Submitted For Your Consideration

April 2009

Friends and Followers

I wonder sometimes if Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, could have begun to imagine the wild new frontier he was creating with his invention and the amazing capabilities it would give us.

Never mind online research and email -- those are "old school" now. So very Nineties.

I could talk about the sea changes in publishing, movie, TV and music distribution online. But never mind that. Let's talk about social networking.

Social networking has become such a normal course of business for many, if not most, of us. For a while, it wasn't enough to have a Web site -- you had to have a blog. Now blogs seem so turn of the century (the 21st century, of course). Blogging isn't enough now -- you need to post your Web site and blog on a social networking site.

The general rule seems to be that LinkedIn is the social network for business and Facebook or MySpace the one for personal use. But like many rules, this one tends to be honored in the breach.

For one thing, it depends on how you define "business." For me, it includes not only my freelance writing and research, but also my fiction writing. I write fiction in order to sell it, which makes it a business venture, not a hobby. Yet, many authors (including major best-sellers) have Facebook pages for themselves or their books.

I suspect that it's a matter of promoting to the right audience. If LinkedIn is a business-to-business site, then Facebook would be more business-to-consumer.

Which brings me to the issue of "friends." The people you connect with on Facebook are called "friends," even though you may barely know each other. You might never have met face-to-face or spoken or even emailed each other. Clearly, Facebook is using this word rather loosely. Nonetheless . . . one wonders, how friendly should you be to become a Facebook "friend"?

A lot of guidance has been written on this very subject. Who do you accept as "friends" (or "connections"-- the LinkedIn term)? What criteria, if any, do you apply before accepting a "friend" request?

On LinkedIn, many refuse to connect with someone that they haven't done business with personally. That's one way to approach it, but I wonder if it defeats the purpose of social networking. If you connect only with people you already know well, perhaps you're cheating yourself of the benefit of someone you don't know well right now, but may eventually wish to know better. Usually, my approach is to check the person's profile for something of interest to me (and I'm interested in a lot of things, so that takes in quite a bit), then connect to that person if I feel a level of comfort in doing so.

On Facebook, I tend to agonize more over these choices. Maybe it's the word "friend" instead of "connection." Maybe it's the obviously professional nature of LinkedIn versus the casual one of Facebook. If someone asks me to be a "friend" on Facebook, I'd like to find some kind of common ground. Something that makes this person more like a friend than a business associate. Yet, some people take the opposite approach entirely.

I had to laugh when I read this column by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Citing a woman who felt hemmed in by Facebook's 5,000-friend limit (good grief), Daum discussed how we seem to be living in The Age of Friendaholism. Which leads to the question I've had about social networking for some time now. Are we cheapening our relationships through virtual networking and socializing? Is the online world changing what it means to be a friend or colleague?

Then there's Twitter -- just when I was starting to dabble in social networks, along came Twitter. A kind of micro-blogging/mini-chat tool, Twitter lets you send out 140-character posts. Your followers can read them and respond to you.

I'd avoided Twitter for quite a while. I couldn't waste my time in constant conversation with people. What a time suck it would be to constantly answer Twitter's "What are you doing?" prompt (not to mention any responses I might get to my post).

But Twitter has caught on like wildfire. Citizen journalists break news on Twitter. Like that emergency plane landing on the Hudson River? That news broke (with a photo, no less) on Twitter, scooping all the traditional and online news media. President Obama Twitters —- and has invited the electorate to Twitter him back. ABC did the first Twitter interview (or Twitterview -- "not a journalistic high point" says this source). I read so much stuff about Twitter's value for research, marketing and promotion, I finally broke down and, extending a cautious toe into those waters, set up a Twitter account. (It's @debbimack, if you're interested.)

I'll admit that, like tech guru David Pogue, I still don't quite know what I'm doing with Twitter. I agree that it is what you make of it. I'm just not quite sure yet what I make of it. I'm still learning about various applications for managing and using it. Trying to keep up with technological change these days feels like trying to jump aboard a maxed-out Acela.

One thing about Twitter is that you have "followers" instead of "friends." I got started by following a couple of people whose blogs I read. Next thing I knew, I was inundated with followers myself. "Mr. X is following you." "Earth Mother is following you." I'm making these up, but that's often the kind of handle you see. Even "Almighty God" is following me now. (Not making that one up.) I was getting so many followers, I was starting to feel I was being stalked by everyone. (Have I identified a new neurosis? Twitter Paranoia?)

My favorite Twitter moment was finding out Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had an account. I decided to follow him and, to my shock, he followed me back. The Terminator is following me! (My husband tells me I should've sent him a tweet or message saying, "Just so you know, I'm not Sarah Connor.")

There's something very cool about being so connected with so many people. I'll admit I can understand the fascination with these tools now. I'll admit they have powerful marketing and information resource potential. They also let you "meet" people you'd otherwise never know about.

Despite all that, Daum points out a sad fact in her column. She writes that "in a poll conducted in 2004 in which Americans were asked how many 'close confidants' they had, the most common answer was zero. As depressing as that is, it's hardly surprising. In the mind of the friendaholic, having one friend you can count on apparently just isn't as fun as having thousands of friends to count up."

That's more than depressing, it seems outright pathetic. The lesson to take away: always make time for the people you care about. If you can't see them, call them up and talk to them. Try to spend even a little time in a meaningful way with them. It's hard to find the time, but finding that time is what makes you a real friend. Think quality, not quantity here.

And accept no substitutes.

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