The Bad Facebook Friend: Meaningful Connections, Weak Ties and Parasocial Relationships
I have 450 friends on Facebook and I often wish I didn’t. Since day one, I maade a point to accept friend requests from anyone who asked in order to allow them access to me, which I feel is important when you spend as much time as I do online. Maybe they liked my blog, maybe they saw me on Twitter, maybe we know some of the same people—whatever the reason, they want to connect and I wasn’t going to let formalities get in the way.
But I have found that connecting doesn’t lead to forming a meaningful relationship. Connecting is easy: it requires a couple of clicks. Forging a relationship takes time and energy.
“Within Internet Marketing, I have developed some solid relationships with and would work with them, partner with them, and/or hang out with them at the drop of a dime,” Tony Adam writes in his post, Keys to building quality relationships and things to avoid. “The problem here is that there are people that don’t understand there is big difference between someone that is a contact vs. someone that you have established a relationship with and the value of that relationship.”
The investment into 450 people in terms of time and energy is a big one, and one that I can’t meet. It’s made me into what my best friend Atherton Bartelby calls “a bad Facebook friend”: one who doesn’t comment on your updates or posts or regularly look over your photos.
It reminds me of that piece in the New York Times Magazine Brave New World of Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson, that came out in the fall of last year:
In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend.
Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
Thompson’s conclusion, after speaking with many “aggressively social people” was that the Dunbar number was not being increased. Online interaction has the ability to enrich relationships by keeping people connected, but deep relationships require more. The main change, Thompson noted, seemed to be among people’s “weak ties,” that is, their acquaintances or contacts.
Contacts are not a bad thing. I don’t think, for example, that a solution to my being a bad Facebook friend is to prune my list. I don’t want to shut people out. I just want to interact in a more meaningful way.
I just don’t know there’s enough time in the day to do it.
I KNOW YOU PARASOCIALLY
When I met Brian Solis at the TechZulu anniversary party last week, I told him I was fond of his musings on the web and social media. He asked me whether we knew one another and I told him, “I know you parasocially.”
He laughed. And it is funny—it’s funny to recognize it and call it like it is. I might know where he had dinner and what he’s reading because of Twitter, but I don’t know him at all and I recognize this.
That’s a parasocial relationship: a one-sided consumption of information where one of the parties knows a lot about the other, but the other party is completely oblivious about the former’s existence. This used to be more common among celebrities and their fans, but in an era of oversharing, many non-celebrities are gathering audiences that know a great deal about us. They feel close with us because of how much is shared by us on the daily, whether via our blogs, or microblogging platforms like Twitter, or through our photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Maybe we’re even Facebook “friends.”
But it doesn’t mean anything because there’s no real relationship.
QUALITY CONTACTS
“The real value is in the quality of the relationship and not the quantity of contacts,” says Adam—and he’s right.
In A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately, John Welsh announces that he will no longer ignore people he adds on Facebook after accepting their request.
“As soon as I accept a ‘friend request, I write a comment on their wall,” Welsh writes. “Why did I imagine that accepting a ‘friend request’, and not saying hello, was anything but rude?”
He’s right, but that’s not all there is to it. A relationship is more than a DM or an e-mail or @replies or comments on your photos or a funny back and forth on Facebook walls. Hell, a relationship is more than sporadic IM conversations, e-mails and even phone calls. A relationship is a social commitment.
“Relationships, whether they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, are held to the same guiding and ethical principles of those we cherish in the real world,” says Brian Solis in his piece Finding the Tweet Spot – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships. “Think of them as investments where the ROI is intelligence, social capital, respect, trust, and friendship. Individuals on both sides must realize mutual benefits and advantages for cultivating short-term or long-term relationships. You are equally responsible for contributing ongoing value.”
The piece by Solis is full of ways to maximize one’s connections online. My favorite bit of advice: “Remember, always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back… it’s how you got here and it defines where you’re going.”
SCRATCH MY BACK…
I’LL TOTES SCRATCH YOURS AFTER I’M DONE SCRATCHING THE BACKS OF 449 OTHER PEOPLE!
Ask anyone about what a relationship is and you’ll hear something about giving as much as you take. The biggest issues I have had in interpersonal relationships have come about as a result of one party feeling they’re giving more than they’re getting, so it’s no surprise that this is one of the biggest complaints in social media.
“Big names don’t like coming to events because people are always asking something,” someone explained to me at a recent tech event in Los Angeles.
Everyone talks about the popularity contest in social media, the race for more followers, for higher trends and better grades. What about the flip side? The day you can’t go on IM because your screen explodes with 50 different “friends” asking something? The night of some big event when your phone blows up with texts and calls from “friends” wondering if you can get them in?
Even from the nosebleed section, I can see it’s a hell of lonely place down there, center stage, with all eyes on you. You just can’t do it all. Even if you want to, you just can’t. We’re overextended.
Even I, with only (only?) 450 Facebook friends and 2,350 Twitter followers, am over my head.
I want to make good on my social commitment. I would love to read the blog of every person who reads my blog and retweet every person who has ever retweeted me and answer every e-mail and every phone call. But as the barriers go down, as we interact with more and more people, it becomes harder to do this. I feel, more often than not, that it’s not that people are too important to be bothered, but that we can’t do it all. The web annihilated geographic boundaries, but there are still only so many hours in the day.
How do you strike a balance? How do you remain accessible to all who want to reach out, foster meaningful relationships, and still have enough hours in the day to work and play and rest?
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February 20th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Minion clones. If we all had an army of them to take care of our workaday lives, we’d be able to develop deeper relationships with our online contacts. Until, of course, the vast armies of minion clones took over the world with all of our combined skills and knowledge, yet none of our social concerns. Not that I’ve given this any thought whatsoever.
It’s a quandary that I grapple with too. Either I cut off access to additional friends and followers, and cut back on those that I have, in order to concentrate on a core group of people with whom I already have relationships. Or, I continue to be open, allowing the possibility of new relationships to develop, while quietly attempting to maintain meaningful communication with a smaller group of people. Generally, I’ve chosen the latter option. Often I fail miserably. Sometimes, I get it right. But, I still catch myself wishing for an army of minion clones to do my bidding, if only because I’d love to sit and chat all day.
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February 20th, 2009 at 6:37 am
You make some good points, I think that this is the reason why I decided to nuke my facebook account. I’d rather not close the door to anybody but I am wasting everybody’s time if all we are doing is just sending noise back and forth.
If you think I can help you, feel free to ask. If I can I most probably will but not because we are “friends” on FB but because helping people out is generally very rewarding work.
If your matter is urgent enough you will find me. If it is not, you wont, and that’s fine for us both.
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February 20th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Thanks for this very thoughtful blog post. I try to think of Facebook and Twitter as an ongoing cocktail party. No, you’re probably not going to have a meaningful conversation with everyone in the room, and you may not even talk to everyone at each “party.” But if you keep going to cocktail parties with your group of friends/follwers, you’ll probably make a connection with each one–however brief–at some point. It’s like having that unexpected but wonderful morning chat with someone on the bus who you might never see again. I guess for me, the tools are about possibility — you might learn something great today, you might have a great belly laugh today, you might just write on someone’s wall or RT what they’ve said at the very moment they need a little encouragement, and you might just meet someone who’ll morph from a para-friend into the real deal.
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February 20th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I loved this article, as I feel that while Facebook helps me keep in touch with one or two key people in my life, it has otherwise been destroying my concept of relationships. At first I thought I should just interact with the random people who requested my friendship, apropos of nothing, asking why they thought we should be friends, but I’ve found this pisses people off. They think we already ARE friends because they have read my column in the paper or found my blog or whatever it is that has lead them to click “add as friend.” They don’t seem to differentiate between Facebook “friend” (or contact, as you mention in your article), and real-life friend or aquaintance. Apparently, all it takes is name recognition for them to click a button. That’s not valuable to me, and I don’t see how it could be for them, so I’m stuck pondering pruning my list or deleting my account altogether. I think Facebook is an important tool, particularly when your business involves meeting new people and staying in touch with contacts all over the world, but the illusion of relationships is quite frustrating. Maybe it’s best to simply be clear in the notes on how you know each other?
OMG, Laura Robertss last blog post: The Who vs. The Guess Who
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February 20th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I have the advantage of still being fairly– well, a nonentity. But generally, I have different rules for different platforms.
Twitter, for example. Twitter is a large party that everyone’s invited to, and you get to overhear conversations you might not otherwise if you have certain groups of people followed. I’ll be more likely to add twitter followers I don’t know than anyone else.
Livejournal is trickier. Heaven knows I have a lot of ‘friends’ there I read and enjoy, or they write something that moves me, and I never tell them. But neither do I expect commentary on my posts. It’s a huge pool, but it’s more like a high school cafeteria where your friends brought a bunch of people to sit at your table you didn’t know, but most of them are cool. There’s the one or two jackasses, and there’s the groups in corners having explody drama, but eventually you all go back to class. I don’t mind adding people I’m not close to there either, because really personal things I can filter.
And then there’s facebook. Facebook… it makes me very uncomfortable to have people on facebook (or even myspace, though I don’t use that so much), who I don’t have some level of trust, or at least ‘you’re okay’ with. Facebook is mostly my family, irl friends, co-workers and long-standing online friends. I have about 80. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it topped out at about 150.
Either way, it’s all about expectation. I don’t think it’s fair to expect attention from anyone, friend or associate, and certainly not favours, unless you’ve already done one (a requested one), for somebody. It seems… distasteful to me. But I can’t help but approve of the desire to be closer with people who, for whatever reason, like one. Nu, that is perhaps more about what one expects from oneself in terms of one’s relation to others, and that is… all right, imho.
Oh, and you know what?
Occasionally, I still post in my diaryland diary.
OMG, Rabbits last blog post: Internal Documents.
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February 20th, 2009 at 9:10 am
I’ve decided the only answer to the conundrum is to remain open and receptive to deeper connections and relationships while being fluid enough to move with ease through the more plentiful waters of more shallow connections. We’re not going to trim our current connections and / or cease adding new connections, because then what would be the point of us moving in these social media circles? Also, to do either might deprive us of more meaningful relationships that may just be taking longer to form than others. As you and Solis so adroitly point out, deeper connections aren’t forged with a few clicks of our pointing pads, they’re formed over time and many mutual engagements. So I wouldn’t beat yourself up about being a bad Facebook friend; if those relationships were made to become deeper, I think, then eventually they will grow to be deeper.
OMG, Atherton Bartelbys last blog post: Filling In The Blanks
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February 20th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
You know, I look at it totally differently. When you make a cursory connection to someone online, be it old classmate or new blog friend, I think of it as the first connection. I may or may not reach out with a wall post or message at that time. I may not be able to respond to status updates for a time. But when I can, I jump back in. Or maybe something comes up that makes me think of a particular person, so I send a message with a link or a reference. Maybe it’s a year later. Maybe it’s never. But the connection is there, waiting.
I think of it as bobbing along in a river, very organically. Sometimes your head’s underwater, sometimes it’s above water, but so long as you’re bobbing forward and moving authentically through the space, it’s all good.
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February 20th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Your right. Its almost impossible to keep in contact with everyone. I try my best to answer every DM or @ or message that gets sent to me. I just recently turned off my Tweets coming to my phone because it did get overwhelming at times funny to say it was actually causing harm to my offline relationships.
There are about 5 tabs I keep open at all times on my browser, Facebook, email, twitter, calendar, and my site. but just like in real life there are those friends that you don’t always pay attention to but occasionally have something good to say and I wouldn’t want to miss it.
Awesome Post AV really enjoyed the insight.
OMG, Efren Toscanos last blog post: Get free Hosting for One Year from Microsoft
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February 23rd, 2009 at 6:04 am
Alot of what you mention is something I had to face pretty much head on last year.
I have never been a person who thinks that the more friends I have on myspace or facebook, or the more people following me on twitter, the more popular I am.
At the time I didn’t even add someone unless I had at minimum met them a few times in person.
But after a pretty bad time for me I realized just how shallow many of those connections I had been making really were. No one cared, but I don’t blame them, the problem was that I had assumed that they treated the services the same way I did.
A service that should be used to make the connections you want to build on stronger, a way to keep in contact with people you don’t see often.
Since then ive rethought how to use these services to my benefit, and rethought the whole designation of who really is my friend, and who is just someone I know or met.
Its a sobering realization, but something that needed to happen.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 3:32 am
I agree with Adele – minions or clones!
But that’s not really realistic. I would rather have 100 contacts I know very well rather than 1000 that are superficial. I started clearing out the noise with Twitter. Facebook will come next. Social suicide or better time management? I’ll leave that decision up to you.
Building a name, positive reputation (whether for yourself or your company) and quality contacts takes time. I am like Tony, once I establish a quality relationship with someone for goods or services, they are the first place I turn when I need what they offer. But I don’t choose vendors lightly, I have to be sure of their capabilities, because their work effects my brand perception.
Everyone has strategies to managing social noise, but once you hit “internet celeb” status, personal relationships start to suffer. Find a balance that’s right for you.
OMG, Macala Wrights last blog post: Do You Have Google Alerts on Your Company, Competitors or Distributors?
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