Regaining community with facebook?

I can't lie: I love facebook. The "reconnecting with old friends" element is cool, but, honestly, I mainly enjoy checking to see what new things my friends have added, whether it be photos, funny quotes, witty status updates, interesting links, etc. It's a form of entertainment, only the content is created entirely by people you know, and sometimes the content is just new information about people you know. As facebook has become more popular and more central to peoples' communicative lives, people have begun to updates their statuses and add new content more often, and, as a result, the site becomes a richer, more interesting source of diversion.

To be sure, social networks, or any online services that collect personal information, possess the potential for abuse. It is frightening to think that all of these personal details are now in the hands of those whose primary goal is to persuade the masses to buy things we don't need. Perhaps more frightening is the spectre of an Orweillian future in which government uses this information to classify people into threat levels based on their political views or personal associations. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the strange psycological effect of suddenly and unexpectedly reconnecting with long-lost acquaintances and gaining a window into their new lives.

Facebook recently introduced this "People you might know" feature (which, as Gawker noted, could be called "People who you hate"). With this feature, facebook calls to your attention a list of users who are "friends" of one or more of your own "friends," and, wouldn't you know it, this list often contains numerous people who you, indeed, know, and, quite often, dislike (and that's why they're not your "friend" already, natch). As a result of this feature (combined with the fact that facebook is gaining in social acceptability), I have recently been contacted by some of the more obscure faces from my past. Today bore the ultimate example, when I was "friend requested" by a woman who used to babysit me when I was in elementary school. It looked like she was doing great, and, though I had to strain for a minute to recall who the hell this person was, it was kind of neat to hear from her. I guess.

While its kind of interesting to hear from people like this, do we really need to know where they live now, what they look like, their new occupation, etc.? Was it better when I remembered my babysitter as this 14-year-old kid and my first innocent crush, rather than a 30-something woman with a fat husband and a Land Rover? Is it healthy or normal for this person to be connected to me in a way that gives her access to 100's of pictures of me and my friends and family? Is anything good gleaned from any of this? Intuitively, it seems not.

On the other hand, maybe social networking is returning us to our roots as a tightly-connected, social species. Social scientists often lament the modern American's detachment from community, as so many people leave their childhood homes, with its social roots, in order to re-settle in new city after new city. As Robert Putnam detailed in Bowling Alone, we have detached ourselves from one another, living as islands unto ourselves and losing touch with those who have shaped us. As a result, we feel depressed and isolated, with little sense of our role in a broader community. I think that, in fact, it is this phenomenom that makes social networking sites so popular: we thrive for community, and facebook allows us to at least feel like we are regaining contact with those who we've left behind.

It's difficult to say whether this sense of reconnection is more than superficial. Sure, I can now see photos and write on the "wall" of my old babysitter and long-lost high school acquaintances, but this a far cry from the tightly-knit, generations-old communities whose loss we so lament, right? Then again, maybe this new technology is moving us in a more healthy direction. While we may never restore the village-like closeness of earlier America, maybe tools like facebook can help us to repair the psychological harm done by a spread-out society. And maybe they can do more than temporarily alleviate the mental symptoms of personal detachment; maybe reconnecting with old friends and acquaintances will lead some to initiate actual physical contact with those who they miss; maybe facebook will remind people of the value of closeness and inspire people to stay near those who they care about.

Or maybe not; maybe facebook simply perpetuates our disconnection by superficially placating our pangs of loneliness. And this is a certainly a real possibility. But, given the newness of the technology, it's yet to be seen what kind of long-term effect social networking will have on our culture: here's hoping that we will use it to restore our frayed communities, rather than deepening our disconnectedness.