Posts Tagged ‘Clive Thompson’

The Bad Facebook Friend: Meaningful Connections, Weak Ties and Parasocial Relationships

February 20th, 2009 by AV Flox in social media

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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Splitting The World: The Art in Oversharing

October 15th, 2008 by AV Flox in intarwebz, oversharing

I write all of you at once, a convenience of modern technology, and in a sense it is like sitting and taking coffee by your side. What I want to share is very personal, but you know how I am—I’ve never lacked candor. Ready?

I have decided that a man’s libido must have an invisible umbilical cord that connects it to the New York Stock Exchange; I have no other way to account for the fact that I don’t recall the last time I was intimate with my husband…

The e-mail went on from there, running with the stocks theme and culminating in a full-frontal exposé of my impending sexual Great Depression.

Being a veteran of the internet world of oversharing, I haven’t felt morning-after-post shame in years. But the night after sending that missive to my mother and aunts, I have to admit that I had a moment of doubt. We are close, but they are, after all, a different generation and culture, one to which such disclosures are not only uncommon, but censured.

Had I gone too far?


NARRATIVE AS ART

Why is there such a divide between students of literature and students of journalism? Don’t we share the same curiosity? Don’t we share the same attention to detail? Don’t we share the same medium?

Book burning is a higher offense than flag burning. But we have no trouble tearing up newspapers to wrap things when we move, or to line the box of a new pet so it won’t piss on the floor. Books are the highest art and newsprint is a lesser art—if considered art at all.

I consider news writing art. It, like literature, has form, rhyme and reason. It, like literature, tells the human story. It, like literature, can unite us and divide us.

Where do blogs fit in all this?

My writer friends laugh at the idea of a blog as literature. I don’t. In the beginning, we carved hieroglyphs on the great walls of the Web. Now, we have more structure, we have codes, we see how those before us did it and build on what we learn from them. The blog has stopped being a repository of adolescent, underdeveloped feelings and has become a narrative, an exploration, and a journey.

This is a return to the great tradition of story-telling. Instead of sitting around the glowing fire and listening to the great stories of those who came before unfold, we now sit in front of glowing boxes and share our own narratives.

“Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul’s journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one’s own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in her classic work Women Who Run With The Wolves. “Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”


FROM FEELING TO FORM

When Emily Gould coined the phrase “overshare” at Gawker, she gave a name to something we were all doing but as of yet had no real name for.

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogophere 2008 report, 79 percent of bloggers are personal bloggers, meaning that they blog about topics of personal interest not associated with a blogger’s work. This is fertile ground for overshares.

While Technorati says that “confessional” blogging is not a priority among the top blogs they surveyed, their sample is limited to a thousand bloggers. The tag “life” beat “business” by 2,392 occurrences, and “technology by 17,349 occurrences in the month of June.

There’s a difference, you say, picking out any one of the 133 million blog records indexed by Technorati. Not all of it is art. It can’t be.

“The best work speaks intimately to you even though it has been consciously made to speak intimately to thousands of others,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her essay Sexual Semiotics. “The bad writer believes that sincerity of feeling will be enough, and pins her faith on the power of experience. The true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.”

As personal narrative began to take shape, the blog stopped being a repository of endless rants and started to become a place where we shared self and experience. Bloggers began to connect. In many personal blogs today, we are riding the current of experience, but we see the power of form and embrace it.

I can’t define art, but I know that art stimulates consciousness. Stories do.

Blogs are life stories.


FABULOUS, DARLING!

There is a part in Curtis Sittenfeld’s book American Wife that haunts me. Alice has escaped from her alcoholic husband with her daughter and sought refuge at her mother’s house. One night, when they’re alone, Alice asks her mother if she and her father ever quarreled while he was alive.

“But you and Dad never had serious fights, did you? Where you considered ending the marriage?”

“That was much more unusual then.” My mother was threading the needle, not looking at me, and her tone remained even. Still, I’m sure she understood exactly what we were talking about.

“It’s not so uncommon to get a divorce now, but years ago, I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. I suppose the Conners were the first couple I knew—do you remember Hazel and William? People said he had a gambling problem. She was a nice lady though.”

My mother turned the canvas over, peering at a particular stitch.

“There were times when your father made me mad, but I can’t say the thought of leaving him ever crossed my mind. I suppose I made a decision—” She paused. “There was a good deal of conflict in my family growing up, and it wasn’t very pleasant to be around. It only causes more of the same—once people work themselves up, it hardly matters what the disagreement was about, does it? After I married, I decided if ever your father and I had a cross word, I’d meet him with kindness. I decided, if I think he’s wrong or if I think he’s right, I won’t try to prove it. I’ll remind him that I care for him in the hope it reminds him that he cares for me, too. I was fortunate because your father had a gentle nature.”

She looked up, offering a willfully bland smile. “Not every man does.”

I’m not encouraging to divorce Charlie, but if you do, I’ll understand—wasn’t that what she was saying more or less?

She had turned the canvas over again, she was stitching steadily, and I leaned in to look at it more closely. I said, “That’s going to be a beautiful pillow.”

How familiar that is to me! My family is like this—not my parents, thankfully, but everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s the end of the world, if you ask any of them how they’re doing, the answer is invariably, “fabulous, darling!” Topics like grief, failure and dissatisfaction are not welcome—they’re to be quickly derailed and navigated into more pleasant subjects.

I wonder sometimes whether my parents were ever like this, too, whether they changed only because we moved. There are no secrets on the islands. If something goes wrong with anyone, you’ll know all about it—and pitch in however you can. Micronesia is a world that welcomes all comers regardless of heritage. The overhare is a social currency.

My grandparents undoubtedly think my sister and I were uncivilized by natives.

They should see me shimmy up a coconut tree.


HUSH

As with everything, detractors have risen across the blogosphere mocking those who dare to share in the same way that polite society once shunned those who dared to speak their truths, simple and complex.

But we have our voices and we’ve found courage in those who told their deeply personal stories before us. We’ve found kindred spirits who share our trials and we have opened our eyes to the realities that others are living.


THE GREAT SILENCE

In a Sex and the City world, we don’t seem to have a lot of trouble talking about their significant others. I know my friends and I never did. But I’ve noticed something funny in suburbia.

Silence.

The rare spouse who mentions a quarrel or the slightest shred of displeasure at parenthood more often than not finds his words swept away as others wax poetic about how much they just adore their spouses and offspring.

I think it’s reckless to perpetuate the notion of a happily ever after. I hold silence responsible for much of the marriage malaise.

So when people ask me how marriage is, I say it’s a pain in the neck. It’s like taking care of a giant, ancient machine that can help you accomplish a lot of tasks in the emotional fulfillment department, but which constantly needs maintenance and calibration.

The question that preempted my overshare to my aunts was: “how’s the perfect marriage?”

My response was that it was anything but.

I thought perhaps I had crossed a line.

Then, in a few days’ time, the responses began to arrive. The things I found were startling. Truths and secrets began to come out. My willingness to expose my not-so-perfect marriage enabled some of the women I loved and respected the most to share in their own stories.

All of a sudden, we weren’t so alone.


SPLITTING THE WORLD

Every time we blog, we take a risk like the one I took in calling a congress of people together and lying yourself open for them. It’s risky and largely indecorous by normal societal standards, not to mention that it leaves you vulnerable to anyone who cares to cast a stone as they walk by, but what is art if not an expression of self, and what is an expression of self, if not risk?

If for every twenty stones cast, someone silenced can feel they’ve been given a voice or are at least not alone, then throw those stones. It’s why I once decided to embrace the thankless career of the journalist and why I blog today.

“In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself,” says Clive Thompson in closing to his New York Times Magazine piece about ambient awareness. But it’s much more than a personal journey because it’s not kept hidden under your mattress. It’s a generational journey, all of us making it together as more and more of us link to one another online.

I think Muriel Rukeyser was right when she wrote the following lines of Käthe Kollwitz: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”

Women and men are splitting the world with their truths, one word at a time.


CORRECTIONS & ADDITIONS

Amber Rhea points out that Dooce used the word “overshare” in an interview with Glamour Magazine as far back as 2005. (October 19, 2008)

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The Disconnect In The Age of Ambient Awareness

October 4th, 2008 by AV Flox in Gloom Cupboard, Twitter, citizen journo, column, faves, malwebolence, marriage, travel

Steven Porricelli has never thrown his wife’s laptop out the window, but he’s wanted to.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.


CRACK IS WHACK

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.


AMBIENT AWARENESS–AN AGGREGATE PHENOMENON

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.”

“It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world? The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.


THE IRL DISCONNECT

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”


HARD DRIVE OVER SEX DRIVE

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others. Social networking may enable us to hook up far more easily, and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships.

And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too. In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”


REPAIR LOCAL AREA CONNECTION?

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.” But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

This piece was written for Gloom Cupboard

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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