The thing about moving about moving away from home is that it puts you out of reach of your old social network. It gets harder to stay in touch and interact with distance. And thus, one ends up making new friends and a new social network.
The thing about living as an expat abroad, most of the people I have close relations with are generally expats themselves. Living in a different country changes people, in the way they deal with a new culture and find acceptance (or reject it) for what it is. I have a great deal easier of a time relating to people that have lived abroad because of common experiences.
There are many quirks about Japanese culture that doesn't jive with me, these are broad generalizations of course... for example the Japanese tend to be shy about meeting other Japan. They run events differently here, in western culture if you have a home party, usually you just have invite people over and the introductions happen on their own. In Japan, that doesn't usually happen and depending on the event there is time set a time to introduce one's self to the entire group where there is one speaker and everyone else is speaking.
There are actually "group date dinners" where a girl invites her female friends out and a guy invites his guy friends out and they have dinner together to figure out who might get along with who. The whole notion of having a party where the focus is to "meet" people is artificial to me. So I've generally stayed out of those things, but I digress.
Some parts of their hierarchical social structure also doesn't fit with me since younger people are usually expected to be somewhat sub-servant to their elders in a semi-formal environment, even if they are just 1 or 2 years apart. They use their last names at work or at university and it gets confusing in a social setting since Japanese people use first names in a non-formal situations. However, even in a social setting, work or university related people still end up using their last names. This makes it a pain in the ass sometimes mixing work with one's social life. Then again, I am digressing again and this post is about social networks.
The problem about living as a foreigner in Japan is that the foreigner community is transient, everyone is coming and going. In about a year, you might end up losing half of your friends since they go back home or somewhere else. Not that it is a bad thing, because having friends around the world is a great thing. Most of the time, you just end up meeting new people to do things with.
Usually within the international community, the easiest way to meet people is through some event held by an expat. Western culture rules apply here and it is quite easy to meet and make friends from there, what happens is up to you. Most friends I do make is usually the result of these events and we stay in contact and call each other out when another event happens.
But when you get older, the idea of just hanging out gets old. When I was younger it was sort of the like that for me, and I would sometimes wonder why I was at some social event just bantering with people, because at the end of the day, it was just socializing.
A purposeful relationship with someone is being able to do something constructive together. Constructive could be teaching each other new skills, exchanging information, working on projects together, introducing each other to new resources or something along those lines. As generalized as it sounds, specific examples could be having someone to host a party with, passing each other information on new events that might be interesting, checking out a great restaurant that one of them might have heard off. I mentioned previously in a post talking about people as information filters.
Not only can we consider a network of "good" friends as a network of good information filters, they also form a symbiotic network supporting all nodes in the network. I believe that this was one of the key elements in the rise of social networks; the "internet 2.0" buzzword that we haven't been hearing from as of recent.
I believe that social networks have been on a decline as of recent. Many of the most popular community sites and social network pages have been losing value. I would argue that the potency of a social network is diluted as more and more people join, unless there is a mechanism to filter people from entering a network.
Sites that I can name off the top of my head that have become victims of this phenomena are Digg and Reddit, both are social bookmarking-esque sites, where people would submit links of interest and the most popular ones would be voted up. I never followed digg, but I was with Reddit since it was in its early phases, before it got popular. The quality of the links posted were really good, since the community was small and driven by fairly intellectual people who probably learned of this site through a startup network (Reddit was a startup at first). Reddit links used to consist of a set of links to startup, economic and international related news. I found this site to be very educational in its early stage.
After several years and growing popularity, mainstream internet users started using the site and more general links were being submitted and as a result the quality of links (relative to me) started to decline as I didn't care much of the latest internet meme, funny picture or what not. The power of the old community was eventually diluted by mainstream internet users.
Fortunately, reddit started to create sub-groups which has started to filter people by field of interest. Though I think there are still too many people on the site. Reddit is also a good driver of traffic so I would also expect people with financial interest in popularizing their sites be gaming the system to make their links popular by resubmission and other underhanded tactics. Thus the quality of social networking sites declines with increasing user base.
I believe that there was an argument that "the collective IQ of a group decreases with more people" and this is probably what is in play here. Knowing how to maintain value in a social network requires skill in isolating the valuable parts and blocking off the rest of the noise.
This applies as much to the online world as it does to real life. The problem I face is social capital dilution-- because most of my meetings with people have been at large events. This problem is amplified even more after coming to Toyko the people I know are scattered all over the place, making it harder to meet on a regular basis, thus making large parties the most "efficient" way of catching up with everyone.
The end result is that I need to become more active in being more selective in the people I meet and for what purpose. This will be an interesting thought to try.
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