What The Sugar Mountain Has Taught Us: 2. It's The People, Not The Garden

As we continue to interact with friends, family and strangers on Facebook and Twitter, it's useful to take a break and consider what is important and what is not.

Remember that in Facebook, an important aspect to why we share our real lives is the feeling of being in a trusted garden with just the people we know. But is it the garden that Facebook provides, or sharing with just the people we know that is more important?

If we had a way of connecting with the people from our real lives on the open Internet (i.e., outside of Facebook), we would share the same content, knowing that we were sharing only with them.

What The Sugar Mountain Has Taught Us: 1. The Khala

On earlier social networks like Friendster and Myspace, identity was malleable and playful, but Facebook was and is different. “We're trying to map out what exists in the world,” [Zuckerberg] says. “In the world, there's trust. I think as humans we fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have around us.

The above quote from the Time article on Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg captures an incredibly important aspect of what set Facebook apart from the social networks that came before it: unlike Friendster or MySpace, Facebook was where we put our real selves online. Everything from our birth dates, to our sexual preferences, to our interests, to our intimate thoughts, on Facebook, we shared who we really were, and we shared it mostly with our real life friends. And we had good reason: back in the day, Facebook was just for college students and it felt like a safe and trusted place - a private walled garden where you could share your life with the people who went to the same school as you.

Fast forward a few years to today. Facebook is no longer restricted to colleges but we are still divulging personal details and the minutia of our daily lives on it. To be fair, our Facebook friends are still mostly the people we know in real life and so a certain sense of trust still exists. But venture outside of Facebook and you will notice that something more fundamental has happened: we have slowly become accustomed to sharing our life online everywhere - and not just with the people we know. Consider Twitter: we share what shows we are watching, what recipes we are cooking up, and what events we are attending; on Foursquare, we broadcast our exact location; on Justin.tv, we broadcast live video; and all of this using our real name and identity. These days, even on forums, mailing lists and comment threads, posts made using our real life identity carry much more weight than anonymous posts.

Forgive the platitude but: humans are fundamentally social beings and will always strive to become more socially connected. We want to see what our friends, colleagues and family are up to, and we want support, recognition and company in the things we do. But as we continue to put more and more of our life online, we are also demanding more control: we want to be able to say that certain aspects get shared only with those closest to us. Other parts of our life - for example, events we want everyone to partake in, opinions we want feedback on - can be available for all to see.