Friendster
I’ve been on holiday, working a scant 32 work hours a week and spending a great deal of time at places like St. Louis International Airport.
In the interim, I’ve also taken to and drifted away from and been pulled back into the wonderful if limited world of Friendster.
Somewhere deep inside this database-driven retread of SixDegrees.com is a very powerful tool for exploring the fertile roots we lay as typically nomadic citizens of the First World.
We move — our friendships stay put. Something like Friendster could help our friendships move along with us by tying them, somehow, to the Internet.
Mostly, I’ve connected with old friends despite the distances that separate us. I’m terribly happy about the security this gives me, the reassurance that “friendship never dies” despite the fact that once the Friendster-enabled “hardware handshake” is complete, I don’t really know that we will always see each other again or, even, exchange words. In the dark cave, our hands have clasped and released. And that’s really enough, isn’t it?
I’ve also had to ponder the meaning of “friendship.” Apparently, in America, the word “friend” — like so many other things — is one-size-fits-all and that size is Extra Large.
Of course, there’s nothing distinctly American about discrepancies between our varying definitions of what constitutes a relationship– its beginning, its end, its depth and its implications. For example, I consider one person in my Friendster “network” to be an intimate friend who, for a variety of reasons, must surely not think the same of me. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of common experiences between us — not all good, many wonderful — which upholds the designation of friendship.
I cannot say the same for all with whom I am currently aligned. Thus, despite the fact that Friendster was designed to make visible and, in turn, useful, the connections that exist between people on a schematic plane, I am unable to manifest the very gradations that render relationships meaningful in the real world.
One simple solution to this possibly important lack of information would be to introduce “distance.”
It might seem ironic that I would suggest putting some space between myself and my friends given what I’ve written above (being reunited with those who are now far-away) but the distance of which I speak now is neither physical nor insurmountable. Rather, it should suffice to demonstrate how it is that most of us likely envision our own universe — in my case, as a drifting nucleus — using the logic of a place rather than a logical expression (e.g., “I am a friend of Jane, Jane is a friend of Juan, ergo I am a friend of Juan.”)
Or am I the only person to ever think that there are such things as “close” friends? From whence this distinction of “close” and “not so close” if not some perceived continuum through which our relationships are ordered — perhaps, by values that are hardly universal, but ordered, nonetheless.
Expressed in this graphical fashion, we would be able to quickly deduce how our perceptions of our own intimate circle differ — often drastically — from the perceptions of those same people with whom we credit one’s intimacy.
The resulting landscape might be no different from the kind of mental image you get by inspecting the “testimonials” that Friendster prods one to produce, value and trade.
The advantage, I suppose, is that the brand of euology available on Friendster as a “testimonial” strikes me as needlessly performative — a social rite not unlike disbursing a limited number of “My Little Pony” stickers at a party. Surely, we should be able to preserve some element of privacy if scheme’s like Friendster are to truly live alongside reality — and not, temporarily, in its place.
There is nothing permanent. The same applies to emotions and to our own self-understanding. One of the best things about friendship, that enduring bond that has both changed and endured through centuries of radical cultural transformations, is the way in which it behaves with elasticity.
In this sense, friendship is a rubber band. It would be far better to represent some of the kinetics this type of ligature implies visually than to subsume all such bonds into a single category with vague, generic properties and implications.
Unless, of course, you concede that the original purpose of Friendster, as admitted by its designers, is simply to exploit such bonds for the sole purpose of dating and mating. In which case, all is fair — is it not?
postscript
The Visual Thesaurus is a strong example of an interactive tool that allows us to visualize a set of relationships.
A shitload of Friendster “news” can be read here which is where you will find a link to one man’s hand-drawn and then computer-aided representations of his own Friendster network.
completely unrelated
NASA has produced an excellent, breath-taking web site devoted to satellite imagery of the earth that is tied to specific natural disasters (from storms to malaria). While it only barely counts as a visual depiction of our relationships to one another, these images of the recent blackout in the northeast region of the United States say something I can’t.