Journal: Keeping score

It occurs to me that the new "social networking tools" are adding an element of explicit "scoring" to what previously was one of the few areas of life that didn't have that. People are "scored" at work by salary, bonuses, etc. People are "scored" at play with literal scoring systems. But historically you weren't "scored" on your social interactions. You had some friends, you had some enemies, and I suppose you could keep "score" if you wanted, but there wasn't any kind of system for it. Now we have sites like LinkedIn with progress meters and "connection" numbers, we have MySpace friend counts and buddy list length, we have Slashdot karma. Are we going to be scored on our sociability forever? I totally buy that there are different kinds of people who like different kinds of things, and that historically the socializers are different from the achievers (that is, the people who like to raise their scores). Will socializers be forced into the achiever game?