Iconoclasm: Social networking and its discontents

I remember my parents telling the story about when phone service made it to their community. 

People didn't have a convention for answering the phone -- they would lift up the receiver and listen when it rang, but they didn't know to say "Hello?" 

So people learned phone etiquette -- from the movies.  Glamourous stars of the thirties with their important phone calls picked up the phone and said, languidly, "Hello, this is..." or "Hello, operator, can you connect me with..." or "Yes, thank you for calling.  Good-bye!"

Social networking is at about the same stage.  Sometimes, people realize this so pointedly that they even replicate the school newsreels of years past in their treatment of themes like posting a new thread to gaming forums (language warning!). 

Discussions rage about when it's ok or not ok to defriend someone on livejournal or other social networking sites.

But sometimes some thing can happen that really takes you aback.

Today in my email I got an alert from Friendster -- "Today is your friend Marie's birthday!"

Problem is, Marie's been dead quite a while.

Marie still has three friends on Friendster.  I wonder how the other two felt when that spooky email hit their mailbox?  I wonder if yesterday she still had more than three friends.  I wonder how it would feel to remove her from my friends, or if I want to keep this virtual yahrzeit going?

Finally, that was my conclusion -- as long as Friendster kept her on their system, I would rather remember the day of her birth than the day of her death to remember her.  So today, I am not "defriending" my dead friend, but looking at an email in a list, and remembering dancing, redheaded Marie, there in a little virtual shrine, in her now very small network.

-- 

Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:

Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published several times a week to Gather Essentials: Newsis an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.

Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues.  She is executive director of The Tor Project as her day job.  She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George.

Opinions here have nothing to do with Tor. 

You can find all of Shava's Iconoclasm columns at http://Iconoclasm.gather.com

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