Net Working

One thing that will never be said about Harvard is that the students here don’t have diverse interests. You may very well have been the only one at your high school with a working knowledge of fine wines, or the only one who said you wanted to be an investment banker when you grew up, or even the only one to have ever attended the national spelling bee, but here at Harvard you’re in far more like-minded company, whatever your mind might be like.

The Internet has a similar potential for connecting even the strangest of people; whether your penchant be for roller coasters, commercial air travel, real estate in the Florida panhandle, or obscure Japanese trading card games, there are communities out there for you to join. Even Harvard itself, thanks to the Facebook, is the center of such an online social network—one which unites most of its present students and an increasing number of its alumni in the ability to poke one another and exchange inane messages about birthdays which would otherwise have been forgotten.

These networks are able to grow far larger than they ever could have before the Internet tore down geographic boundaries, and this enables them to do some pretty special things. Airliners.net, a web site where airplane enthusiasts (they really do exist!) can gather and swap photos, has a database with pictures of just about every commercial plane in service, tens of thousands in all, and surely part of Wikipedia’s success is due to the community of people interested in organizing information which has sprung up around it.

But the most interesting feature of these groups, I think, is one that also offers a hint at why they’re spreading so quickly: it’s what they do for us. Social networks appeal to our deep-rooted desire for belonging. They allow us to seek out people who are like we are and in doing so make the world, which appears bigger and bigger every day, a bit more manageable. We’re able to find out that there are Yankee fans in Boston (and Red Sox fans in New York, lest I be mugged!) and that other people do enjoy “Who’s The Boss?” reruns.

Of course, compartmentalization by similarity isn’t always a good thing. As some Facebook groups have noted with irony, often it can be downright silly; surely I don’t need to be in a special class because my last name is five letters long and ends in a vowel. Sometimes it might even be harmful; in the past, your drinking buddies may have been your politically diverse colleagues, but now thanks to web sites like drinkingliberally.com you can imbibe in more comfortably homogenous company. This is probably good for grassroots political organization, but it might encourage polarization at the expense of consensus building.

That’s a far-fetched fear, however, and while there are a few bad eggs (white supremacy social networking, anyone?), the vast majority of these communities are just alternate places to find friendship and deepen passions. The most important of social networks, in fact, aren’t controversial at all—they’re the ones which center on us. They take the form of AIM buddy lists and email address books, and they’re comprised of our present friends and roommates, people we knew in high school, old teachers and mentors, colleagues from two summers ago, and camp counselors from when we were 12.

Some of the very same tools which allowed airliners.net or Wikipedia to grow to unheard of proportions keep us closer to our families and distant friends than we’ve ever been before. If we choose, we can be a part of the day-to-day lives of even those who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Connections that used to require letters or phone calls can now be maintained through Facebook photo albums or profile checking in the wee hours of a Saturday morning. These social networks, in some sense our social networks, are changing just as quickly and substantially as the bigger ones with broader focuses like “Harvard” or “ping-pong.”

Nevertheless, they too sometimes come with costs. As we become more and more accustomed to dealing with friends and family via instant message or email, we’re increasingly able to keep in touch without face-to-face contact, or indeed without working particularly hard at relationship-building at all. While before we may have had fewer deeper friendships—those select few enabled by sheer force of will to last over great distances—now we have many weaker ones: people we talk to once in a blue moon when our schedules align (who hasn’t gone through their buddy list at 3 a.m. while putting off a paper?) but otherwise go months without contacting.

If we’re terribly worried about these changes, though, nothing save our own laziness is stopping us from maintaining friendships the old-fashioned way. And whether we like it or not these communities—our own and Harvard’s both—will keep growing: the class of 2010 is already on the Facebook, and, someday, the class of 2040 will join them. This, in the end, is something I think we should take comfort in; it means that if we ever need to ask someone about oenology, or how to spell it for that matter, they’ll never be more than a poke away.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.