By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

All the friends I need

I remember attending lectures in telecommunications classes, during the time the Internet was just a toddler…a toddler with a penchant for hardcore pornography.

My professors were telling us bright-eyed mass communications students that all this new virtual connectivity would lead to disintegration – or at least tarnishing – in real world human communities. Their theory was that being able to connect worldwide with people that had the exact same interests as you would make building relationships and friendships with people not just like you not worth your effort.

Obviously family bonds and their connections would still remain, but friendships, you know the kind where you listen to someone’s boring interests and commentary just so they will listen to your boring interests and commentary, would be gone. This global interconnected future held the promise of chat rooms full of people exactly like you.

My professors worried that we would be drawn more and more towards Internet sites full of people that agreed with us as much we did them; places full of people just as interested in any specific hobby or belief system as we were, and for awhile they were right. I was and still am active in a few of these online bulletin boards which are so specific in subject matter that a nerdiness meter would peg out and melt down if it was ever used to monitor the online conversations in which we take part.

So my sweater vested wanna-be Nostradamuses were right to some degree, but they underestimated the human desire to stay connected to one’s friends and family from the real world. The social networking world that was never on their scholarly radar has truly changed the face of how people use the Internet as an accessory to, not a replacement for, their “real” lives.

The social networking thing introduced itself to pop-culture with MySpace, which, other than it’s night club-like atmosphere, isn’t a bad place to keep up with old friends, relatives or to stalk people. MySpace, though, was just clearing the road for what is becoming the most dominant force on the Web for the foreseeable future. This network is not just an online community that hums along like a 24/7 -365 family and class reunion, it is also frankly a virus that will in short order dominate everyone it comes in contact with and soon that will be everybody on Earth. Its name is Facebook.

With me the infection started innocently enough, almost like something from an after school special, with a friend, who also happens to be my wife, suggesting I get a Facebook account. Well, just like Johnny in the “Don’t Do P.C.P.” after school special episode, I tried it and immediately went from casual user to junky. I wasn’t seeing purple monkeys or trying to fly from the roof of the gym, but I was quickly a slave to some damned addictive java script and html code.

In the wife’s pitch for me to try Facebook she said I would like using it to catch up with old friends and classmates and we could also use the site to share our family pictures and updates with loved ones. So I bit, I signed up and here I sit today barely able to conduct my real life because of all the time I spend maintaining my online one. No opening of my e-mail inbox is safe from a request to be Facebook “friends” with someone, or maybe a reply from somebody I have solicited for online friendship has had the grace to accept me as an online amigo.

To truly understand how insidious Facebook is one just needs to recall the safe-sex ads that ran back in the early ‘90s. These ads warned that when you had sex with someone you also had sex with everyone they had had sex with and all the people those people had had sex with and on and on. Other than the fact these ads creeped me out enough that I remember them 18 years later, they also describe the danger of social networks like Facebook.

It all starts innocently enough you find some of your friends and kinfolk who are already on Facebook to add as “friends.” That is where the problem starts, once you add a contact on Facebook and they agree to be your “friend,” you inherit a connection to all their friends and so on, now you are exposed to people that are your friends’-friends’-friends and nothing but trouble can come from that.

Once infected by the social networking bug, you will spend an inordinate part of your day trying to figure out how you know people that have shown up from the hazy outskirts just outside illumination of your day-to-day life. It becomes a never-ending game of six degrees of separation trying to figure out how you know this new person who wants to be added to your social network.

I think it is time I do my part to prove my professors’ theories accurate and retire back into the world of people I don’t know in the real world, but are as obsessed with minutia surrounding the directors cut of “Apocalypse Now” as I am. I feel safe talking to them since I KNOW those people don’t have any “friends.”

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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