Why are social networking sites so popular?

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Have you ever wondered why social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace so popular? What is it that drives so many of to join sites that can be quite invasive to our personal privacy. The simple answer is of course that we want to connect with our friends, family and colleagues, know what's going on in their lives and be "close" to them even if they are far away. But I think there is something else that drives us to join these sites and that is something that goes back to our instincts. Let me explain. Even before we could walk, humans have lived in tribes and groups. We have always needed to bond with other humans and through this bonding and co-operation together with our large brains, we became the dominant species on the planet. We moved from trees to caves in groups. We moved from caves to setting up settlements in groups. We developed agrarian methods of producing our food in groups. We have, over time, developed technologies that have increased our domination over the plant and again we have done this in groups. But now, we don't live in groups other than in family units. Lots of us live in impersonal towns and cities where we don't even know our next door neighbours. The greed of the 1980's destroyed our traditional communities, driven by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan. And now we can work from home. We can shop from home. We can get medical advice from home. Everything that we need to do, we can do from home. So we become more and more insular and there is less that we share with each other. What has this got to do with social networking? Well an awful lot actually. The reason why many people join these sites is because they don't have any other meaningful interaction with people. They don't have any sense of belonging at all. But by joining Facebook and MySpace they "talk" to people, they can share in other people's lives through the status updates and news feeds. You can even make new "friends". I ran a little experiment some time ago. I joined an "add me" group on Facebook and even though I hadn't requested anyone as a friend, in less than a week I had over a hundred new "friends". I had never met any of these people and I am very unlikely to meet them and probably don't want to. Scarily in my opinion, I knew that many of these friends had new cars, televisions etc from their status updates. I knew someone's dog had died and I knew someone else had given birth. But I didn't know these people. The very fact that these "friends" were willing to share such intimate information with me, someone they don't know, is a cause of some concern to me. I could be anyone that could take advantage of the information that they are posting by pretending to be their friend and this is especially true when people are at their most vulnerable such as at times of bureavement or personal stress. I'm not against these sites - they are useful for keeping in touch with people that you actually know or share common goals with. The fact that people are willing to become "friends" with others that they don't know and have nothing in common with does go some way to proving my theory I believe. I would say that it is certainly something that needs researching. (This is a summary of a much longer article that I wrote some time ago - if you want to read the full article let me know and I'll post the link for you).