After all, what’s Facebook fatigue without Facebook withdrawl?

I’m taking the week off from Facebook, primarily to prove that I can still live without it. Those of you who aren’t on Facebook may not understand why this is difficult to do, and I can empathize with that– I held out on the whole social networking thing for a really long time, and back before I plugged in, I found the whole phenomenon pretty ridiculous. Ever since I realized I was addicted, I’ve been trying to figure out the why and the how, so that I might find a cure.

I was up in DC for Keith and Natalia’s wedding a couple weeks ago, and on the plane ride up I read Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence. Goleman has an odd writing style; the vast majority of his books involve him citing the research of people he went to grad school with at Harvard who are all really, really brilliant. I feel like he tends to short-change all of the mediocre psychologists and neuroscientists out there who are doing difficult, complicated research that isn’t remotely interesting to anyone.

All kidding aside, I really like Goleman’s stuff– he provides the neuroscience behind my gut feelings, which is immensely satisfying to my left brain, which loves to feel like it knows what’s going on in the world. There was one section in the book where Goleman talks about how our brains are wired for social interaction, so much so that our thoughts tend to turn to our social relationships when we don’t have anything else going on.

David Brooks wrote an article the other day on our outsourced brains that made me think about the ways in which I’ve come to depend on a handful of web services to act as an extension of my brain. Google is an obvious (and nearly universal) example of this– the module that our brains turn to whenever a question pops up from the ether (though I wonder when everyone else is going to notice that Google is rapidly turning into a front-end for the Wikipedia).

As Google is the 50 year old bordeaux for the prefrontal cortex, Facebook is the crack pipe for the orbitofrontal cortex. Our brains literally cannot get enough of what our friends are up to, and Facebook provides all of the raw materials via the news feed. Just as Google leverages user feedback to improve spam filtering, I could see a future where Facebook could predict which of your friends were about to get together or about to break up, and tell you how your actions might influence the outcome. Wouldn’t that just be insanely cool creepy?

So that’s 24 hours without Facebook. Let’s hope that I spend the next 24 thinking about it a little bit less.

Labels: cognition, social networks

[ 0 comments ]