It’s received wisdom that social networks make it possible to connect to people half way around the world based purely on your similar interests and so communities are no longer defined by where you live.
But what if that isn’t so, and we are in fact connecting with many of the same friends, but just in different ways? A study published over the weekend makes this case. It suggests that very often, we’re using these networks not to talk to people in New Zealand, but to someone half way down the road.
Noshir Contractor and William J. White of Northwestern University studied virtual worlds like Everquest and Second Life. These computer generated environments are places where you can remain totally anonymous if you so choose. So you’d imagine that these are the very places where people aren’t bound by geography.
Not so. The researchers found that geographic distance did play a part in choosing your friends. But in the sense of the closer they are the better. To a certain extent that does of course make sense. If you are from Australia and someone else is from Mexico not only do completely separate time zones come into play, there’s also the language barrier to contend with.
However, Drs Contractor and White actually found that people based 10km away from each other were 5x more likely to be playing together than people 100km away from each other.
That’s something I was told when launching the kids world Club Penguin in the UK last April – that often participants play on there with their existing friends after school. And similarly, looking at the teen version of Second Life, the researchers found that players did make new friends, but just as in real life these were friends of friends. In other words, by and large they stayed within an extended social circle, something that as an aside should reassure parents.
I know 1st hand that often applies to blogs and bloggers as well. In the UK (and I imagine it’s not so different elsewhere) if you organise a bloggers lunch, not only will you find that the people there largely already know each other, they already link to each other too. So most UK tech PR blogs, link to other tech PR people in other agencies – the type of people they already encounter in their daily lives - and so on.
It would be an interesting side study to do the same to Twitter accounts. As (unlike on Facebook) it’s generally acceptable to follow strangers on there, does it break down barriers?
From what I see from my own colleagues the answer is initially no, eventually yes. You sign up and follow people who might be sitting at the other end of the room from you. But eventually after seeing who they follow, and checking out their followers’ followers, the boundaries do start to dissolve.
So, in conclusion, even though there’s been a lot of research about the existence of virtual friends, what this study tells us is that our virtual and real networks are sometimes not so different after all.
Instead, “people end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know. It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks.” It’s sometimes less about creating new friendships than about deepening the ones we already have.
Image - Le Korrigan
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