As e-mail started to become more popular in the early 00s, I began to use it when a far more intrusive phone call was not necessary. But e-mail and other forms of online communication have become integrated into life. Today, these are officially intrusive and merit the same amount of consideration that we give to phone calls: is this worth calling about? Is it relevant to the person I’m calling? Might the person I’m calling be busy? Might they find this offensive?

Now, I run on notifications because if I have no room in my inbox, I have even less in my brain. I need to be told to check my social network profiles or I will forget all about them. This works well for me as most social networks are rather limited in the range of notifications they send out.

Except Facebook, of course. Oh, the great universe of Facebook. So many things to do to your friends, colleagues and acquaintances and so little time. This is my list of the top seven notifications that give me nosebleeds:

• A Person You Don’t Know added you as a friend on Facebook…

  As Facebook becomes more like Twitter, the role of lists in managing friends is becoming more and more important. A brief reminder of how we know each other helps me know where to place you. But the introduction is more than just a practical thing: would you show up at my house, ring my doorbell and just stand there?

• An Acquaintance sent a request using Are you a BITCH??: Are you a BITCH??! Answer a few questions and find out – it’s that easy!

  I might be amused by such a request if it happens to stumble in while I am on vacation and my inbox is totally devoid of any other messages. This has never happened, of course, and probably never will. Sending an invite to someone you hardly know and asking them to take a quiz or fight with your zombie or join your mafia gang or whatever in the middle of what could be a busy day is not only not fun, it’s annoying.

• A Colleague sent a request using Causes: A Colleague wants you to join them in the fight against animal cruelty!

  Facebook is all about expressing ourselves and our beliefs—I have no problem with that. But invitations to join causes should be considered carefully. Simply, don’t send your atheist friend an invite to bring prayer back to schools or invite the one colleague wearing a fur coat on your friends list to join the fight against animal cruelty. If your beliefs are worth possibly offending someone over, you might need to reconsider whether you should remain Facebook friends.

• A Friend commented on your status… (x25)

  It’s 6:26AM and a fight has broken out on your wall among two friends of yours who don’t know one another, in response to a status message you posted the previous night about how much you disagree with, say, something the Obama Administration has done. When you wake up, there are 25 notifications announcing this exchange alone, with each response getting less and less civil as the discussion progresses.

  I consider my Facebook profile an extension of my home. I don’t take kindly to friends screaming obscenities at one another in my parlor, nor will I entertain this kind of behavior on my wall or any other space on my profile. If you can’t keep your head on straight while arguing a point, you’re not only embarrassing yourself and disrespecting my other friend, you’re also embarrassing and disrespecting me.

• A Friend invited you to HUGE RAGER!, tonight at 10:00pm… in Ibiza.

  Even if I had a PJ at my disposal, which I currently don’t, sadly, not least of all because I live in a country with a collapsing economy, giving someone no time to schedule is causing them undue stress—especially if it’s an event they wish to attend. Invitations to any event that require travel should be sent at least six weeks in advance. I perceive the amount of advance notice you give me to be in direct correlation to your desire to see me at the event. The more time you give me, the better I can plan to attend. The less time you give me, the more I feel like an afterthought.

• A Friend tagged you in a note on Facebook…

  I’ve been tagged in a note! I go look at it and find… it has nothing to do with me at all. If it has an explanation, it goes something like this: “While cleaning my closet, I found this old story I wrote when I was still in college in the pocket of an old coat!” Seriously? Please get a Tumblr so I can ignore your failed attempts at literature along with all my other friends’.

• A Friend wrote on your Wall…

  A friend has written on my wall—for the tenth time today! Look, I love that we’re connected, too, but wall posts are for occasional greetings and comments, not a substitute for IM. There is a reason I am never logged in to Facebook chat: I don’t have time.

I think the sooner we realize that everything we do on social networks has the potential to intrude or otherwise inconvenience someone, we’ll be better equipped to develop meaningful, and long-lasting connections with others.

What are some of the things that bug you on Facebook?

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?

Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”