I was talking to a newly friended cousin-in-law today on Facebook. She asked me if there was any chance my husband would start a Facebook account now that he knows she joined.
I jokingly said probably not since that would require him to be social. He would probably only want to join an antisocial networking site.

So that got me to thinking. What would an antisocial networking site look like?
(Let’s ignore for the moment that, by definition, antisocial people wouldn’t be interested in networking).
  • Would the site allow people to insult each other?
  • Would it allow them to brag about their latest misdeeds?
  • Would a person sign up to it only to be able to reject every request to “friend” them?
  • Would a person start out as a friend of everybody who has an account on the page and the point of the site would be to “unfriend” everyone? To make it extra special, one would have to approve whether or not they were unfriended. The truly antisocial would then be able to mess it up for lots of people.
I was pretty sure that if I had thought of antisocial networks, then so had somebody else. A quick Google search showed me how correct that assumption was (though the sites share little resemblance to the above mentioned ideas of how a antisocial networking site would be manifested) .
  • There is the site isolatr which appears to have been in beta since 2006.
  • There is also snubster which, ironically, has a Facebook app.
  • Enemybook is also tied to Facebook as a Facebook app and allows you to add people as Facebook enemies (in Facebook, they will be listed right bellow your Facebook friends list). Interestingly, it also allows you to friend the enemies of your enemies.

In my Google search for antisocial networking sites I found several articles explaining the genesis of these sites.

All of the ones listed above were generated as a backlash to the social networking phenomenon and poke fun at how such networking sites stretch the definition of “friend” to the breaking point.

This is a common response to social and cultural trends and one that frequently inspires creative counterparts to dominant social trends.

The articles also point out that the antisocial networking sites are a social commentary on some of the absurdity inherent in social networking sites that stretch the definition of “friend” to its breaking point.

This has also led to some interesting phenomena  as people try to figure out how to navigate the new social interactions enabled by these platforms.

It leads to phrases such as “Person X is a Facebook friend but not a real friend.” It also leads to some debates concerning the appropriate response when ex friends and lovers put in a friendship request. Similarly, there is also concern and debate what the appropriate protocol is for “un-friendling” someone.

Like many disruptive technologies, these sites cause us to think about and question how computer/technology mediated interactions and behavior are similar to or different from our “real life” interactions and behavior.