Let’s Be Acquaintances
20th July 11
Posted in Friendship
The launch of Google+ brings once again the opportunity/chore to categorise our real world and digital relationships into some sort of meaningful schema. It’s the social media equivalent of copying out names and numbers into a new address book (remember those?) and analysing the probability of ever needing that contact again.
Is the person I spent a night with drinking at a conference and discussing our children a friend, an acquaintance or a co-delegate? Where do colleagues fit in on my relationship map? And what about the person who I’ve never met in ‘meat-space’ but correspond with regularly in conversation on twitter/flickr/facebook? Do I need to worry about circling someone as a ‘Social Media Maven’ rather than a ‘person who does cool stuff? (Answer: Yes)
“Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.” – Anna Freud
It will always be hard to put people into broad categories because, well, we’re all special and unique flowers, man. But questioning the nature of online friendship is an exercise worth revisiting every now and again. As the lines between online and offline blur we’re going to need to find new ‘friendrank’ algorithms. So, while code can reveal to us who we communicate with most often, it can’t tell us who we care for. Right now I’m categorising ‘friends’ as people I am genuinely pleased for if something good happens to them and ‘acquaintances’ as those whose news I am merely interested in.
This is as far as I’ve got with my Circle Schema and is subject to change – I’d love to hear your strategies in the comments below.
In our daily real-world lives, the categorization of relationships with others is in constant flux.
Relationships are not only rooted in sharing interests, or being friends, or drinking coffee in the same cafe — our relationships are effected by our behavior — which is ever changing.
This makes meta-grouping less effective – and I believe a lot of work with not a whole lot of payoff.
The ability for our digital socialization to adapt to our behavior, interests, emotions – whatever – is critical to evolving how we relate to others through technology.
Eventually we will be able to overlap certain circles and create subsets of circles for certain “shares.” In the meantime, everyone has a different strategy — from lots of small circles to fewer large ones. Depends on whether you are listening, broadcasting, engaging, sharing inside information. It’s funny how we are all so determined to figure this out on paper before we do so in real life. One of the downsides of social media. We don’t digest things enough before making predictions and prognostications. Wonder what Jaron Lanier would say. Probably he’d wait a while, think it over, experience it, then share an observation.
We need to make things – experiment – with solutions in technology to learn about how social interaction is evolving. G+ is doing just that at massive scale.
We must *absolutely* digest what we’re using before making sweeping claims based on a gut reaction alone. I’d love to see the data analysis happening at Google right now… mind melting.
Circles is a clever execution, however, I haven’t observed it solving the problems in my use — yet.
Really. Working on many levels for me. Has some shortcomings, i.e. can’t be shared as on Twitter lists, and I can’t yet share docs with a circle. But I can filter content better, communicate with a select few more easily. And I can already imagine dozens of productive uses for clients once business accounts come online.
I think business is the sweet spot for the G+ products.
If you haven’t checked this out, totally worth a read: http://kevnull.com/2011/07/can-we-ever-digitally-organize-our-friends.html
I fall in this camp of thinking:
“The problem with friend Circles, Groups, Lists, etc., is that our brains don’t have a clear information architecture of our social graph.”
Thanks all for your thoughtful comments – for me your quote about the lack of IA for the social graph really makes sense. We’re making this stuff up as we go along, learning about technology, distance, relationships and ourselves as we progress. But there’s little opportunity to stop and read the map because the terrain is shifting even as we set course. Fun times.
we have a wonderful opportunity to be transformative in the communities where we live and work! social technologies are tools to assist our reality and allow us to share with common interest.
givethanx!
Tip: naming acquaintances as “shabby genteel’ man in dark clothing, slouch hat and carrying a shiny black bag” makes it all much easier
Helpful post and comments, indeed. Jeremy, I like the idea of empathy entering our friendrank algorithm — there are a few social analytics tools that are attempting to play here. Would be great to apply them to Circles analysis. As someone who lives and breathes social media, Circles has me feeling more human than ever before about what I do and the choices I make as a communicator. And, yes, Edward, for brands this will be productive, but will require intensely more human and culturally relevant conversations.
One other thought, are we limiting potential discovery, or our own emotional evolution, by making our thoughts more insular, less public? Twitter’s difference is unfettered discovery, possibly.
I hope that the advent of new social schemes like Google+ encourage people to not only get and stay connected to others, but also enrich existing relationships in a way that would have been improbable if not impossible before.
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