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PROMETHEUS BOUND
Your friend is my friend . . .
By Giovanni Tapang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City
Thursday, January 15, 2009
During the holidays, a deluge of email swamped my Inbox. Surprisingly,
only a fraction was sent by dubious characters selling snake oil and
offering instant money. Most of the emails were notifications from
virtual communities such as Friendster, MySpace and FaceBook that
my (real) friends were sending greetings and whatnots to my profile
page. There are some friends who have just “added” me to their list.
With a simple click of a webpage button, I “accept” them into my
friend list—an instant recipe for making new “friends.”
These social networking sites are so popular that most Internet users,
from Barack Obama to exiled Professor Jose Maria Sison, have used
Facebook or Friendster for their advocacies. Research firm Universal
McCann issued a report on the Internet and social networking entitled
Wave 3 in March 2008, showing that Asians are taking the lead in using
social media—in terms of having profiles and in posting their pictures,
videos and stories. In the Philippines, for instance, around eight out of
10 Internet users have created an account in these sites. Friendster is
immensely popular in our country, with around 40 percent of visits to
the site coming from the Philippines. MySpace and Facebook lead the
pack elsewhere.
People get to be introduced to these social networking sites through
different ways. I was invited to be a “friend” by several people before
I gave in. Others search for people that they already know. Others
value the fact that they can reestablish contacts with friends from
their past—classmates, old friends, officemates and others.
Here, the virtual world copies the real world: reflecting the popular saying
that “my friends are your friends, and your friend are my friends.” A friend
invites you to join the site and you invite friends to join in turn.
Second only to cellphone texting, the Internet is definitely a cheaper way
to update each other than a phone call. Once logged-in, we Pinoys can
post our photos, read each other’s stories, and connect to each other
through the Internet. This is most probably a collateral effect of the
large-scale migration of our friends and family members to find work abroad.
One can also study and analyze these networks and see how groups form
from their relationships and how one individual is connected to another in
this group. A classic example is the popular “six-degrees of separation”
experiment by Stanley Milgram, which asserted that a person could be
related to any other in the world in around six steps. This “small world”
concept of social networks has spawned movies, games and TV shows.
Even the notorious “I LOVE YOU” virus capitalized on the fact that people
tend to open e-mails from friends especially one with such a header. It
had spread itself by e-mailing copies of itself to everyone in an infected
computer’s address book and forced many companies in May 2000 to shut
down their servers to prevent it from spreading.
Networks based on human relationships typically form what is called “small
world” networks. These types of networks have been studied vigorously
in different fields of science ranging from physics to psychology. These
networks have been found in protein interactions in our body, in electrical
power line networks and even in the structure and syntax of written text.
It has even figured in explaining how short-term memory functions in the
brain. In such networks, there are only a few nodes, which are connected
to many others, serving as central hubs for other members of the group.
This makes the network less prone to random changes in the nodes.
Gaining information about the connectivity of the nodes in a social network
can lead to more effective information campaigns. In recent history, for
instance, the phenomenon of reaching other people through text-brigades
and similar activities proved very effective during EDSA Dos. One-person
texts two, those two texts four and so on. Due to the nature of human
relationships, these messages will eventually be sent back to you. The
downside is that these social networking sites can also be used to impersonate
someone or invade the privacy of other users by state intelligence and other
mischief-makers.
With proper and periodic security checks of those who run these sites as
well as its users, social networks can be made into a useful tool to bring
people together in a virtual community with shared objectives. Users now
prefer these sites to e-mail to send messages to each other and people
are now overheard to replace the usual “Say Cheese” in prompting for a
photograph to “Pang-Friendster ito.”
Dr. Giovanni Tapang is a physicist and is the chairperson of AGHAM.
You can add Prometheus Bound to Friendster and Facebook by inviting
[email protected].
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