Mimeographs from the Future

The ever inter­est­ing Jere­miah Owyang has a post up on his blog about what to do if your boss “friends” you on Face­book. Now, it was made over a year ago, but I just saw it when he re-posted a link to it on the twit­ter­verse. It brings up the inter­est­ing idea of what options are avail­able in such a sit­u­a­tion, and while I pre­fer to believe that a man­ager would never “friend” a sub­or­di­nate — it would be a gigan­tic abuse of power — it’s highly likely to hap­pen on a more and more fre­quent basis. While his advice is sound, even if I dis­agree with the con­clu­sion, I think it’s perched on a dan­ger­ously false assump­tion: that we have but one social network.

Per­haps I am more than a smidgen old school, but I do not believe that my life has but one dimen­sion to it. I do not believe that it has a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous social inter­ac­tion stream. For me, I try to keep things par­ti­tioned up and care­fully seg­re­gated for a few rea­sons I’ll go into. The major seg­ments are in the nerdi­li­cious Venn dia­gram to the right: work, friends and fam­ily. Now, some might scoff at the idea of keep­ing friends and fam­ily as two par­tially over­lap­ping (or par­tially con­nected, if we are to use the more cor­rect graph ter­mi­nol­ogy) spheres of social inter­ac­tion, but I believe that if we are hon­est with our­selves, that we will acknowl­edge that while we have friends and fam­ily, not all fam­ily are friends, and only some of your friends are fam­ily. It’s the nature of our rela­tion­ships. If I am truth­ful, I even sub­di­vide my friends into var­i­ous groups. While they might all be equal in my affec­tions, that does not imply that they are a fun­gi­ble resource. The var­i­ous sub­groups often are not really com­pat­i­ble, and while that is par­tially a result of my slightly schiz­o­phrenic nature, I believe that if we exam­ine closely, it is true for many.

The rea­sons for keep­ing these cir­cles only par­tially inter­sect­ing are numer­ous, but even­tu­ally boil down to sev­eral rough guides. First, I gen­er­ally keep my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life sep­a­rate in order to be able to bet­ter man­age peo­ple at work, and also to keep the inevitable drama to a min­i­mum. Some might see this as harsh, as they trea­sure their “work friends”, but this is just my expe­ri­ence and per­sonal pref­er­ence. The sec­ond, and more dif­fi­cult to explain, is that some groups of friends will never mix like a good vinai­grette. Instead, they’ll stay sep­a­rated because of “lifestyle choices” that oth­ers might not approve of. Per­son­ally, I don’t care. Lastly, there are those that are sep­a­rate through noth­ing more than the fact that my con­nec­tion to a group of peo­ple is dif­fer­ent, or encom­passes a dif­fer­ent set of inter­ests, than another. It’s not a rank­ing of impor­tance — all friends are impor­tant — but sim­ply an acknowl­edg­ment of dif­fer­ences. With each of these groups I might share dif­fer­ent aspects of my life and my per­son­al­ity, and so there’s no one stream of thoughts that fits them all.

So there in lies the fal­lacy of “the social net­work”. There is not one, but a mul­ti­tude which over­lap and inter­link one another in ways that are dif­fi­cult to explain. So on Face­book, I might have fam­ily and friends, but I also have for­mer peers in school and oth­ers who I am friendly toward, but who might not quite rate the rather overused and abused label of friend. It is this sim­plis­tic per­cep­tion of our inter­con­nect­ed­ness that I believe is also the root cause of the col­lapse of pri­vacy engen­dered by sites like Face­book. Because there is but one term, friend, for every­one, we are encour­aged to debase the term and apply it indis­crim­i­nately to many for whom it is a poor moniker. The per­son I am to my cowork­ers, my fam­ily and my friends — not to men­tion acquain­tances — is not exactly the same. The empha­sis is dif­fer­ent, and the will­ing­ness to share is cer­tainly very different.

Where then is this ram­bling post going? I’m not sure, but I believe we have deval­ued the idea of friend­ship in the Face­book era, and allowed our­selves to pro­mote many to a level they are not yet deserv­ing of, and by doing so deval­ued those who are. Some sites pro­vide some mod­icum of con­trol, or more likely the appear­ance of con­trol, over what gets shared with who, but the real­ity is that the imple­men­ta­tions are so slip­shod, vari­able and unin­tu­itive that their use­ful­ness is min­i­mal to most people.

And since no blog post is com­plete with­out a wit­ti­cism, I leave you with a quote from The Incred­i­bles:

Mr. Incred­i­ble: You mean you killed off real heroes so that you could pre­tend to be one?
Syn­drome: Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it with­out your pre­cious gifts, your oh-so-special pow­ers. I’ll give them hero­ics. I’ll give them the most spec­tac­u­lar hero­ics the world has ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inven­tions so that every­one can have pow­ers. Every­one can be super! And when everyone’s super–
[chuck­les evilly]
Syn­drome: –no one will be.

Tagged: facebook, friends, linkedin, social, socialnetworks, twitter