It’s not an illusion. We really are doing more with each 24 hours, as technology enables (or forces) us to interact and intersect, do and consume with unprecedented volume and vigor. We live our lives at breakneck speed because we can, because we feel we have to keep up, and because every macro and micro breeze blows in that direction.
I remember the days before social media when I would get 20 phone calls per day and probably go on midnight calls for the 'tolus' in my life, and felt exhausted by the pace of communication. Now we’ve traded the telephone for other connection points (I only get 2-3 calls per week, I don't even call anyone tho'), but the overall number of people calling and sending me texts faded away with no explanation like Elijah did.
Now the number of “inboxes” we possess is staggering: Email (3 accounts for me), public Twitter, Twitter DM, public Facebook, Facebook messages, Facebook chat, Linkedin messages, public Google +, Google + messages, blog comments, Skype, text messages, Instagram, phone, voice mail, and several topically or geographically specific forums, groups and social networks. That’s a lot of relationship bait in the water.
THE LIE OF OPPORTUNITY
How do we justify this? How do we convince ourselves that slicing our attention so thin the turkey becomes translucent is a good idea?
We do it because we believe that more relationships provides more opportunity. I attended a social Media
Week once, chaired by Omojuwa and other bloggers in Nigeria and I heard sentences like these more often:
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
“Social media makes a big world smaller.”
“Linkedin is for people you know, Facebook is for people you used to know, Twitter is for people you want to know.”
All of these chestnuts are passed around like a flu strain because they make intuitive sense. But common, among them is the underlying premise that interacting with more people is inherently better than interacting with fewer people. I have always believed this to be true, and in fact have delivered the lines above while talking to friends and sometimes on my blog. But today, I’m no longer convinced.
Instead I wonder, what if we have it ALL wrong?
YOU DON'T KNOW
In addition to despair and shock and surprise, what I felt most about the death of a facebook friend was confusion. I found myself saying over and over “Geez, you think you know someone…” I had a similar reaction when I read about a Gary Speed's suicide a couple years ago and very few people saw it coming.
The reality is, we don’t KNOW hardly anyone.
You interact with someone quite a bit online, and you think you already figured out everything about them. You think they are one of a kind, most interesting, generous people you'd ever know.
You consider them a friend. I suspect social media created an avenue where you see everyone online, you monitor their tweets, their status (facebook,2go,whatsapp etc), PMs, DPs and then you assume you know them. It's a face behind the system, the mobile phone and most times what we type is not who we really are. Those stuffs people do online are just to make some feel among in these world that's on a tour of moral decadence . Some do stuffs online just to get attention, I know quite a number of people who only twit about sex but are virgins or circumstantially non-virgins. What we should know is social media creates a false intimacy, making you feel you know someone and you feel unnecessarily attached. Even in reality, you move closer to some people, share everything with them and still you don't know them or know who they are because you don't know what they are thinking and you are not the one thinking their thoughts.
Kenny Thomas is one of my closest buddy in social media, but she’s never been to my home. Tinaspice and I share a lot of views on Eba and Okoro soup but we've never had some in a plate to eat together. And lots more. Imagine that retweet from that big star or celeb and you think you are sort close and have the feeling of intimacy.
I consider these people (and many, many others) to be friends, and I’m thankful that social media has brought them into my life. But in comparison to my pre-social media friends (many of whom I’ve known for 10+ years), I know almost nothing about them.
Is that what we want – spending considerable time building large networks of shallow connections, potentially at the expense of deepening a few cherished friendships upon which we can truly rely?
I recognize this is not purely an either/or scenario, and relationships that began with a Twitter exchange or series of blog comments can flourish into treasured real-world ties.
But those situations where we “meet” someone through social media, have the opportunity to interact in real life, and then develop a relationship that creates true friendship are few and far between. And as social media gets bigger and more pervasive, this chasm becomes even more difficult to cross. As my own networks in social media have gotten larger, I’ve ended up talking about my personal life less, because a large percentage of that group don’t know me, or my GF, or my sisters, or my town, or my interests. I don’t want to bore people with the inanities of the everyday. (Facebook is the one exception, as I’ve always kept my personal account relatively small).
To some degree, I think this explains the popularity of Google + among people with very large followings on Twitter and/or Facebook. Google + provides a chance for a do-over, to create a new group of connections that are more carefully cultivated.
But that’s just medicating the symptoms, not curing the disease. Fundamentally, technology and our use of it isn’t – as we’ve all hoped – bringing us closer together. In fact, it may be driving us farther apart, as we know more and more people, but know less and less about each of them.
MAKING FRIENDS OUT OF CONNECTIONS
Maybe we should be focused less on making a lot of connections, and focused more on making a few real friends? I’m going to try to work on this, to identify people with whom I want to develop real friendships, and make a concerted effort to do so, even if it means answering fewer tweets and blog comments from a much larger group of casual connections.
We have to take at least some of these social media spawned relationships to the next level, otherwise what’s the point beyond generating clicks and newsletter subscribers?
You think you know someone, but you don’t. And that’s social media’s fault. But more so, our own.
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