Tech Blog

[#1]

Earlier today I read an excellent essay by Umair Haque titled The Social Media Bubble, hosted on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Quite simply, the essay, (the first part of two, it seems) posits:

Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

After that hypothesis, the author then goes on to touch on points of relationship, trust, disempowerment, hate, exclusion and value to support his position.

And an interesting position it is. Basically, he's saying that social media-based relationships are not as strong as real world relationships. My take is he's saying we're living in a house of sand - an easy and plentiful material to acquire, but difficult to really build into something meaningful.

As I understand it, and please feel free to let me know if I've missed something, he's saying that simply because we can create online 'relationships' so easily, and so casually, that we're lessening the value of *all* relationships we have, both online and off.

In fact, the author even extends that to imply that relationships no longer are valuable as exchanges of trust. Rather, he seems to be stating that online relationships are now to be considered a quantity of value. The more Facebook friends or Twitter followers you have, the more important you must be. And that makes the *number* of relationships you have more important than the *quality* of them.

An interesting thought.

Especially since it takes no real emotional or tangible investment to create that online relationship. I can simply click on a button and *poof* I've created a new friend. Using an autofollow service or script I could create hundreds or thousands.

So, I can create new friends and followers by using a script. And this Social Media paradigm seems to value quantity over quality, so perhaps his hypothesis is correct. Especially since it's so easy to create new connections (a couple of clicks), but much more difficult to block or delete them (4-8 clicks) -- these services seem to want you to develop more linkages than to refine the quality of those linkages.

But then, where does that leave us with our Twitter followers and Facebook friends? I'm sure there are meaningful relationships built within the context of these media -- but then again, when I reflect back on my own relationships, online and off, the value of that relationship only really exists within the context the relationship was developed in; deep friendships made offline continue offline and easily transition to online, whereas online friendships take a bit of effort to extend to the offline world. There seems to be a more tangible risk to transitioning an online relationship to an offline (some call it Real World) relationship.

Perhaps Umair Haque is on to something. I'm looking forward to his next post How 'bout you?

[#2]

I wonder if the kind of online environment where the interaction takes place affects the portability and thinness of the relationship. I have a couple of people I've known for nearly a decade through multiple MMOs, and I wouldn't hesitate to have them over for dinner were they in the same geographic area. I've watched them go from single to married to parenthood; from student to first job, etc.

However, for me, Twitter has been more useful for keeping up with real-life friends and contacts. I gave up on Facebook nearly a year ago due to too much noise and not enough signal.