SNSs and the Problem with Real Life Social Networking

Of all your friends on Facebook, how many have you met in real life? If you're like most people the answer is most if not all. SNSs work to catalogue existing relationships. They are tools to archive people you've already met in real life, and this archiving constitutes the only direct social networking service they provide. As the populations of SNSs are composed of people users have already met, and they only function to compile them together, they are 'past based'. You've already done the networking, in real life, but in the past.

Think of the last 3 friends you made – they were probably introduced to you by someone else, or for the more gregarious, approached directly by you or vice versa. Perhaps you met at a conference, café, ball game or a party. Regardless, the connections were made in real life, in the moment.

And what precipitates the connections? More often than not it is an introduction through a friend, work colleague or family member – people you trust and whose judgments you trust. The introducer acts as a 'social commonality' a social agent you have in common with someone else. The principle of homophily posits that people are more likely to bond with people similar to themselves, and similarities are identified in people between whom a relationship has yet to form through commonalities. This principle is more familiarly expressed through the adage "birds of a feather flock together."

Commonalities can come in myriad forms. You may be interested in the same things as someone else, work in the same company or in a related industry. All work to identify people similar to you. You would almost unavoidably strike up a conversation and feel a strong sense of affinity with someone you find out knows 4 of the same people you do, is your age, went to the same school, worked in the same industry and like you is an avid tennis player. Any one of these would suggest you are alike in some way, the combination enforces the suggestion, and in this hypothetical, would create an irrepressible urge to communicate or bond in some way.

There is one other commonality that occurs in real life social networking that is often unconsciously overlooked – physical proximity. This 'proximity commonality' has significance when we, perhaps irrationally, consider all the places one could be at a certain time and place. Something, whether it be habituated, similar circumstance (or just dumb luck – a variable I think humans naturally find difficult to treat dispassionately and non-fatalistically) 'led you together', and, of course, created the possibility of a physical interaction, the value of which I believe will never be reproducible or communicable online to the same degree.

I decided to discuss the 'proximity commonality' independently for good reason. It is the one critical commonality that can't be readily, if at all, identified using online social networking services. It's the main reason why people only populate their SNS friend and contact lists with people they know (one glaring exception is online dating – explicable by the mutually understood purpose of everyone's subscription). SNSs, of course, do allow you to identify commonalities you can't readily in real life. With a few clicks you can filter lists of users by age, industry or interest commonality, something impossible to do in real life without everyone wearing it on their shirts, so to speak.

Considering the vast panoply of assumptions I've made in this short article true, if only for conversation's sake, the optimal social networking tool would be a combined approach. A service or application to use in real life that would allow you to identify commonalities with the people around you, with the proximity commonality already given.

Feel free to contact me directly to discuss, for sources and / or literature on the topic at c.kahler [at] urbian.org or learn more by visiting www.urbian.org.

Urbian.org's website
A mobile social networking services using a host of technologies to network in real life.