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Posts Tagged ‘John Welsh’

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?

pass it on!

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