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cory doctorow
of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her
friends list, our teacher-friend’s buddies naturally assume that
she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-
grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.
In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks.
Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s
cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of every-
one in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight
friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-it roses
and hearts. And yet, there’s an undeniable attraction to corralling
all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and
their relationship to you. Maybe it’s evolutionary, some quirk of
the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who
gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired
the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure
that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g., napping in
the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to
eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.
Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of
work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out
some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancée
once proposed a “social scheduling” application that would watch
your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were
and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your
reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship
aglow. By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re
out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with, old
summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their
families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans...
Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and
then some.
You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for han-
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