Why real life matters
“As we leave behind the 20th century, it is almost as if we have come full circle back to the village where everyone potentially knows your business” Zeynep Tufekci, Wired Nov 09, P.113.
This is true. And you know what is also true? The internet won’t change our lives, it will add to our lives. It will contribute value, it will stick on, it will plaster over queasy relationships and it will make us all more knowledgeable, more aware, more… socially intelligent.
I recently turned off push updates from Foursquare, mainly because Michael Litman seems to want to be the mayor of everywhere. Let’s not see this as a slight, Michael is using a new technology and trying to smash home the social element. The only reason I became a bit irritated is because he’s in London and I’m in Leeds. That’s quite a commute for just one beer.
Let’s jump right back to my original point; the internet, and more specifically, social media, wont change the world. MySpace changed the music industry (didn’t), Facebook changed our lives (didn’t), Twitter changed the way we connect with people (didn’t really). All that the aforementioned three have done is add value to existing relationships. Yeah, sure, they may have facilitated the creation of a few relationships, in fact, they may have created 30 billion* relationships, but what the actual relationship is built on is similarities. Familiarisations. The same things ‘real life’ friendships are built on. All social networks do is add another level of communication to the mix.
Let’s look at real life for a second: Jason and myself** have been best friends for over ten years, I love the guy, he’s great, but if he text me every fifteen minutes I’d end up posting him something horrible in the mail. As things are, we talk about once a week, we text a few times a week and I check his Facebook profile probably once a day to see what’s going on. If he joins Twitter I’ll follow him, but all it will do is add value to our relationship. I’ll know more about him (but only as much as he wants me to know, but that’s a conversation for another time) and I’ll know what he’s up to immediately. It won’t alter our relationship, it will add to it. If he starts using Foursquare, or Dopplr, or Songkick, or Wave – all that will change is the way we connect, not our relationship. We’ll still be friends with embarrassing stories we’d prefer kept off of the internet. We’ll still be normal friends.
But wait, I hear you cry, what when relationships are the other way around? OK, so I’m friends with Tim Hoang. There, I said it, now everyone knows. Well, I met Tim on Twitter about a year ago. In fact, and I quote, he called me ‘a whore’, which was nice. I’ve probably @’d him 20 times in a year, I’ve probably seen him eight times this year, I’ve spoken to him about 40 times on the phone, I’ve text him (probably) thousands of (drunken and inappropriate) messages. See, and this is the point, we met online, but because we’re similar folk, we bonded offline. A ‘relationship’ in social media or public relations as a whole is only worth anything if it’s a friendship. Let’s not ‘work a room’ or ‘manipulate our contacts’ let’s work with our friends and build something meaningful.
Next week on Sesame Street, the number four.
* This is not fact, although please expect it to be the number quoted at some point in a UK national newspaper.
** Real life example.
** I’ve made a few grammatical edits to this post, nothing more, nothing less. **