Musings on Hyper-social Behavior

How long will it be until we have hyper-social behavior listed as a human disorder? I suppose it might be defined as ‘one who manages their social network identity, often via frequent updating of status, at the expense of real, human relationships’.

On the topic of [electronic] social behavior, an interesting discussion making the rounds tonight after the BBC’s Darren Waters’ article Social networks ‘are new e-mail’. We kicked around the very same topic on this blog two months ago. Dare Obasanjo comments:

These days I’m more likely to post an interesting link by sharing it on Twitter and have it filter out to my social networks on Facebook and Windows Live than I am to share it via email and risk spamming a bunch of my friends and coworkers. As more people embrace social networking, the trend of using email for certain types of sharing will likely decline.

Also coincidental that this topic comes up on the same day as the Times Magazine piece Growing Up on Facebook, where Peggy Orenstein ponders the social changes that might come from living one’s youth out in the open. She comments:

College was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity.

I was also caught by her usage of the phrase “growth through loneliness” while lamenting this generation’s lost ability to break away from the past. I can very much relate to that, having gone to college half-way across the country (FB/Twitter/and e-mail free) and having travelled for a month alone through Europe (OK, that came later and I did enjoy the occasional e-mail from an Internet Cafe).

And just while we’re trying to digest and understand the impact of these new social behaviors on the human brain, new ones are popping up and becoming adopted at ever-increasing speeds (due, of course, to the fact that the existing social networks are leveraged to propagate the newcomers). Let’s just hope we know what we’re doing, else we’ll have to add more than just hyper-social behavior to that list.