twopointouch

I’ve been fairly unimpressed by Facebook apps. By and large, I haven’t seen the point of them. A lot seem to just add some sort of gimmick - I don’t want to ‘high five’, add a fish, zombify or stroke the pet of my Facebook pals. And, in the main, I don’t want to poke them.

But I was wrong. Many thanks to Helen and Alfie for talking up the Scrabulous application during the lunch break at the iDesign conference yesterday. I checked it out once I got home. It is, as you’d expect, the game Scrabble adapted for Facebook.

So why is that not just a gimmick?

Because playing Scrabble with your pals reinforces the point of putting casual contacts onto your network in the first place. (My Facebook rule on friends is (a) have met or (b) feel like I’ve met them because I know them really well online). If online social networks are to have any value apart from taking up idle time (not a bad thing in itself), then they ought to deepen our casual connections into more intimate connections.

At the conference yesterday, Dr. Nick Baylis delivered what turned out to be a very controversial talk about us mis-using technology. His argument was basically that face-to-face relationships with people that we can hug ought to come first, if we are to achieve happiness. Our world is full of fear and loneliness, though, he says. One reason for that is our blind acceptance of any new technology as a good thing. We’re accepting ‘friendships’ from virtual strangers; leaving our mobile phones on all night; obsessively re-checking our email. He thinks that we are in danger of - or actually are - stretching ourselves too thin - that we’re endangering our proper, intimate, face-to-face relationships by cultivating dozens of casual friendships online. That, if you claim to have 80 Facebook friends, none of them would "piss on you, if you were on fire… A friend helps you move house; a real friend helps you move a body". Sadly, Dr. Nick got characterised in the following discussion as some sort of Luddite. I don’t that’s really very fair - he was talking about ‘mis-use’, not ‘use’ (though I loved the high spirits that it brought to the debate!)

He does have a good point. The number of professional contacts that I would like to maintain as ‘friends’ is a lot higher than the number of people that I am able to phone up on a regular basis, meet for a pint, or hug and kiss. It’s not that I don’t want to do any of those things (though kissing might be awkward with many), it’s that I haven’t got time. So I’ve overstretched myself, I guess. But I’d prefer to see technology as an answer, not an affliction.

Where I think he’s wrong, is on the role of social networks like MySpace and Facebook in all this. Getting updates on the statuses of my professional contacts is actually deepening my relationship with them. I know if they’re tired, bored, elated. I know about the status of their latest projects. And they know about mine. There are people who have been friends to this blog since way back who I feel I could walk up to and hug when we actually meet in the flesh. And with those casual friendships - when we meet again - we’re so much more intimate than the first time we met. No, I can’t care - properly - about 100+ people all the time. I do agree that that is a biological impossibility. But I can care about each of them on a one-to-one basis. I heard some bad news about one of those friends today, and I’m thinking about him now. This is someone I have met in the flesh about 3-4 times. But, yes, I really care.

Does this mean I am paying less attention to the 3-4 people that are the closest to me? My family and my wife? I don’t think so. I don’t apply the same rules to them and I don’t think others do either. It may mean that the other 99 slightly more casual contacts take a lesser place for a short while. But is that a bad thing? No. I’d suggest that it is exactly analogous to "traditional" social networks of maybe 20 people when one of them really needs love. If your wife/husband/son/daughter/equivalent is sick and needs love, do you still go out to that social gathering you were planning to? Of course not.

So back to Scrabulous. My face-to-face experiences of that game is that it’s a great way of achieving intimacy. Chess is more abstract, but as a sustained test of a person’s ability for logical thought, it is unmatched. Scrabble is a bit more quirky, though, and thus more admitting of distinctions finer than "I am more logical than you, bitch". The game illuminates our online personality by stretching to the reaches of our vocabulary. Possibly because I’m an English grad, I do believe we are made of language. Far more than pokes and high-fives, Scrabble takes you into the recesses of a person. Their choice of vocabulary is extraordinarily revealing. One rule change I’d hope for, though - don’t check the words against a dictionary - people’s mistakes (including the long catalogue of my own mistakes) are some of the most intense indications of character we can have access to. No one loves a perfect person - we love people for their foibles.