Editorial Notebook

A Secret Society of 30 Million

One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name  Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young  and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.

I get the same feeling  vastly multiplied  from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries  everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?

I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.

I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages  microblog entries of 140 characters or less  to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.

One effect of so much social networking  so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals  is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”

There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites  places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/opinion/22tue4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-10
209565
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RS5BXUSHQZQVLMENX3FZJ3LAV2FAR4XI
<urn:uuid:4a69855b-0dce-4c68-94f6-66a12b070602>
2020-02-27T12:19:04Z
151.101.249.164
text/html
sha1:TN7JCVXK6LN55KLEHDHXO6TOMYNSWRUC
<urn:uuid:7b41d340-57f5-4592-b44e-143e358d90d7>
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/opinion/22tue4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
response
<urn:uuid:72e962eb-16c2-4128-9b58-a8f3dddf3320>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-233.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/