Social superficiality

Aside from my terrific family and a great job, there was one thing for which I gave my most heartfelt thanks this recent holiday break: I was in no way responsible for the Social Experiment. Pity the poor folks at Residential Life, who devised a scheme to boost interaction among students that simultaneously engendered the ridicule both of the subjects themselves and of such diverse media sources as the New York Post, Fox 5 News, New York Magazine, the Harvard Crimson, and IvyGate. Fitting into standard cultural narrative—the disaffected nature of the wired generation, the alienation of New Yorkers, the detachment of the elite—the Social Experiment gave us the gift of snark, perfectly timed for the Thanksgiving table.

It is true that the Social Experiment was a clumsy effort to improve student interaction. As Tom Miner and Liz Lund wrote in these pages, if the aim was to encourage students to be “more community-oriented and less self-interested, or less competitive,” a competition was indeed a poor strategy. If the goal was to get students off of Facebook and their handheld devices and to encourage conversation, a game that encouraged students to log on for prompts and to input passwords, and to speak to each other only to transmit “nonsense,” might also have been ill-conceived. In an obvious irony, the fact that the winners sent mass texts to gather passwords demonstrates the way in which the game too readily slipped into paradox. But is it the case that the problem the Social Experiment sought to address, and the defects in its solution, lies in the replacement of face-to-face communication with the temptations of the Internet?

As the film “The Social Network” acerbically suggested, technologically mediated or generated relationships may well be a refuge for the socially awkward. But the effect of such technology on the development of relationships—or, closer to my own areas of interest, on political agency—is at best indeterminate. Let’s grant that Residential Life could not possibly have intended to deepen existing relationships with the Experiment. Instead, they were no doubt attempting to enhance community spirit by introducing a silly activity that would generate a new set of social connections, however superficial, among students. In this respect, it largely mirrored, rather than subverted, many of the activities we undertake online, whether via tweets or status updates (read: nearly nonsensical missives), or game-playing among Facebook “friends” or complete strangers.

So the right objection to the Social Experiment is that it encouraged superficiality, rather than genuine engagement with others. This is, one might note, also a fair critique of social networking sites. The types of communication promoted by these sites are short and frivolous, typically intended for a broad and essentially public audience, composed of family members, close friends, acquaintances, former classmates, childhood friends, and professional contacts. Yet because the snippets of information our genuine friends offer give us the illusion of connectedness, the feeling of having been out of touch is diminished, and with it, the impulse to have a real conversation with them may also be quelled.

It is important to remember, however, that this is not an unavoidable pathology of the Internet, or the communities fostered therein–and if students are detached from each other, it is not because time spent online necessarily promotes social anomie. As my former George Washington University colleague Henry Farrell has argued in many different contexts (including in joint work with me), both the Cassandras of the Internet and those who have promoted it as a libertarian utopia overlook the most important feature of the Internet: the remarkable variation in forms of social organization it has fostered. Though sometimes dismissed as illusory or trivial, Internet communities—especially those of political advocacy (e.g., Daily Kos) and of knowledge-creation (e.g., Wikipedia)—have generated a set of norms that have enabled durable and effective collective action. Though beset by the problems endemic to all communities, notably efforts by the powerful to manipulate rules for their own benefit, the open character of the Internet has fostered innovations in the structure of collective projects that may well have offline benefits.

So the problem with the Social Experiment is not that it pushed students back online in an effort to liberate them from their computers. Nor, really, is it that the experiment encouraged competition where it ought to have fostered cooperation. Instead, it is that it sought to replicate the worst features of our lives online—brief and meaningless interactions—rather than reflect the best.

The author is an associate professor in the political science department.

Each Friday, a professor will share scholastic wisdom readers won’t find in lectures. Suggestions regarding which professors to feature are welcome.