Are you Facehooked?

May 30 2008 By Nicholas Craig for The Journal

Social networking has caught on so much that some employers have been driven to ban sites such as Facebook and MySpace from employees’ computers. They claim that £130 million is being wasted each day because of their popularity.

Employers’reactions, I fear, will not stem the extraordinary momentum of social networking. They are proliferating at a rate of knots, finding and filling niches with admirable ease. Business focused sites are booming. Ecademy, LinkedIn, The Lonely Entrepreneur and many more are homing in on business users, providing support and practical help for small companies and individuals.

I have not yet felt the urge to set up a page on MySpace, or use a site to share a business problem, but I am in the minority. Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year if it continues to grow at its present rate.

It is true, however, that building relationships and connecting with people, socially or in business, is central to business or social success. The generic desire of us all to communicate lies behind the rapid growth of MySpace, Bebo and the others. These sites encourage us to share information, to collaborate, discover people and join networks.

In a world that is becoming increasingly isolationist because of the internet, relationships appear to be blossoming in the virtual world. I still prefer to do my communicating face-to-face, and will continue to meet people as much as possible because conversations are so much more complex, subtle and spontaneous than written messages.

Social networking is, however, hoping to combat the solitary existence of computer consumed youngsters. It opens up chances to gain virtual friends, share jokes, gossip, listen to music, have a dialogue and learn new skills.

But is it really connecting us? Is it not instead a strange disconnection, devoid of talking, eating, drinking, laughing, even shaking hands? Which of us would honestly spend a Saturday night ‘chatting ‘ to friends on Facebook rather than popping down to the pub for a chat with pals and neighbours?

I am less than convinced that networking profiles really tell the truth, and I remain averse to the ego-driven focus that highlights the quantity rather than the quality of your ‘friends’. In real life you need only a few trusty souls on whom you can rely. With friends like these on Facebook…..

Nicholas Craig is a partner at Watson Burton LLP