The Ties That Bind Us
… I love how the word “friend” has been hijacked by web20. As in lists of things like “what your friends are doing.” I mean, on twitter I have two friends. I have two friends on a lot of websites actually, livejournal, hi5, flickr, tons of them. I can’t even remember them all. All these random websites that support the “friends” feature. There seems to be no remorse for the fact that only a fraction of my friends can even use a social networking website, much less whichever one is trendy and featureful at the moment. So as much as I want to have twitter updates from my mom and my ex-girlfriend, it’s just not going to happen.
Everything is so disconnected for no good reason. Hello google, you stitched together web1.0 into a useful mesh, why can’t you do that for web20 instead of messing around with youtube? I know there are efforts like “open friend network” or whatever but it’s just not working.
I guess that’s just the way it is, social networking websites model existing social networks. Some people are in, and some people are out. The one thing that ties my social network together is me: my cell phone, my email, my user id and password on 50 freaking websites, my day-to-day real life interactions with other people. We all implicitly manage our network using the most appropriate medium. Some of my friends *only* call me, even when email makes more sense (annoying!). Some people I interact with almost 100% on iChat, to the extent that phone calls now would feel out of place. It’s like there is a law of gravity for relationships, a type of energy minimization: use the simplest and cheapest form of communication technology available that gets the job done. The funny part is that we get annoyed if someone uses too rich of a form. For example if an acquaintance showed up at your doorstep to hand you a URL on a piece of paper. You would be like … why is this person being such a dork? Don’t they get it?
most of my friends don’t do this stuff either. a lot has to do with what we do for work - we spend an inordinate amount of time behind a computer. i was hanging out w/ a friend who is a surgeon yesterday and she spends her entire day on her feet, so she’s *never* in front of a computer. She only checks her email once a week if at all, so i definitely have to call or send a text message if I want to get in touch.
but in general, i think this sort of socio-technological-disconnect is mostly generational. High school kids have more time to experiment with this kind of stuff and are usually on the same online network(s) as all of their friends. a lot of them would have no friends if they weren’t.