What happens when the social networking-obsessed generation goes professional?
"My Social Network" by Luc Legay on Flickr
With the influx of mobile technology and social networking sites dominating the web, we are more likely than ever to keep in touch with the people we meet. This applies to older generations as well, but less so than to Gen Y and below- the generations who have been spoon fed the internet as kids and reared on Facebook, Myspace and the like as the natural way to interact socially. I think I’m bad (checking my email and facebook several times a day), only to see the habits of those who are still in high school or just starting college who literally never let go of their blackberries (note: I don’t even have a blackberry).
My mother studied in France after high school. That was in the 1960’s, long before cell phones and the Internet were ubiquitous. She keeps in touch with one person from that time, a man that she dated briefly and who has now evolved into a retired bank CEO and intellectual eccentric. Two of my four sisters have spent up to a year living with this man and his family in their Paris apartment while studying abroad. I recently shared a bottle of wine and a masochistically satisfying crise-de-foie with his wife when I was in Paris.
My mother’s steadfast relationship with this man from her youth has without doubt yielded countless benefits for her and her family, but this kind of friendship maintenance of yore is also demanding and time-consuming. You have to call each other regularly, send Christmas cards and birthday notes. You have to make an effort to update all of your acquaintances’ many changing numbers and addresses. But what if you lose that over-stuffed address book? The contacts are lost into the abyss. Sure, you can track down your closest friends, but what about the bow-tie-wearing hedge fund manager you shared that fascinating conversation over bouillabaisse with two years ago?
To me, a restless Gen Y:er, this sounds like a really big effort. I am terrible at keeping in touch with people in the traditional way, and have gently (or not so gently) let acquaintances drift off my radar at a rapid pace.
Until…Facebook.
Suddenly, not only my friends and acquaintances, but also interesting people I’ve met once or twice, are at my very fingertips. I don’t even have to call or write them to find out that they have changed numbers, cities, girlfriends, cats. They readily tell me so themselves by changing their status, or the details of their profile. There is no longer any excuse to lose touch with anyone.
You won’t even miss out on what used to be reserved for the most intimate of friendship circles. A while back, Liz and I put on our detective hats after spotting an unusually shiny ring on a far-away college classmate’s left hand in a Facebook photo album. Within minutes, we knew that she was engaged, where she had been proposed to and what dress she had been wearing when it happened. As for the fellow, he wasn’t in either of our personal networks but through his fiancée’s photos and profile, we could discern that he was a law student, had an annoying tendency to write sappy comments and liked double-stuffed Oreos. That’s good market profiling, right there. (But it also begs the question: what will happen to privacy, and what we deem private? Especially after Facebook has decided to go public, see this New York Times article “The Day Facebook Changed.” Kashmir Hill, another T/S contributor writes about these kinds of things quite a lot in The Not-So Private Parts, for instance, check out: “Facebook: A Privacy Round-up.”)
With the shift toward mobile technology and social networking, community has been re-defined. No longer simply characterized by geography, communities are now formed in virtual spaces, across international borders and through grassroots pipelines. The Facebook generation finds fast friends and instigates pivotal action through visual storytelling, blogging, chatting and gaming online. This will, no doubt have lasting effects on the norms of social interaction. But it will affect the way we work as well.
The kind of information you can easily find on Facebook is not only handy for late-night stalking; it is a fantastic resource for career building. Go onto any random person’s Facebook profile (or Myspace or Linked-in or any other equivalent) and you are likely to see that they have literally hundreds of “friends” listed in their personal networks. And let’s not forget that ridiculously potent market profiling (what will they finally do with all that juicy private info at Facebook headquarters, I wonder?). What a goldmine! Gen Y and the generations below us promise to have enormous social capital to throw around as we begin our professional lives.
Our friend and Wharton Business School student Sarah Shaikh once wrote that, “a large part of being a successful leader or achieving high goals is recognizing your weaknesses and then finding people to help you patch up those holes— only then can you fully realize your potential!” With the Internet and its proliferation of social networking sites, those hole-patching people will be easier to find. Just ask Liz and I. We relied heavily on our extended Facebook networks to build up a readership for our work-life website, www.thelatticegroup.org.
Click, click, bingo.
The larger repercussions of how Gen Y leverages its immense social capital in an increasingly digital world will be interesting to follow. I know I’ll be following it. On Facebook.
- Astri
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
As a fellow new T/S Contributor, let me say welcome, I look forward to learning from you! But I’m not so sure information access and online social networks “re-define” community as much as add new dimensions to existing communities. Clearly, like you, I love having all these new, better tools for staying in touch, for both the personal and professional (just today my sister discovered our Dad–well into his 80s–on Facebook!). But they’re just tools, tools marketed as creating “community” or “friends.” Among other things, being part of an acutal community implies shared bodily risk (watch out for that hurricane!) that not even Gen Y-ers will be able to find on FB.
I largely agree with you. What you call “bodily risk” community (or, say, the more traditional kind of community) can never really be replaced by communities that remain simply online (just like, my mother keeps telling me, nothing will ever quite replace the hand-written thank-you note.).
That said, the online gaming world is an example of an instance where communities (as in where people build up trust, rely on one another, create on-going, lasting relationships etc.) are created online, and often stay purely online. I had a classmate in college who was equally, if not more, committed to the members of his World of War Craft guild (whom he had never met, and whose real names he didn’t even know) than some of his real “flesh and blood” friends.
I have over 1,000 “friends” on Facebook, many of whom I rarely, if ever, see in person. But I keep up regular communication with quite a lot of them through messages, wall posts, photos etc. Yes, those relationships began with an actual face-to-face meeting at one point, but the upkeep of those relationships– over years, even– all happens online. We are members of a common Facebook community linked by shared contacts etc.
It’s not just that Facebook makes it easier for me to keep in touch with these people, our presences in that online community actually changes the very nature of our relationship. Thanks to the information I can garner from Facebook, I know more about many of those 1,000 contacts than I would ever know if our relationship was kept only on a face-to-face level. You might call it a form of passive observation rather than active social interaction– but it fundamentally impacts our individual relationships, and the way we relate to people in our communities as a whole (like how people increasingly appear to need to post photos on Facebook and share their experiences with their online community in order to feel as though they have actually had that experience fully). I’m not sure that “re-define” is too strong of a word for that.
- Astri