1997, a writer and web developer named Paul Ford walked into a sushi restaurant in midtown Manhattan to meet a group of strangers. These werebloggers—a term not yet widely in use—who, along with Ford, formed a tight-knit vanguard of individuals publishing personal writing online. Ford had been building experimental personal websites since 1993, and had made a name for himself online with his lyrical missives on programming esoterica and New York dating mishaps. He’d never met the other bloggers IRL (In Real Life, a phrase that likely had even less currency then than blogger). He was excited to finally get the chance todo so.When Ford arrived at the restaurant, however, he froze with anxiety. “I was 22 and the Internet was new and everyone was sitting around a table chatting and laughing,” Ford told me. “Who went to parties where no one knew each other?” He stood just inside the door and surreptitiously watched the group clustered around a table. “I left after ten minutes.”This incident remains as strikingly plausible today as it did two decades ago. Relationships that travel from the Internet to the nondigital world, or navigate a space somewhere in between, have retained that same patina of weirdness. The stigma associated with online friendship, that persistent doubt that “real” intimacy can only be created via physical encounter, has not faded. Even in this, the Age of Social Media, when virtual interaction populates almost every facet of daily existence, online friendships are still viewed with suspicion. But they shouldn’t be. The time has come to obliterate the false distinctions between digital ties and the ones that bind us in the physical world. Our lives on Twitter and Tumblr are today a real part ofour real lives. Everyone is an Internet friend.John Suler, in his 2000 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, wrote that people “tend to separate their online lives from their offline lives.” But thisis far less true today. With the launch of Friendster (2002); MySpace (2003); and, in 2004, the global behemoth Facebook, distinctions betweenfriendship online and off grew more ambiguous. People had to decide which of their friends and acquaintances—many of whom they had not been

motivated to see in years—they should befriend digitally. Facebook in particular, with its early reliance on college e-mail accounts for membership, has tied digital identity more firmly to the IRL iteration.The perception that online relationships are somehow less real than their physical counterparts exemplifies what Nathan Jurgenson, a New York-based sociologist and researcher for the messaging platform Snapchat, calls “digital dualism.” Contemporary identities and relationships are no more or less authentic in either space. “We’re coming to terms with there being just one reality and digital is part ofit, not any less real or true,” Jurgenson said. “What you do online and what you do face-to-face are completely interwoven.”

 The first mainstream internet communities—and thus some of the earliest virtual friendships—didn’t emerge until the late ’80s, when commercial traffic was allowed online via private Internet service providers like The World, which launched in Massachusetts in 1989. Early online social groups were largely restricted to specific-interest cliques that hewed to the medium’s nerd origins. Usenet, an e-mail and file-sharing client created to sort news by subject, first launched in 1980; the WELL, a dial-up bulletin-board system co-founded in 1985 by hippie futurist and editor of the utopian Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand, became a popular gathering point for Grateful Dead fans. IRC, or Internet Relay Chats, were likewise segregated along topical channels, like #anime or #hardware or #geek. The platform peaked in the 1990s with Eris Free Network, and today is largely reserved for illicit hacker groups with a need for anonymity.In this early period, crossover from the digital world and into the realone remained rare, in part due to suspicion of the semi-anonymous natureof the Internet itself. “You don’t tend to find deep relationships online,” Douglas Rushkoff, the tech writer and thinker, told me. “And ifyou look for them you could easily get catfished,” Rushkoff said. (Catfish [noun]: “Someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.” See Urban Dictionary.) For those who have grown up on the Internet, the expectations of honesty in response to the existential chat query “A/S/L?” (Age/Sex/Location) mightbe low. But this may not remain the case.Online traffic in the United States increased by more than 1,000 percentbetween 1999 and 2003. A by-product of this growth was a narrowing of the digital divide. Enough people were online that your real friends might well know your online-only ones, who could then be mentally reclassified simply friends-of-friends. IRL meetings became less suspect. Web communities, meanwhile, began to leave the vertical depths of niche interest and join the mainstream. In 1999, a web designer namedMatthew Haughey launched MetaFilter, a general-interest online forum that is still active today. MetaFilter was designed to help users share

links of compelling posts (cat videos!) from across the wider Internet. It also became known for its then-unique penchant for physical meetups. “The meetups were half shy nerds and half relatively normal people,” said Rusty Foster, a developer who founded a contemporaneous (and now largely defunct) community called Kuro5hin, which skewed toward a nerdier audience. Foster has since referred to his site as a “gated dysfunctional community.”The first MetaFilter meetup happened in 2001, after an earthquake in Seattle. Discussion of the natural phenomenon as it happened caused the members to notice that they lived in close proximity to each other. Onceit was safe to go out, they decided to gather at a bar. It went so well that Haughey soon devoted a section of his site to planning such events.Haughey attended his first meetup at a Belgian frites spot in San Francisco in 2002. “I was incredibly nervous, because I didn’t know anyone,” he said. But his fears proved misplaced. “It was really a greatexperience. One of the guys had the greatest username: Fishfucker. Fishfucker turned out to be a really nice dude.” Meetups eventually became big business. In 2002, a start-up called Meetup was launched thatmanaged online social circles with an IRL component, charging group organizers for added features. The site now boasts over 180,000 Meetups with focuses ranging from New Age philosophy to “geek physique.” (The Internet’s ability to convene niche cultures has never flagged.)The anxiety still lingering around Internet friendship is a legacy of a particular antiquated conception of online life—a sense that “the Net,” like jetpacks and the Segway, was going to be a lot cooler than it has proven to be. The 1980s-era techno-utopian vision of “cyberspace” as a separate, and perhaps even pure, Matrix-style realm of glowing tubes andbinary code was a false one. “At no point was there ever a cyberspace,” Jurgenson said. “It was always deeply about this one reality.” The Internet is shopping for knitted caps and sharing coupons for bad meals and enduring comments from sexist strangers. It has always included an element of real life difficulty, and the primordial web denizens knew it. Now, the rest of us do, too. We once fetishized cyberspace as sexy and revolutionary. Today it’s just normal. Online friendships make it clear—and forgive the debt to Facebook—that the way we friend now has changed. Intimacy now develops in both digitaland physical realms, often crossing freely between the two. If we acceptthe equal value of virtual friendships to their IRL analogues (perhaps even doing away with the pejorative acronym), we open ourselves up to a range of new possibilities for connection.“The Internet represents a broadening of the spectrum of relationships we can have,” Jenna Wortham, a New York Times Magazine writer known for theprolificacy of her online social life, told me. “I have lots of online-,Gchat-only friendships and I love them. I’m very comfortable with the fact that I don’t know [these people] in real life and I don’t have any plans to.” The merit of these friendships lies in their mutability—in

your pocket, on your screen, in your living room. Discarding the distinction between real and virtual friendship does not doom us to a society in which tweets, chat, and e-mail are our only points of contact. It just means that the stranger we meet every day on the other side of our screens will no longer be a stranger, but someone that we know and trust.

New Friendship and Narcissism

For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid forimmortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects — professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits, as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as “painted anthropology,” with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about theculture in which they were created.Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist bothas he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits canat once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the lifeportrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil

on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention — and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come togrips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, withits constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises — a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

Making ConnectionsThe earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand started in 1985,made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (Now owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was “the primordial ooze where theonline community movement was born.”) Other websites for community and connection emerged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by high school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site founded in 1997; and Epinions, foundedin 1999 to allow users to give their opinions about various consumer products.A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with thelaunch of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online communities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Friendster uses a model of social networking known as the “Circle of Friends” (developed by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends and acquaintances — that is, people they already know and like — to join their network.Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-2003. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003,quickly to surpass it. Originally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as well as videos and photos. It

is now the behemoth of online social networking, with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site isFacebook, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebook — which takes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming freshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new people — soon extended membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most popular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the siteas their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, gettingupdates on their friends’ activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about.There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Yahoo 360º. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer “an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online.” (It is noteworthy that Microsoft refers to socialnetworkers as “consumers” rather than merely “users” or, say, “people.”)Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering forums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids pretend to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earning virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networkingsites connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people to share their personal goals. Click on “watch less TV,” one of the goals listed on the site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network who want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network but don’t know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users locate theproper online social networking community for their particular (or peculiar) interests.Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their lives’ work to get your attention — namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incidents of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are legion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and brand icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called “Miss Irresistible.” As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she

urged to “spice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card.” The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as “I wanna get fresh with you” or “Pucker up baby — I’m getting fresh.” A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are “going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.”As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidates have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has official pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpace (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twenty-three different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer social networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of the GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popular sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the process of setting up one’s online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, address, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and you’re up and running and ready to create youronline persona. MySpace includes a section, “About Me,” where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status.There is also a “Who I’d Like to Meet” section, which on most MySpace profiles is filled with images of celebrities. Users can also list theirfavorite music, movies, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can also blog on their pages. A user “friends” people — that is, invites them by e-mail to appear on the user’s “FriendSpace,” where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below the Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allowsusers to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; indeed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visual and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and clip-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an overdecorated high school yearbook.By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides general personal information, Facebook users have a “Wall” wherepeople can leave them brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Facebook e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general, unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Facebook friends tend to be part of one’s offline social circle. (This might change, however,

now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send “pokes” to friends; these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Facebook group with over 200,000 members is called “Enough with the Poking, Let’s Just Have Sex.”

Degrees of SeparationIt is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word networking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites “connect” users with a network — literally, a computer network. But the verb to network has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, especially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first came into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Back then, “network” usually referred to television. But social scientists were already using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculate just how closely we are connected.In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a study about social connection that he called the “small world experiment.” “Given any two people in the world, personX and person Z,” he asked, “how many intermediate acquaintance links areneeded before X and Z are connected?” Milgram’s research, which involvedsending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a particular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that we are all connected by “six degrees of separation” (a phrase later popularized by playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, has embarked on a new small world project to test Milgram’s theory. Similar in spirit to Milgram’s work, it relies on e-mail to determine whether “any two peoplein the world can be connected via ‘six degrees of separation.’” Unlike Milgram’s experiment, which was restricted to the United States, Watts’sproject is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science, “Targetsincluded a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a veterinarian in the Norwegian army.” Their early results suggest that Milgram might have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on average. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallness of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-László Barabási enthuses, “The world isshrinking because social links that would have died out a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically,

bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six,” Barabási writes. “We could be much closer these days to three.”What kind of “links” are these? In a 1973 essay, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain kinds of information than networksof close friends and family. Watts found a similar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely professional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individuals, for example.Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties — no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgram’s small world experiment — our supposed closeness to each other — was the swiftness and credulity of the public in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when she delved into Milgram’s research (much of which was methodologically flawed and never adequatelyreplicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermine the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed those barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing theirown digital small world experiment, “more than half of all participants resided in North America and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian.”Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularityand proliferation of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and friendships are we creating?

Won’t You Be My Digital Neighbor?According to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vastteenage playgrounds — or wastelands, depending on one’s perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable generational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anecdotally correct; I can’t count how many times I have mentioned social networking websites to someone over the age of forty and receivedthe reply, “Oh yes, I’ve heard about that MyFace! All the kids are doing

that these days. Very interesting!”Numerous articles have chronicled adults’ attempts to navigate the worldof social networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter when she joined Facebook: “everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks,” her daughter instant-messaged her. “unfriend paige right now. im serious....i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually.” In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than halfof the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the first generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. What’s more, the proliferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, suggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual space for the foreseeable future.What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography. As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites of a decade ago used metaphors of placeto organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boasted thirty virtual “neighborhoods” in which “homesteaders” or “GeoCitizens” could gather — “Heartland” for family and parenting tips, “SouthBeach” for socializing,“Vienna” for classical music aficionados, “Broadway” for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, today’s social networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person, with individual profiles thatlist hobbies and interests. As a result, one’s entrée into this world generally isn’t through a virtual neighborhood or community but through the revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, whereone usually has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking sites are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of community — geographic location, family, role,or occupation — have little effect on relationships.Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a “friend”who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you haveif someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone — do you defriend the ex? If someone “friends” you and you don’t accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertaining; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of

social space. As Danah Boyd, a graduate student studying social networksat the University of California, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled, social networking promotes “informal learning.... It’s where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact with others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy.” This is more a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isn’t asked is how the technology itself — the way it encourages us to present ourselves and interact — limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities expect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transient communities that form in publicspaces obey these rules, for the most part; for example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New technologies are challenging such norms — cell phones ring during church sermons; blaringtelevisions in doctors’ waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietly — and new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era; they serve a protective function. I know a young woman — attractive, intelligent, and well-spoken — who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, they both updated their relationship status to “Engaged” on their profiles and friends posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was over, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he changed his status on his profile from “Engaged” to “Single.” Facebook immediately sent out a feed to every oneof their mutual “friends” announcing the news, “Mr. X and Ms. Y are no longer in a relationship,” complete with an icon of a broken heart. WhenI asked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was something disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchange initiated by her, it was devoid of context — save for a helpful notation of the time and thattacky little heart.

Indecent ExposureEnthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; they see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, rendering quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers “layouts,

graphics, background, and more!” to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obesewoman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it’s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, “Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in thisnew domain. I imagine Augustus’ MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.” And he wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one’s own and others’ lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might havelearned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.”It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, manyof us give up one of the Internet’s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to “stake their claims as unique individuals,” users enumerate personal information: “Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.” Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites “vast celebrations of solipsism.”Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. “One cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and natureof the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be,” Carnegie Mellon researchers AlessandroAcquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at

their university, Acquisti and Gross “detected little or no relation between participants’ reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood” of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacy — the ones who worried about “the scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived” — about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC’s Dateline featured a policeofficer posing as a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey onchildren is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that “40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile ofa potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook.” Yet college students’ reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought itwas a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and “64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.”This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorianpatriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer onhis MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when one’s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote

gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “protean selves.” Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces “mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor.” (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that “23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.”) Also, Lifton argues, “the emotionsof the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target.” So, too, with protean communities: “Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating,” Lifton writes, “removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence.” This is precisely the appeal of online socialnetworking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.

The New Taxonomy of FriendshipThere is a Spanish proverb that warns, “Life without a friend is death without a witness.” In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: “Life without hundreds of online ‘friends’ is virtual death.” On these sites, friendship is the stated raison d’être. “A place for friends,” is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook is a “social utility that connects people with friends.” Orkut describes itself as “an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.” Friendster’s name speaks for itself.But “friendship” in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.The hypertext link called “friendship” on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: “You have 1 friends,” along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, “I always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number.” An

associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpaceis, “Thanks for the add!” — an acknowledgment by one user that another has added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your page from an attractive person posing as your“friend.” As the founder of one such service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to “turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets.”The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is “managing.” The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that “teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.” There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: “Change My Top Friends,” “View All of My Friends” and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, “Edit Friends.” With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize ourown preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends — often without having ever met them in person.

Status-SeekersOf course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking “friends” and friends theysee in the flesh. The use of the word “friend” on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement, and surely no one with hundreds ofMySpace or Facebook “friends” is so confused as to believe those are allreal friendships. The impulse to collect as many “friends” as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for status. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone era would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, social networking websites allow us tocreate status — not merely to commemorate the achievement of it. There isa reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities don’t need legions of MySpace friendsto prove their importance. It’s the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.

But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, which, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling one’s status, maintaining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year-old wrote in a New York Times essay, “I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship.... Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign.”The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies “persuasion strategies” used by social networking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, “The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status — spoils that humans will work hard for — to activities that enhance the site.” As Fogg told the magazine, “You offersomeone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status.” Network theorist Albert-László Barabási notes that online connection follows the rule of “preferential attachment” — that is, “when choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page.” As aresult, “while our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns.” Our lemming-like pursuit of online status via the collection of hundreds of “friends” clearly follows this rule.What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for communityand friendship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional communities, to “lifestyle enclaves” which were defined largely by “leisure and consumption.” Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into “personality enclaves” or “identity enclaves” — discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups oflike-minded, though ever-shifting, friends.

Beyond NetworkingThis past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural Institute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. “I noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking sites,” Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sites been useful to Nichols students? “It has relieved some of the stress of transitions for them,” he said. “When abrupt departures occur — their family moves or they have to leave friends behind — they can cope by keeping in touch more easily.”So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth

century, Emerson observed that “friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.” Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. “It’s away of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,” as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker.And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you haven’t heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch with — it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people.But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exposé, Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have greatly facilitated friendship. He writes, “Proust once said he didn’t much care for the analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, because you could shut it — and be shut of it — when you wished, which one can’t always dowith a friend.” With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social networking sites (which Epstein says “speak to the vast loneliness in the world”) have a different effect: they discourage “being shut of” people. On the contrary, they encourage users to check in frequently, “poke” friends, and post comments on others’ pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. “There is a sense of, ‘if I’m not online or constantly texting or posting, then I’m missing something,’” he said of his students. “This is where I find the generational impact the greatest — not the use of the technology, but the overuse of the technology.” It is unclear how the regular use of these sites will affect behavior over the long run — especially the behavior of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no research has explored how virtual socializing affects children’s development. What does a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adolescent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenager who spends her nightgossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that “people want to live their lives online,” as the founder of one social networking site recently told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger ages, these questions are worth exploring.The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users “feel less socially involved with the community around them.” He also found that “as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level ofsocial involvement decreases.” Another recent study conducted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University of the Pacific found that “those who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and

self-esteem.”The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social networkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs when we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least worth asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact — and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates — Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of thiscentury reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk — the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

The End of Solitude

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As thetwo technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from

our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time,homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper towrite. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man maybe a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, indesert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and religious institutions are no exception. You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divine word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest. Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. (Egregious, for no man is a prophet in his own land. Tiresias was reviled before he was vindicated, Teresa interrogated before she was canonized.) Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth.Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinson's interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by focusing the soul inward, leaving it to encounter God, like a prophet of old, in "profoundisolation." To her enumeration of Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early-modern selves we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to reading's essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of television and the Internet in our own. Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.

But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: Thepoet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability — if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others. For Emerson, "the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude;and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society." The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs:Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume's social sympathy gave way to Pater's thick wall of personality and Freud's narcissism — the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can't choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; D.H. Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs — Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts. The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only withoneself. (Just as there are few good friendships in modernism, so are there few good marriages.) Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast andterrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticityis to look upon these visions without flinching; Trilling's exemplar here is Kurtz. Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave

way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. "Reach out and touch someone." But throughthe 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with yourfriends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alonein front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lostin space.Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people tocommunicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, issimply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it isimpossible to be alone.As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance mysense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, theyhave no time at all for solitude.But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for

people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desirefor solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about "the modern fear of being cut off from thesocial group even for a moment." Now we have equipped ourselves with themeans to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not meanthat we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn't even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The OxfordEnglish Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is nota necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negativeexperience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn howto make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn't have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absenceof company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; theshepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially

among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredomis the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Humeand the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and thisshould come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneselfor one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that itcan be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense oftheir own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.

If they didn't, they would understand that solitude enables us to securethe integrity of the self as well as to explore it. Few have shown this more beautifully than Woolf. In the middle of Mrs. Dalloway, between hernavigation of the streets and her orchestration of the party, between the urban jostle and the social bustle, Clarissa goes up, "like a nun withdrawing," to her attic room. Like a nun: She returns to a state thatshe herself thinks of as a kind of virginity. This does not mean she's aprude. Virginity is classically the outward sign of spiritual inviolability, of a self untouched by the world, a soul that has preserved its integrity by refusing to descend into the chaos and self-division of sexual and social relations. It is the mark of the saint andthe monk, of Hippolytus and Antigone and Joan of Arc. Solitude is both the social image of that state and the means by which we can approximateit. And the supreme image in Mrs. Dalloway of the dignity of solitude itself is the old woman whom Clarissa catches sight of through her window. "Here was one room," she thinks, "there another." We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. Solitude, Emerson said, "is to genius the stern friend." "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defendedfrom traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth. "God is alone," Thoreau said, "but the Devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion." The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal." We are back to the seer, seeking signposts for the future in splendid isolation.Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the driftof the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be

unpopular.The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Thoreau knew that the "doubleness" that solitude cultivates, the abilityto stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicitin avoiding their company. But then, he didn't worry overmuch about being genial. He didn't even like having to talk to people three times aday, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship maybe slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure ofhimself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.

The Flight from Conversation

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize ourlives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we

value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the samething: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. Andthen they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of oneanother if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we cancontrol: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little —just right.Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move fromconversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring,we forget that there is a difference.We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to

understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves.So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.During the years I have spent researching people and their relationshipswith technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides so many automaticlisteners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of usare willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to anelder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to haveembraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of

human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and thatwe never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach fora device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasinglyfragile selves.We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The oppositeis true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first,deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, thedining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do thesame thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even tothe boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves toone another.I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walkedwith their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.