Keeping in touch

Dear TPH,
I am a 16-year-old girl from Colombo. Recently I joined www.myspace.com and found it very interesting because I think it is a very good way for friends to keep in touch. It is much more interesting than e-mail because now I can share pictures and make comments about my friends for everyone to see. Then one of my friends invited me to join another 'social networking' website called Hi5 which is also like myspace.com, but I just want to choose one of them because it's very confusing to be a member of two social networks. Can you tell me which site is better, Hi5 or Myspace?
D.R.

Dear D.R.,
A few years ago, most of my friends left the shores of home in search of the light of wisdom and knowledge. I soon joined them and the tides have drifted us apart and scattered us all over this polar-ice-cap-melting and climate-changing world of ours. We had so much fun in school together that the idea of being time-zones apart bored us to death. That is why the very first invitation I got from a friend a couple of years ago, to join Hi5 seem like the light of salvation. We could finally be in touch with each other without me having to torment all gazillion of them with a weekly 6-page e-mail – which by then had earned me the founding presidency of 'The (Very) Long Letter Writers' Guild'.

Nothing prepared me for the annoying and depressing realisation of how pathetically the idea of 'social networking' had degraded. It did nothing less than make me all but loose faith in humanity. I felt it personally insulting to call myself a man when I tried to count the sheer number of desperate men who would publicly make themselves and all 'man kind' look like "sex-starved voyeurs". I put up with it because I still thought of it as a good way to keep in touch. It was all good as long as I could still make a positive contribution to the online community and even venture out of my friends list sometimes when I felt I could provoke a thought or share some information in a positive and decent manner.

Another interesting aspect I find in online communities such as Hi5 is browsing through the many networks of friends. This is a research area called 'Social Network Analysis' that has got a tremendous boost thanks to the Internet, and businesses are starting to take advantage of the rich information in social networks for their sales and marketing. I used to browse through the networks of my friends and their friends often and amazingly enough, I find that our generation of Sri Lankans who are on the Internet are more closely linked through mutual friends than I ever imagined possible.

However, I have not yet answered your question: which is better; Hi5 or Myspace? Well, there are many social networking sites to choose from, but Hi5, Myspace, Facebook and Orkut seem to be the most popular ones among young Sri Lankans living here and abroad. I created accounts for myself in Myspace and Orkut, just to get an idea of how good or bad they were – so that I could give an informed answer to your question. My personal opinion – which may be different to that of some others – is that Hi5 is actually the worst of the lot because of its limited features and accessibility. Facebook – which is by far my personal favourite, has a great interface and offers the best level of privacy and security, but people who like to pry on strangers may not like it. In fairness to all these sites, each user has some level of control on the amount of privacy they can have. Myspace, Facebook and Orkut have public message boards on each member's profile page, and if user does not restrict access to his or her message board, any stranger can click right into the heart of many years worth of conversations on it – some of which could even be private. So it is not only important that you look for the features you want to have on a social networking site, but you must also be able to use them in a way that suits your needs. Having seen the extent of abuse that some users have been subjected to, and some research experience in the real threats of online security including areas such as cyber-stalking, I would be very apprehensive about making any of my conversations or personal details visible to complete strangers. As I hinted last week on Techno Page, information tools such as search engines, satellite imagery, online telephone directories and public forums when combined may expose not only the identity of a person, but also a person's location, contact details, information about his or her lifestyle and much more – which in turn would turn out to be a cyber-stalker's dream come true!

Call me old-fashioned, but I was never a great fan of social networking sites because I always believed in real personal contact as opposed to 'virtual' contact. I could see a million pictures of a long lost friend, but personally for me, nothing beats the thrill of a real conversation on an IM or over the phone. So choose wisely when you decide which online community you want to be a part of, and if you make even just one New Years' resolution, resolve to be safe on the Internet in the coming years.