Comments on: Freedom of conversation vs social responsibility.

By: Knowing When to Let Go « Tilling the Soil

Knowing When to Let Go « Tilling the Soil — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:07:01 +0000

[...] again referencing a conversation with Colin Walker. Last week we had a brief discussion about friendships and the internet (see comments below his [...]

By: ryanbrymer

ryanbrymer — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:14:52 +0000

Colin,

Fair questions. It somewhat saddens me to think about the implications of the answers.

I hate to believe that my connections with people were only so deep as our environment at the time, but perhaps this is true. I guess I'm just sentimental that way.

One thing is certain, the relationships that last are the ones that I never would have expected to.

Furthermore, the ones that I've developed online are some that I never would have expected and a number of them have risen off of the page and into real life.

By: colinwalker

colinwalker — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:57:23 +0000

Ryan,

Perhaps you need to look at why you lost contact with those "friends" in the first place and then ask whether you really expected following them on a social networking to be a cure all. I think you'll come to quite a predictable answer.

There is no doubt that social networking can enhance current real life relationships and spark new virtual ones but I am not convinced that it is really able to revitalise old relationships that faded on their own and died of natural causes.

We are friends with people due to circumstance and environment, once those change it is often inevitable that we will go our own ways and the glue which holds the relationship together comes unstuck as we no longer have our environment in common.

What do you think?

By: ryanbrymer

ryanbrymer — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:33:42 +0000

Colin,
Thanks, as always, for the quotes and links. I'm glad that it has continued to spark conversation.
Not to turn the boat too much, but what is currently distressing me is the number of real-life acquaintances that I've been able to re-connect with for a brief moment (i.e. Friending) and exchanging updates for a week only to forget about a month later.
The “always a click away-ness” of communication has (I believe) helped to develop our non-face-to-face relationships while eroding some of the real-life relationships. Like Alexander says above, in Facebook world, we can get away with not “poking” someone for a month, but in the real world it would seem like we were rudely ignoring our real friends.
I guess that I haven't really said much other than to commiserate on a topic that I find myself entrenched in as well. I do have an experiment in the works, though, so I'll be reporting on how that turns out.

By: nicefishfilms

nicefishfilms — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:37:28 +0000

Thank you for this great post. In the early days of the net, some sociologists feared that anonymous interactions would lead to the decline of civilization. Instead we are seeing accountability as a byproduct of community interaction. Through engagement, we are able to expand our knowledge circles, bring back dynamic social information and impact our “real” worlds- not a bad thing at all.

By: colinwalker

colinwalker — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:52:57 +0000

There may be no real expectation in general but what about the expectations we put upon ourselves and the standards of behaviour we set? By being involved in online conversations such as blogging and social media we are putting pressure upon ourselves to stay involved and maybe this is something we need to get out of.

Once we have invested our time in these activities it's almost like reading a good book: you want to know what happens on the next page, in the next chapter, at the end of the story. It is often not human nature to just walk away from something we don't consider is finished and perhaps our online relationships fall in to this category. While we can and should put the book down we feel compelled not to.

By: vanelsas

vanelsas — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:38:29 +0000

There are different psychological processes taking place here. 1 is that we can have 1000 (or a million) online contacts that we call ” friends”. But in reality they are people you interact with on interrupt basis. If you don't interact, no one would care. You don't know any of their faces, voices etc. And they don' t really know you either. And that is convenient because neither side expects that we invest in that particular relationship. 2. Take a Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or whatever friend of yours. If you haven't really met an “on-line” friend in real-life then the pressure of seeing each other every once in a while isn't there. This becomes different f I know you in real life, we might live not to far away from each other. We would (if we are friends) feel the need every once in a while to connect, t talk, phone, see each other, whatever. There is no such need on the web