Despite Merlin's enthusiasm--he's an enthusiastic fellow--Friendster seemed like a fairly typical destination for web exhibitionists: one more site where nerds can advertise their nerdiness and exchange their nerdly wisdom with other nerds. In other words, not my line of country.
But as time passed, I kept hearing about Friendster, the newest trend in online extroversion, like LiveJournal for grownups. You sign up, usually at the invitation of someone you already know, and automatically become "connected" to your friend's network of friends. You write a profile of yourself, select a picture for your avatar, and fill out a survey of your interests. You also select your objective--are you looking for dates, friends, activity partners (love that one), or are you "just here to help"? Then you scan your little network and try to make it bigger, setting out, presumably, to make as many friends as you can, by commenting on people's profiles, by offering "testimonials" to fellow users' virtues, or simply by e-mailing them directly and asking them to be your friends.
These invitations are the hook that has made Friendster a fad--it doesn't cost anything to sign up (not yet anyway), and once you score a few "friends," it becomes addictive. In the months following my original invitation, I received five more e-mails from people I knew asking me to join. As usual, Merlin had been ahead of the curve; Friendster was clearly crossing over to the lifestyle section of the pop-culture radar. I still couldn't see any reason to return to the site. But after reading two features about Friendster in two different cities--in two different papers, in three days--I resolved to go and see what had happened to make this dork colony sprout wings.
What had happened was that in my absence, I'd become connected to 15,214 people through my one friend (thanks, Merl!). It began to make sense. Browsing around the site, it became clear that the "friend" part of the Friendster equation was less a matter of socializing than of commodity trading. It's not about who you know, it's about how many. Armed with my one friend, I marveled at the numbers; how can one person possibly have time for so much interaction? Before long it began to resemble a pyramid scheme: You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on.
But this is a pyramid scheme without the money, or the advancement, or the pyramid, for that matter. It's just a scheme, marrying the age-old desire to be popular and the added technological bonus of being able to quantify your popularity. Throw in a dash of 21st-century urban despair and the web's inherent self-determination factor, and you've got yourself a formula for increased connection. Feeling stuck in your dead-end life? At least you have 78 friends and 22 testimonials. Feeling sad? Well, if it's any consolation, Jenny thinks you're totally sweet and funny and will probably be at Bill's later if you want to hook up for drinks or whatever. In short, it's a harmless network fueled by the basic human desires of exhibitionism, voyeurism, and procrastination. Some people get dates, some people get new web fans, and some people get ignored no matter how hard they try--same as ever.
Still, as any Friendster aficionado would have to admit, the site's real pleasure comes not from meeting new people, but from searching for people you already know. On my second visit, I did a Seattle search, and close to 400 names came up. Of the 80 or so I scanned, I had met more than a third, and seen almost half of them. Some were people I know well, and many of the others looked vaguely familiar. There's a kind of fascination to scrolling down a list of strangers--and because it's the web, it really could be anybody--only to find that they aren't strangers at all. Then comes the secret kick of seeing what people say about themselves, and what other people say about them, and more to the point, what any of them might be saying about you. Seattle, Friendster kindly reminds us, is still a small town that enacts its communal tendencies wherever it can. The site serves to demonstrate that pretty much everybody really does know everybody else, and in case that seems unclear, you can click on a link to prove it graphically.
Buried somewhere in all this connectedness, however, are a few important questions. Do sites like this really bring anybody closer together, or is Friendster just this week's contribution to the ongoing decline of live human interaction in this miserable young century? Do these communities provide any actual connection, or are they just a way to gather information about other people? Is it live or is it Memorex, and if it's Memorex, why is it such an ego trip? These questions first occurred to me last year when I found out about LiveJournal.com, a site where thousands of people, mainly young, publish personal diaries that are updated often and read compulsively by fellow journal keepers and lurkers alike.
Aside from the inversion of the classic nature of a diary (i.e., private), the site didn't seem so unusual at first. What made LiveJournal feel unique was its institutional character, discernable in a wide cross section of journals, whereby the diarists felt a responsibility to their audience--to be honest, sure, but to keep 'em coming back. There's an element of performance in online-journal-keeping that rubs harshly against the whole idea of chronicling one's inner life. Then again, the world is full of people eager to broadcast their personal drama, and even fuller of people eager to receive it. This wasn't standard-issue narcissism. It wasn't just that these kids were airing their business to the world; it was that they were doing it in a prescribed format, alongside countless others who had either been invited to join free or paid the 10 bucks. This "forum for personal expression" has an eerily standardized quality about it, which inevitably spills over into the expression itself, and again manifests in the quest for quantity. Several LiveJournalists display hit counters to show how many people to date have peeked into their lives. Every user profile contains a list of the user's friends, and the friends of their friends, and so on and so on and so on. A few cross-indexed clicks and you've crossed the country, peering into the private turmoil of dozens of pre- to post-adolescents, all of whom are keeping track of one another, though they will very likely never meet. It can be compelling and compulsive reading, but it can also make you feel a bit uneasy. Is there such a thing as overconnected?
Unlike LiveJournal, Friendster does not promote self-examination. Like all dating services, the site invites you to invent a version of yourself that's better, smarter, funnier, and ideally sexier than the one people encounter in real life. It's all about display. Most of the profiles I scanned are lighthearted or absurdist in tone, with an emphasis on the intrinsic silliness of the whole enterprise. (From appearances, the clientele is largely male, white, and mid-20s.) Much of the "networking" that goes on consists of real-life friends talking flirtatious smack and gossiping about one another. The individual pages are often ironic gestures of self-aggrandizement, with foxy photos and big numbers to underline the swagger. Many others, however, are perfectly earnest attempts to raise a flag against anonymity, in much the same way as a weblog. But where a blog offers the chance to expand on one's self, Friendster reduces the self to a trading card, suitable for collection. Few would likely cop to using sites like this based on need, but all the same, the amount of time spent recruiting, updating, doling out praise, and fishing for compliments--to say nothing of lurking--begs the question. You can't blame anyone for reaching out. You can wonder, though, if they're settling for a list of names when what they'd really prefer is a friendship less... virtual.
It's likely that Friendster is just another piece of driftwood in the weblog ocean, akin to the countless personality tests, polls, and petitions that are wildly popular one day, spread like viruses, and are soon forgotten, quickly supplanted by the next meme of the moment. The real test, as in all such cases, will come when the beta period ends and Friendster becomes a pay site. Then we'll see just how friendly it really is. At least for now, almost no one takes it terribly seriously, no one's making any money off it, and it's all in good fun. It's possible, though, that in crossing over into a wider readership, Friendster will come to represent the standard for online interaction, as characterized succinctly by my friend Merlin: "Kinda cute, kinda weird, kinda creepy." And let's not forget lonely. Very, very lonely.
