In the first of our P2P research sessions Headboxer Rushda Khan (23) takes a look at the internet and how it effects her and her friends social world. Keeping a close eye on Facebook, Rushda investigates how, if at all, social networks benefit us:

Like many young people, my Facebook friend count has hit three figures. But I am not a popular person: I have exchanged only a few sentences with most of my Facebook friends and I have never spoken to a third of them at all. Yet pick one and I am likely to be able to tell you their interests, where they went last night and how they are feeling. I may even be able to tell you who they are in a relationship with and how well that relationship is going.

Most young people are only too familiar with the absurd situation where we see one such ‘friend’ on the street and think she got drunk at a party last night, and then pass them by without batting an eyelid. This person may know just as much about us and yet for all intents and purposes we are strangers, only on each other’s lists because of the most trivial recognition.

This ‘Facebook friend’ syndrome is a remarkable indication of the way young people now use the Internet. In earlier Internet days, we would log on specifically to email someone or chat to them on MSN. But now we use the Internet to connect to people in a way that could only be described as passive. We browse their photos and read their statuses without necessarily letting them know about it, rather like reading someone’s diary. We end up forming opinions about them without ever having communicated with them at all. Mirroring this is our intense desire to personalise our own space on the Internet – we do not just want to know about others, we want others to know about us.

But knowing about someone is not the same as knowing them. The latter requires an level of interaction which seems to have disappeared in our online habits. According to Virgil (22, Cambridge), social networking sites may not only do nothing to create or boost friendships, they may harm them as well. “I feel like I’ve spent time with someone even when I haven’t.” The irony therefore seems to be that social networking may not really be very social at all.

The passive way in which we ‘socialise’ online is only a symptom of a greater move towards using the Internet passively in general. Because of the number of things we can do at the same time, young people no longer need an aim when they are online and often do not choose to spend their time focussed on a conversation with one person. In the same way as we may connect to someone via social networking for no other reason than that we can connect to them, we are often connected to the Internet ‘for connection’s sake’ and don’t have to do anything in particular. While this lack of specific demands is enjoyable for many, some young people are overwhelmed by it. Sebastian (21, Bath) says he doesn’t even know what to do online much of the time.

Despite the social side leaving a lot to be desired, I still think however there is a certain beauty to the interconnected nature of the Internet. While a book or CD may be enjoyed in its own right, it will not link to other books and CDs in the way the Internet makes them link. While young people think that Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias are not sufficient for school work, crucially most still love the unique way we can explore topics in endless interconnected chains and find out about the world without having to go searching for specific things.

Similarly I think that the way in which young people can have an online experience rather than simply an online activity is exciting as we are constantly learning more and getting more than if we did just one task at a time. Taking music as an example, we have reached the point where we can now access new and diverse music at the click of a button, have it play via iTunes, see song lyrics, and see recommendations via sites such as Lastfm. All this can happen in the background and, like many other online applications, can be absorbed without even realising it.

There is no doubt that passive learning isn’t always the best way to learn something and passive socialising isn’t the best way to have friends. However, there are benefits to both and it is especially refreshing to have a balance between the real world and online world. This isn’t a new revelation: young people have always recognised this. While the Internet can no longer be considered as “geeky” by our peers due to the new trendiness of social networking, using the Internet too much is still considered anti‐social and has always been considered as such. Any young person I have spoken to passionately defends the superiority of face to face contact to online contact, even though they may spend many hours of their day online. It is indeed about the balance: there are some things in real life which cannot be replicated online and vice-versa. We can certainly do more online now and our habits have dramatically changed but that doesn’t mean what we do is replacing anything we value offline.

Young people today – the ‘Facebook generation’ – have set a precedent in way we use the internet. Having been an early user of the Internet, in the days when young people thought the “big thing”was to swarm internet chat rooms, it is astonishing to see the direction in which we have taken our online behaviour a decade on. It is therefore extremely difficult to predict what will happen in future. I only need to think about my little niece Sara to understand the changes that are occurring. She plays children’s games online and uses video chat adeptly, even though she is only four years old.

Who knows how she will be using the Internet when she is a teenager?

Part 2 coming soon, what do Rushda’s friends think of the current state of the internet?