Unless you’ve been on the moon last week (or 50ft under waiting for the end of the world) you must have read this thoughtful meditation from NYT magazine on Twitter, Facebook, ambient intimacy and so called awareness tools. It’s a good read, especially for people who don’t use these tools.
The article tells the story of how ‘awareness tools’ have created a whole new class of parasocial relationships (ambient intimacy). Those peripheral people (weak ties) in our network that we follow online and tweet by tweet getting a glimpse into their lives. But it fails to address an increasingly common problem of handling the parasocial and the social, the weak and strong ties in one place. The one thing that is missing from this article and where I believe the evolution of social networks and awareness tools should be heading to, is to help us get back lost context(s).
[Note: if you are one of those people that thinks there is no problem whatsoever to share every bits of your life with hundreds of people, most of them you don't even know the below reflections are not for you. you should read this instead]
In our offline social relations there are natural, inherent order, priorities and hierarchy that are predicated on our common and shared perceptions of acquaintance, closeness, intimacy and friendship. These formed over time and are always context based. A study-group college friend that became a close friend as the year progresssed. People I’ve met while traveling and now IMing occasionally. Blog buddies. Ex colleagues that used to be fairly close but now have faded out. Friends of friends, gym buddies, the women who does my hair, family, bosses, neighbours, my thesis supervisor, high school mates I haven’t heard from in years….
These people used to have a clear place and role in my life. My relationships with them are defined by context. There are (or were) time and place and form for these relationships, or simply put, there was a clear context to all of my strong and weak, close and remote relationships and these contexts are now somewhat gone.
Take a look at the map of my friends on facebook clustered under 9 categories and believe me I had to work hard to reduce it to 9 categories. And if I wasn’t so lazy I’d create a more accurate visuals that will show the overlaps between these categories (some of them are not mutually exclusive, of course and people can be in more than one category).
All of these people are now my ‘friends’ on facebook. All in one flat, context-blind place - in addition to 25 people I don’t even know. At all.
During the rush-to-befriend period we all befriended practically everyone we know who is on facebook. And we’ve sent and accepted friends invite from blog buddies, industry people, aspiring planners, cousins and who not (obviously the more ‘popular’ you are, the more people you don’t know ask to be your ‘friends’)
And now something is flawed.
This problem became clear and acute to me when Thalia, my baby girl was born 6 weeks ago. For a start, I have far less time now for skimming and filtering through the people I’m really interested in what they have to say and those I don’t and the truth is that the former are significantly smaller than the latter (I’m interacting with no more than 20% of my facebook friends). Secondly, suddenly I found myself torn between my wish to share all the amazing things that I’m going through with those I feel comfortable to do so and the decision to keep things private because I just don’t want to share it with the majority of the people that are my facebook ‘friends’. Whats more, some of my very best mates still live in caves and are not on facebook/twitter.
So my facebook experience is broken. Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of facebook a lot. But I started to dislike what have become of my facebook. It has become cluttered and meaningless. (The situation with Twitter is much better as it’s still rather niche and I’m following/followed mostly industry colleagues - context is far clearer)
Now that our online and offline lives are fully intertwined we need more and better tools to organise the online. These tools must better reflect the dynamics and contexts of our offline social lives. As much as there are natural organisation, contexts, priorities and various degrees of friendships offline, we should be able to have these online as well.
So far these tools are merely cosmetics like the top friends or circle of friends applications - these allow you some visual organisation but don’t give you control over information you share/accept.
Currently, the customisable privacy setting on facebook allow you to choose between your network, friends of friends and friends only. But that is only half the solution as it treats ALL your friends as equal. What I have in mind is a facebook tool that will allow us to regroup / organise our facebook friends and easily control the things we want to share with and accept from our different friends and acquaintances. A tool that will help people regain context of friendship on facebook without the need to resort to two different profiles (public and private).
What do you think? is it just me or are other people feel that there is a need to better reflect the different levels and qualities we have to our offline social relations?
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