Rav Casley Gera

I got a little angry at friend of mine. Let’s call her, for the sake of example, Mandy Davis. Not a close friend, it’s fair to say: someone I’ve done a couple of film projects with, nothing major. Possibly she’ll invite me to the party, but definitely not to the actual wedding. That sort of thing. But a nice, friendly, fun person, not someone I’d expect to get annoyed with.

As vaguely-out-of-touch friends do, she tracked me down on Facebook and friend-ed me. Which is all fine, and perfectly normal, and no, don’t worry, this is not yet another merits-and-drawbacks-of-Facebook discussion (it’s been around three years, people! keep up!). What made me annoyed was Mandy’s name on Facebook. Not Amanda Abigail Davis. Not even Mandy Davis. Just Mandy D. Accompanied by a non-identifiying, artsy picture.

I was genuinely irritated. Facebook is for real life, I thought to myself. Use bloody Myspace if you want to call yourself a funny codename and have a picture of Brad Pitt as your avatar. That’s why it’s populated primarily by teenage girls. Facebook works because people are real on it - real names, regular photos, bewilderingly complete contact information. It’s official, it’s trustworthy. It doesn’t purport to be a gateway to some magical other cyber-life. It’s designed to fit in with your real one. This is why, for example, you won’t find the obscure picture on the front page of this site on my Facebook profile, but one where you can actually tell what I look like.

Mandy said, after I grilled her, that she doesn’t want her identity stolen. Fair enough, though why not just hide your profile from non-friends? But really, the point isn’t just about Facebook - it’s about a wider shift in what “social networking” sites are supposed to do.

In the first few years of the internet, there was much written and said about its potential to afford people new identities and new lives. You might be a teenage girl in Iowa, but there was nothing stopping you becoming a legendary gay man on the New York club scene, a successful share trader, or a respected philosopher on UseNet. And equally, of course, you might be a 40-year old man, but you can exist as a 14-yr old girl in chat rooms - for at least as long as it takes to groom a potential sexual victim. Many of the services central to social networking services on the internet from webmail to myspace - operate on essentially this anonymous basis. There’s essentially no restriction on who you can be - as long as you can keep up the pretence.

But here’s the thing: we don’t really want wild, additional e-personalities. In many cases, we really just want to be ourselves. I’ve always been suspicious of cute e-codenames, usually going for the unexciting ravcasleygera. Increasingly, I’m seeing everyone else do the same - not just my twentysomething friends, but the teenagers who have essentially grown up with the internet too. They may have an additional, “secret” identity for particular interests - so do I - but they’ll usually have a straightforward online identity to pin their cyber-ego on.

Why? Because you only need an additional identity if you want to meet people you wouldn’t meet in ordinary life. In fact, though, we mostly want the internet to be an extension of our “real” lives. If you look at the average, e-savvy teenager’s myspace friend list, there may be 3000 people on it. But if you look at who they’re actually in regular message contact with, it’ll be friends from school. Groups services like Yahoo! Groups do exist for topics and virtual collaborations, but the vast majority are a supplement to a real-life group. Skype has conference rooms you can go into to talk to strangers; but of all the millions of people of Skype, there’s usually only a handful in them. IM, email, VOIP, even themed services like Flickr: I bet the majority of people you communicate through these mediums are your actual real-life friends. And where new friendships do blossom on the internet, they usually turn into real-life relationships - or wither. I’ve met two new people through myspace; one I went on to meet in real life, the other I fell out of contact with.

This realness - the internet as an extension of real life - is the key to Facebook’s runaway success. Facebook famously didn’t start open to the whole world, like Myspace. It started within an already very closed community - Harvard students. And it grew incrementally, through other elite US universities, all world universities, and then finally to non-students just last year.

I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. I joined on the third day, and I must have been one of the last. People pounced on it, because they saw a clear reason for it. In a closed community like a university, there are tens of people you know - maybe you took a class with them, or shared an activity like a play or sports team - who you don’t see on a regular basis - the kind of people who, if the only means of contact were in person, phone calls and emails, you could lose touch with. People like Mandy Davis, in fact. With Facebook they remain tied to you, albeit lightly, just enough to maintain contact. And it worked. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one Harvard senior told me last year, has “had a more profound effect on college life in America than anyone in the last twenty years.” People didn’t swarm all over Facebook to escape their humdrum day-to-day, but to improve it.

It’s easy to sniff and say, if you care about someone, you’ll stay friends with them no matter what. But this ignores psychological realities. Anthropologists have noted that, as hunter-gatherers, we used to travel in tribes of 150-200 people. Then, when we settled down to agriculture, our settlements were around this size. And even now, if you take the average person, and measure the number of people in their social network - from the lady behind the counter at the dry-cleaner they chat to every week, to their friend’s brother they occasionally meet up with - you’re looking at about, you guessed it, 200 people. These relationships are significant; we don’t live in tiny villages any more, but a sense of belonging to a community - or, rather, of wanting to - is still hard-wired into us. You may only need six people to carry your coffin, but we’d all like to imagine a hundred or so people turning up to the funeral.

In a village, or a university, you might see these people in the library or greengrocer. In a city, though, you can lose them as quickly as you got to know them. The greatness of Facebook is the way it helps with that. It’s become a ritual - after you meet new people, on a night out, a trip away, or through a friend - you trak them down on Facebook. It’s a way of securing a connection that might otherwise fall by the wayside.

So, I’m not dropping my militant stance when it comes to real names - and real photos - on Facebook. Facebook is for real life in the real world. With more and more of us living in cities, and greater and greater cultural diversity, it’s becoming easier and easier to meet like-minded people. But with our ever-busier and more mobile lives, the trouble is keeping in touch with them. The great potential of the internet isn’t so much its capacity to enable new friendships and relationships. It’s to help secure existing ones.

Yours,

Ravinder Madron Casley Gera