Online socialites

But can our online socializing through mediums like Facebook and Twitter really be called networking? Sure, online social media can be a great way to maintain correspondence with people who we don’t get to see too often, but such activity constitutes only a very small portion of our time spent online. Some of the countless collective hours that we spend gazing deeply into bright LCD screens are occupied by posting, tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, hashtagging, uploading, sharing and generally broadcasting any event of (in)significance that we deem worthy of the attention of an ever-growing online audience. But the last and largest part of our time spent in social-media land is the time we spend idly browsing, scanning the homepages and newsfeeds that provide us with a steady stream of others’ broadcasts.

It’s hard to quantify just how much time is spent in this kind of ‘person surfing’ that is reminiscent of flipping through channels on the TV, but — considering how often you see that dark blue Facebook bar on the computer screen of someone sitting in lecture, the library, Frist or any other place you can get a decent Wi-Fi signal — I think it would be safe to say: “a whole damn lot.”

I can’t think of the last time I spent even half an hour flipping through the channels on my TV in a fashion similar to how I peruse Twitter feeds, but that could be because TigerTV only gives me 85 channels to choose from, about 20 of which are in Arabic, Hebrew or Chinese anyway. But let’s say I had thousands of channels to choose from: I still wouldn’t do that. It would be boring as hell to scroll through clip after clip of prepackaged entertainment, limiting myself to no more than 30 seconds at each stop. I would get tired of this fruitless activity within minutes and probably move my attention over to my laptop, where I could do pretty much the same thing on a social media website, scrolling through clips and uploads instead of sitcoms and crime dramas.

So what makes this second kind of channel surfing so much more appealing to us? Sure, when I’m browsing Facebook my attention span isn’t challenged by the prospect of wading through a 30-minute storyline, but on the other hand, some of the things that I see when I’m media-surfing are so unbelievably asinine — “#mylifeiscraycray lolz” — that I must stop and take a moment of silence for the small part of me that has just died. And unless you are one of the few people who limit their online social connections to those they actually give a damn about, then you can sympathize. But of course after my moment of silence is over, I’m right back at it. A few dumb comments and misplaced hashtags — seriously, do people realize that hashtagging on Facebook doesn’t actually do anything? — aren’t nearly enough to shake me, and I’m sure that I’ve shared some things online that must seem terribly asinine to others as well.

We all put in our time online, wading through the sea of broadcasts and sometimes doling out likes, re-tweets and comments to the ones that can actually catch our attention for longer than 10 seconds. These are like small rewards, or acknowledgments to the broadcaster that subtly say: “You have my approval, and you’ve earned the right to some small part of my time.” And sometimes you go online and you see that someone has doled out an acknowledgment to you. Something you have said or done has warranted the attention of someone else. It’s a give-and-take relationship that we have with social-media land, and when people offer their approval and a small part of their time to you, there is a feeling of gratification that cannot be achieved by watching TV. But there’s one last reason why social media is so enticing.

Unlike a greeting given in passing, a joke made to a friend in private or a moment shared between a closed group of people, the interactions that we have online are date-marked and available for all to see. They are concrete. They draw us back to our respective social networks time and again. These online blurbs, likes and comments — as trivial as they may seem — can give us the lasting knowledge that, for some moment of time, there was another human being out there somewhere whose attention was focused entirely on us.

Paul Popescu is a sophomore from Princeton, N.J. He can be reached at ppopescu@princeton.edu.