Interview: How Does Social Networking

¶ … interview: How does social networking influence people's identity in contemporary culture?

Approximately how many times a day do you check your email, Facebook page, or other online sources that you use to stay 'connected' to people?

Do you often find yourself more absorbed with your life online than your real life?

When you cannot access the Internet (due to a power outage or poor reception) do you feel stressed and anxious or does it not bother you?

Do you believe it is possible to be addicted to the Internet? Do you believe you are addicted to the Internet or is someone you know?

Do you think your life would be significantly better or worse had the Internet never been invented?

How has your online experience affected your real-life sense of self?

One of the reasons I wished to conduct an interview on this particular topic was the ubiquity of the Internet and cellphones in modern life, and the fact that I could see the behavior 'in action' while I conducted the interview. Some of my interview subjects did check their messages through their PDA during the interview. Before asking the formal questions, I chatted with my subject about their favorite way to go online (Mac vs. PC, computer vs. hand-held device) and all of them were passionate about the type of computer or PDA they liked to use.

Regarding how many times a day they checked their devices, however, all respondents were initially quite vague, answering 'it depends,' 'more than I care to say' or 'too much.' The most concrete reply was after every social function or task during the day (getting up, before getting in the car for work, arriving at work, before shutting it off to go to a work conference, before and after the gym, etcetera). All of them insisted that they were not more involved in online life than in real life, although several of the subjects had participated in online virtual 'worlds' and all were members of Facebook, maintained a blog, and/or were active on some Internet forum. Two said they regularly corresponded with people they had not met in real life, or had only met once, although all four said that their most frequent interactions were with people who were friends, family members, colleagues, or former classmates.

The respondents cited several positives of anonymous online life versus 'real life,' such as the ability to not be judged on one's personal appearance. One subject said that he liked the fact that he would not be judged by his race 'first thing' online, because he could merely give a username to strangers. However, even the most enthusiastic participants in message boards, Facebook, and Twitter said that they were careful not to become overly absorbed in their online life at the expense of their other relationships. Only a single respondent said that he knew someone with an Internet addiction, but that was because of an unhappy marriage, rather than anything dangerous about the medium's potential for social networking: "infidelity was common even before the Internet."

Three said that they did feel emotional distress when unable to connect online even for a day, although one respondent said that was because she needed to connect for work-related reasons. All of them said that they used social networking to remain connected to friends and family, and that if they knew that they would be 'off line' for any reason, that they would experience considerable work and personal distress, because that constant 'connectiveness' was demanded in modern society. But they believed their engagement in social networking facilitated rather than hampered real world relationships.

All of the subjects said that being addicted to the Internet was fundamentally different from being addicted to drugs or alcohol, and qualified the use of 'addiction,' even if they said that they thought it might exist in some limited instances. All of them denied every being addicted themselves, or of ever being addicted. Three out of the four subjects said that their lives were better because of the Internet, and would have been poorer if they did not have access to information online and about the world. They said they had reconnected with old friends from school, and learned about professional and social opportunities in their immediate community by searching with Google that they could not have found out about, had they merely used a local newspaper.