Do social media technologies make us more social?

Far from forgetting about making friends in real life, online relationships can be hugely beneficial for us, writes Eoin Whelan

THERE is no doubt that social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife, and Twitter are a heavily used medium through which people interact with each other today.

These platforms enable us to keep up-to-date with the latest adventures of our friends, family, and even our favourite celebrities. But do the hours we spend sharing our lives through computer screens and smartphones actually isolate us from real and meaningful relationships? Or do these social networking sites really make us more social?

These are questions we’ve been pondering in recent years as we increasingly notice our university students interacting online with their Facebook friends while seemingly discounting the presence of the classmates physically beside them.

There are many who hold the opinion that the emergence of Facebook and its ilk have diluted the concept of friend-ship. They point to the fact it only takes one click of a mouse to add a “friend” and as a result, many social network profiles proudly display conn-ections to hundreds of friends.

Yet it’s impossible for one person to maintain deep relationships with more than a few dozen others, despite what the politician who attends every constituency funeral may wish us to believe. In fact, research suggests the average person can only maintain about 20 significant relationships at any given time.

So the fact the average social network profile displays far more than 20 friends is obviously evidence of the diminishing quality of friendship. Not necessarily so. We need to remember that friendship is a broad spectrum.

At one end we have our close personal friends whom we know intimately and vice versa. At the other end are our acquaintances with whom we are still friendly, even though we only occasionally meet them — old school and college friends, past work colleagues, or people we meet at conferences, weddings, or other social gatherings.

These loose friends are hugely beneficial because they move in different circles and can be drawn upon to provide us with new information our close friends do not possess — a new job lead, a referral to a good service provider, or even an introduction to a future love interest.

Indeed, research we and our colleagues have conducted with hi-tech companies have found that these acquaintances are a far better source of new ideas and opportunities for innovation than closeknit work colleagues.

What social networking services have changed is not the number of close friends we each possess — this has remained a constant throughout the decades — but the way we maintain a connection with our many acquaintances, which otherwise may have been lost to us in the pre-Facebook era.

A few years ago, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, published an influential book titled Bowling Alone.

Putnam eloquently argues that a growing number of Americans were turning their back on civic life — voluntary associations, book reading groups, church clubs, PTA meetings — the get-togethers that are essential for building a community spirit.

To illustrate this decline in social interaction, he reports that the number of Americans who bowled (the 10-pin variety) had gone up 10%, while league bowling had decreased by 40%. In other words, most Americans were bowling alone. Many see the withering of these local communities and the rise of the internet as too much of a coincidence.

However, a major study published this year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project provides evidence refuting fears that new technology pulls people away from social engagement. People who use Facebook several times a day are just as likely as anyone else to visit a neighbour in person and are even more likely to belong to a youth group or charitable organisation.

The same study finds that Facebook users get significantly more support from others — such as having someone to help if they are sick in bed — when compared with non-users.

In contrast to the negative perception of digital technology, there are many social comm-entators and technologists who argue that social networking services are such powerful drivers of social engagement that they could even liberate the world from authoritarian regimes. Unfortunately, such claims suggest a utopia that is clearly non-existent.

Take, for example, the recent uprisings throughout the Middle East, and particularly in Iran. Sky News and CNN were quick off the mark showing pictures of smartphone-carrying youths pouring into the streets of Tehran to protest about what they believed was a rigged election.

It was even dubbed “the first Twitter revolution” as we were shown various tweets that the protestors were using to co-ordinate their social activism. The reality is that Twitter played only a minor role in shaping this revolution.

Iran’s Green movement lost much of its momentum in the months following the election, and it became clear that a Twitter-inspired revolution was little more than a pipedream. Indeed, uprisings happened in the past without the aid of social media — a statement which the history of our own nation can certainly support.

Nor was it the case that protesters were using these social technologies to strategically outwit sclerotic governments. In fact, the opposite is true. The people who got to these positions of power did so by being clever and seizing opportunities when they arise.

They too can be quite swift in figuring out how to exploit social network technologies for their benefit. This is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the Iranian uprising. The Iranian police set about tracking down the ringleaders of the protest campaign. They, along with all the people they were connected to, were all “encouraged” not to partake in any more activities hostile to the incumbent rulers. How could the authorities identify and dismantle the network of protesters so efficiently?

No need to initiate the traditional methods of infiltrating the opposition party, or developing a system of informers. All the information about who was connected to whom was publicly available on Facebook and Twitter, along with photos and other personal details useful to any regime wishing to discourage collective social action.

As a management scientist, my own research has examined the impact of social media within organisations, and the work myself and my colleagues have done in this area suggests that our digital friends and our face-to-face friends co-exist.

In fact, in the workplace, our online social relationships are complementary, not substitutes, to our face-to-face relationships. Each type of relationship offers different value propositions. Our personal network of strong ties (eg, close colleagues and friends) gives us better career advice, trusted critical work project information, institutional knowledge, and a better understanding of corporate culture than our digital “weak” ties (eg, general acquaintances) can provide.

Meanwhile, we found digital weak ties with our colleagues can provide us with a great diversity of information at a very low cost. The result is an increase in personal innovative-ness in terms of acquiring new ideas for work-related projects.

Therefore, it’s beneficial for employees to maintain and cultivate a portfolio of both face-to-face and digital relationships. Indeed, there is evidence that social media can be an excellent tool in developing these close personal relationships with like-minded others.

People reveal much about themselves in their social media profiles and this provides an ideal opportunity for the ambitious employee to identify who they want to enlist, but also, how they can go about establishing a meaningful connection with them (eg, common associations such as colleges, professional groups, home location, family, sports/hobbies, etc).

Likewise, the recent phenomenon of tweet-ups is also an excellent example of how online and offline networks can complement each other. These are physical face-to-face get-togethers that occur before events, in specific locations, that enable those who interact virtually to actually meet each other for deeper conversations.

So do social media technologies make us more or less social? The reality is that peoples’ behaviour online is not all that different to their real world actions. The emergence of Facebook and Twitter has certainly not caused us, or is ever likely to cause us, to become social isolates who only interact with each other in 140 characters or less. What social networking sites provide us with is a way to maintain links with our peripheral friends and the people who move in different circles to ourselves.

This can be extremely useful when we need to reactivate those old dormant ties but as the Middle East Twitter revolution has shown us, we also need to be wary of who is paying attention to our network of contacts.

*Eoin Whelan is a lecturer at the JE Cairnes School of Business & Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway.