No sex no drugs no wine no women no fun no sin....

...no you, no wonder its dark" sang New Wave band The Vapours in "Turning Japanese". They were not talking about Facebook (or any other Social Network), but this post in The Times labelled "My online life: no hobbies, no opinions, no friends, no fun" implies they were extraordinarily foresighted. The author writes that:

I knew my online life had to change when my boss decided that he would join Facebook. As the resident young person in an office of thirty and forty-somethings I was tasked with setting up his online profile. His first act on Facebook was to make me a Facebook friend. I had created a monster.....

.....My profile had to change, and so did my online behaviour. My favourite hobbies no longer included “working up a sweat, cooking up a storm”. In fact, I quickly had no hobbies, musical or cinematic preferences at all. I was quick to “detag” any compromising photographs posted by others as I didn’t want anyone to think that I had too much fun or was too much fun to be taken seriously.

As he notes - and as we noted last year (see here for example), the problem with today's social networks is a complete lack of nuance:

One problem with Facebook is that it cannot distinguish between the friend who knows all of your embarrassing secrets and those with whom you enjoy a two-minute chat. To counter this one friend created two profiles, one for personal friends and one for colleagues, in an effort to keep his two lives separate. I’ve decided that trying to maintain one online life is hard enough.

This creates a "friend of a faux friend" (FOAFF) social network - in fact it is arguable as to whether the "Social Graph" that you can deduce from such a system is actually meaningful in any way. It is also categorically not teh way we organise ourselves socially, so as a "Social Network" these e-Networks are not very good simulations of the real world. As we wrote last year in The Dark Arts of Anti-Social Media, it leaves us vulnerable - our human networks have developed all sorts of subtle tests over the millennia to sort out Friend or Foe (FOF) etc:

Compared to the nuances of our relationships in the real world, they are laughably simple - and this is where it all goes wrong. These systems do not model our real word, so we cannot easily reproduce the filters we have there.

Firstly, in real life there are very subtle variations in how we hold our friends - layers of an onion if you like - and that determines what we tell them, what they can see of us, what they can see of our other friends. How do I reproduce that on Facebook, for arguments sake - the toggles are friend / not friend and a bit of fiddling with privacy. How do I tell Skype that I am always on for family, not on for work colleagues etc..

Secondly, what we call "microbarriers" - imagine that onion, at every layer there is microbarrier to entry - pass it and we reveal a bit more of ourselves, fail and stay where you are or recede - its for this reason we disagree with Tara Hunt's call for mo' walls - its unsophisticated as an approach compared to microbarriers.

Thirdly, what we call "transactional interaction" for want of a better word - the "Tit for Tat " of a relationship that allows us to build a dynamic picture of trustworthiness of a person, ( we have no visibility - apart from on eBay - of someone's reputation) means we have to move to a transaction system - email, IM, text, chatroom if it exists (hello Twitter) - and this brings its own problem, since.....

Fourthly, bandwidth is limited - we have no body language, voice intonation etc to gauge the shades of meaning (which is why it is so easy to be misunderstood in text (don't know i Seesmic et al will help at all yet)

Fifthly, in general energetic minorities can always self organise better than disorganised masses, so it is probably extremely difficult to self police, especially if there are no public sanctions (again, apart from eBay's reputation approach)

Which, in our view, is why the "live and let live" crowd are being touchingly naive, and the "you gotta let it all hang out" crowd are being dangerously mendacious - humans are already evolved to lie, cheat and steal in our much more nuanced real world, so in far cruder social nets such as these it is far harder - and takes longer, if it is at all possible - to spot fake identities and malicious intent.

And don't just take our word - as Danah Boyd (who I always had down for being pretty gung-ho for Social networking - interesting) noted yesterday in response to the Google API issue we blogged about, with respect to letting our networks all hang loose, "just because we can, doesn't mean we should".

Or, as the Vapours put it:

"Everyone around me is a total stranger............."