I was sitting on my couch yesterday when a notice from Aardvark popped up on my laptop screen: "Are you there? I have a question about *cars* you might be able to
answer."
Aardvark, you may recall from my January column, is the artificially intelligent
search engine that uses its artificial intelligence to connect the human asking the question with the human most likely to be able to answer it. It is so intelligent, in fact, that it knew
that, even though I myself am pretty useless at car questions, my car-savvy husband was sitting right beside me. So I told Aardvark I'd be happy to give it a go.
"What kind of vehicle/model is
this? http://idthis.org/id/Qw /" I wouldn't have known the answer in a million years, but hubby barely had to glance at the picture: "It's a T-Rex." (The "duh"
was implicit.) I sent the answer and the Wikipedia link to the questioner.
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A minute later, I got this response: "THANKS!!!!!!!!!! F**K YEAH!!!!!!! I just got done bragging to a thousand people
about that. THANKS KAILA, YOU ARE GOD!!!!"
As much as I wanted to print that out and put it up on my wall, I had to confess that it was actually my better half who supplied the answer, to
which I received, "I see. Then... your husband is GOD!!!!!!!!!! You better treat him right, all right?!?!???? THIS IS SERIOUS!!!!!!!!! N.Z. RULEZ! BYE NOW!!!!! :DDDDDD"
My husband started
strutting around with his chest puffed out like a peacock. I laughed all day. It was a phenomenally gratifying encounter.
And one, no doubt, replete with oxytocin, also known as the cuddle
chemical. It's the stuff that makes us feel empathy, care for others, and fall in love. In a fabulous Fast
Company article, journalist Adam Penenberg offers himself as a guinea pig to neuroeconomist Paul Zak, a.k.a. Dr. Love. Zak is working on demonstrating that encounters with people online can
have the same chemical effect on our brains as encounters with people in the physical world. His experiments with Penenberg seem to support that claim; during a 10-minute Twitter session, Penenberg's
oxytocin levels went up as much as those of a groom at a wedding, causing the title of the article, "Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling In Love," to seem a little less hyperbolic.
An emotional, oxytocin-inducing experience like the ones you might find on Aardvark or Twitter would seem completely out of place on a utilitarian site like Google. ifindkarma describes it as the difference between lobsters and pandas. We go to Facebook for the lobster
experience (apparently lobsters just wanna have fun) and to Google for the panda experience: forage, consume, move on.
The difference between these two approaches is not insignificant, and
both have their merits. Sometimes you just need to be productive, while personal relationships are fundamental to the human experience. And they can obviously co-exist -- after all, Google bought
Aardvark at the beginning of the year. But they need a certain amount of separation in order to succeed. When you want to get stuff done, you want to get stuff done, and when you want to cuddle you
want to cuddle.
So, again, we come back to whether Google Me has any hope at all as a social network. Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with Penenberg and ifindkarma: without the oxytocin,
they'll never be anything more than pandas.
Does social networking make you all lovey-dovey? And does Google make your oxytocin levels spike? I'd love to hear about it, here or via @kcolbin.