Social networking is not new

John Hawks mentioned a lovely article in the New York Times, interviewing an anthropologist, Pauline Wiessner, who worked with the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari. She notes that they maintain social relationships across many hundreds (and in her case, when they found a satellite phone, thousands!) of kilometres. This means that through the use of small gifts and messages, they have people who can help them with resources when they are in need.

Q. Were there any special messages in the gifts?

A. That the relationship was alive and well, and to remind the exchange partner that they had a kind of contract to call on each other in times of need. Actually, in the Kalahari, people send gifts to their exchange partners even when there isn’t a crisis. Like Christmas cards and presents, these objects are information on the status of the relationship. We may not particularly want Aunt Sally’s holiday fruit cake, but we’d be troubled if it didn’t arrive every year. In the Kalahari, if gifts aren’t sent, it means the relationship is in poor repair. People know their networks are crucial to how they get past the hard times, and they tend them with loving care.

She goes on to make a very significant point about human prehistory:

I think they are a clue to how modern humans moved out of Africa around 45,000 years ago. Unless these migrants had support systems in a founding group and could maintain ties with them, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to keep pushing into unknown territory. It only took modern humans some 5,000 years to move out of Africa, cross Eurasia and end up in Australia. I think that the invention of social networks — the storing of relationships for a time when you will need them — is what facilitated this expansion.

When Claudia Dreifus, the journalist, asked her for a modern example, of course it was Facebook.

People who use it say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home.

We all know of people who’ve been “friended” by old pals from college and former neighbors they’ve lost touch with. When they see pictures of them and read “sharings” from their Facebook partners, they are reminded of their presence in their lives.

This set me going about my childhood friends, and so I set off looking for my oldest friend, who I haven’t seen in 21 years (he moved to Darwin, and I just moved). He didn’t have a FB page, but he was mentioned online, and I have wikkid Google fu! So we spent a nice time on the phone (oldtech, sure, but hey…) catching up and exchanging news. I first met him when I went to kindergarten. Only one other person alive has known me longer.

If ever there’s a major drought here, I hope I can go live with him until it recedes…