Internet, People!
I’ve been writing a lot of things in notebooks about the difference between active friendship and passive “friendship.”
I know some of you people believe in that and talk about it - and I want to talk to you about it. I want to build something for people that want to use social media build meaningful connections. I know some of you folks very well in the face-space - There are some of you where our only connection is through our “work” or something. There are some of you people that I’d love to drink alcohol with in a situation where people aren’t clamoring to blast their location to the internet, get a badge and become mayor of douchetown.
Is this just blips and beeps and borings?
I couldn’t fit my answer into 140 UTF-8’s, so:
Medium is message to an extent, so what you choose to use counts. The sites you use to communicate say something about the kind of connections you want to make. Twitter’s a broadcast platform, Tumblr’s some kind of magical blog, Facebook’s still basically a yearbook: overgrown with ads and full of “stay sweet!” scrawls.
I have very few internet friends that I haven’t met in real life, but social media has kept me in touch with people I would have lost contact with long ago. I’m not sure if that’s always a good thing. Part of living is leaving some things behind, and as much as politesse demands that we not say so, there are people it’s best to know only as a faint, fond, and fading memory.
Of my internet connections (as distinct from my friends), I’ve found many voices I love through social media. Merlin Mann was my gateway into both Twitter and Tumblr, and there are amazing people doing things in both places that I never would have had the chance to see anywhere else. It’s not all blips and bleeps and boring, even though most of these people never become your friend. But if people approach a platform with sincerity and humanity, there’s no reason we can’t form real friendships. You have to lower your guard, though, just like in face-space.
