[iDC] another reference

[David and Ellen Levy]

You might take a look at today' s Week In Review about Facebook (by Alex 
Wright).  I have pasted it in after my name. Perhaps nothing profound here but nonetheless pertinent.


All best,

Ellen

December 2, 2007


  Friending, Ancient or Otherwise

By ALEX WRIGHT

THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
MySpace 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/myspace_com/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make 
“friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s 
walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.

We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an 
unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and 
tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging 
and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral 
communication.

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a 
communications professor at Fordham University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/fordham_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of 
social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric 
patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We 
didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems 
largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like 
“talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, 
lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using 
services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving 
Gertrude Stein 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/gertrude_stein/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s 
maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but 
see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who 
is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture 
online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on 
the present. The Web is all of these things.”

An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a 
professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who 
coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of 
electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work 
of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of 
the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, 
“unites people in groups.”

In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are 
subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State 
University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/kansas_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how 
people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he 
applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals 
of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the 
question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, 
you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities 
by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself 
in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons 
and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people 
accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls 
and hula girls.

“It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says 
Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his 
academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”

As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There 
are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In 
tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the 
Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for 
popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or 
drunk-dialing your friends.

Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal 
societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face 
contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling 
people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections.

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it 
simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says. “But there’s also 
this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to 
connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a 
connection because it’s safe.”

And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals, 
social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity 
that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. “Secondary 
orality has a leveling effect,” Dr. Strate says. “In a primary oral 
culture, you would probably refer to me as ‘Dr. Strate,’ but on MySpace, 
everyone calls me ‘Lance.’ ”

As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this 
leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the 
offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise 
of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: “It may be 
gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, 
talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass 
people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world 
friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of 
hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that 
for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. 
“They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members 
of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”


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