Friends vs. friends
December 05th 2007
When an idea gets bouncing around in my head I’ve got to get it out.
Originally I wanted to talk about this concept of some people you know online are Friends (with a capital F) and some are friends (with a lowercase f). Whitney Hoffman said something about this in an e-mail to me the other day and it has had a hook in my brain ever since.
In the end I decided to just hit record and brain dump into the microphone. What turned out is a short show that I hope gets a conversation going because I’m very interested in your thoughts. Please share them in the comments are leave a voice mail at 206-309-4729.
As suggested on the show, don’t forget to subscribe to Six Pixels of Separation when you have a moment.
[…] Full show notes […]
hey CC. two things. on the f vs. F thing. I know what you mean, but for me, the beauty of a lot of these things (and I think I find twitter the best) is that it makes people you’ve never met feel like close friends, or that you have known and know about for a long time. I’ve known of this for years, as have others, and I remember having similar experiences when I used text based MUDs and IRC etc. Twitter is just one of the latest ways of doing it for me. Personally, as well, I enjoy getting updates from both f & F. Facebook feels a more personal place for me, maybe because it’s got photos and is more visual as well, or maybe because it’s not so instant as twitter is.
and secondly, on a stream of consciousness comment, which twitter lends itself to, i actually find those kind of pod-posts more, or certainly as, interesting as the more planned ones. keep it up.
H
just called ya. have a great day dude.
This is why I prefer to call all the Friends and Buddies lists “Contacts” lists.
Utterz uses “Circle.” Twitter uses “Follow.” I think social app developers are starting to catch on that the term Friend doesn’t quite work.
And I’ve decided that Web 2.1 is where you end up using filtering and streamlining all the contacts and noise you’ve accumulated in Web 2.0.
Looking forward to more stream-of-consciousness podcasts. Torley had a good one the other day, and I’ve been experimenting with them on Utterz on Saturdays.
I thoroughly enjoyed our lunch. Stream of consciousness is good. Robin
Stefan says “intimi” (Dutch, from Latin) when he means close friends. Ancient Greek used “anankaioi” (literally, “necessary people”) to mean your nearest and dearest, the people you had the closest ties of affection and obligation to. Capital “F” and lower-case “f” work better than no distinction.
To Julien’s point, I don’t think that whether someone rates a capital “F” depends on your knowing them “in protein.” Stefan and I got engaged after 6 months of trading e-mails and one face-to-face meeting. But we all know people in various contexts whom we like but either can’t or don’t choose to develop close, continuous relationships with.
I’m so glad that this has got people talking because that was sort of the point. I was wrapping my head around the whole thing and hoped that the collective voices of others would help me sort it out.
I also love that the conversations are jumping channels. Some people are commenting here, others are calling in and then check this out. So far two people giving their feedback via Seesimic:
http://www.seesmic.com/Standalone.html?video=PH9NFqiZSJ
and then…
http://www.seesmic.com/Standalone.html?video=1ONR5Id05C
I meet TONS of people and I love helping them all out no matter how close they are to me. But, each of us in our heads since the time we were little had our own ranking system or categories in our heads for when someone was a “best friend” or now I guess BFF would be the proper term. *grin*
Social media allows us to connect and build relationships with people in a way that we couldn’t do in the past and as we move forward borders will continue to fade away. It is an exciting time.
not listened yet (at work) but answering your blog post, the best description is that people you only know online aren’t usually friends they are acquaintances - it’s when you meet them the friendship can move to the level of friend. There are very few people online who could be close to even being called a friend, it does happen but the friendship can’t really progress until you’ve met them.
Until you meet someone you might be in thrall or in love with an idea of who they are, rather than the reality…
I do think that social networks have blurred the lines and confused many of their own users about who they can call “friends” because of the terminology they use. The people we connect with on these networks are professional colleagues, classmates, people we’re fans of (or our fans), politicians, artists we like, fake people (accounts used to sucker people in or sometimes just for fun), and, yes, actual friends we already know or used to years ago. Using the term “friend” - or even one term - just doesn’t seem all that appropriate or accurate, but as another commenter suggested, these developers probably have already realized that. Overuse of the term “friend” just succeeds in devaluing it more; with all the various iterations of your TYPES of friends you can have - BFF, for example - it’s kinda already happened. What’s next? My DSDDBFFAE? (Double-secret double-dog bestest friend forever and ever!)
But I think it’s reasonable to assume that some people who succeed in connecting to you online through a network think that they have more of a connection to you, and the strength of that connection is often not measured the same way on both sides of it. For some, the more connections they have to you through more networks, the stronger they believe their connection to be. But it takes more than simply adding someone as a friend to really have a true connection, and we all know this; it still takes communication and a sharing of ideas before you can even be close to becoming a friend.
Some people just add friends to increase their numbers, like a status. They want to appear more popular or more in tuned with the network, so they add indiscriminately, and it really is a case of quantity over quality.
Most people should know exactly where they stand with people - i.e. I’m a fan of Galacticast, but that doesn’t make me tight with Rudy even though I am his “friend” on Facebook. But like you alluded to, C.C., this whole idea of “who is my Friend vs friend?” is something we grow up molding in our own minds, so the issue is quite universal.
Hi - stumbled across your feed on iTunes…glad I did! LOVE the stream of consciousness thing.
Have been thinking about the friend thing myself a lot lately….there are friends I’ve met online that I’ve never actually met in person that are closer to me than people I have in the flesh meetings with. I’ve personally found that the people who end up becoming F with me are the people with similar lives as mine (being self employed and, let’s be honest, ADD). I love being able to have text conversations with people at any time during the day. Or just popping over to someone’s house to say LET’S GET ICE CREAM! Also key is some unstructured “hang out” time. I admit I can be overly “production-focused” and sometimes that happens with friends too - like I feel like I want to see this person, but maybe they can just hang with me while I do X. Sometimes that is fine, but you really do have to just have time to veg with someone, and naturally see what bubbles up. It is harder to do this with online friends, but sometimes late night IM chats fit the bill.
Great podcast, looking forward to more!
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I am at a point in my life where find myself with no friends of my own, and an atrophied ability to make new ones. I’d rather not get into the reasons for it, and it’s nothing I can’t figure out eventually. But I’m finding that social media is offering no remedy for the situation.
Typically, the front-page lure into these sites is, “Never mind what we’re about, or why we’re not just like the last thing you joined. Sign up now! Invite your friends!” Often I’ve replied to the silent monitor image, “If I had friends, I wouldn’t need you, now would I?” It’s like someone teaching me how to make my second million dollars.
What we call friends today we used to call mail-merge. The illusion of intimacy, the easy use of first names, the important inclusion of cultural likes and dislikes — but computer-generated. This is the LAST medium I’d ever choose to pour out my heart, as I can with a friend. I’d be too concerned about my Personal Brand, and want to avoid the “naked photo syndrome” that keeps bad news cached twice as long as good news. So it’s nothing but optimistic, Chapmanesque cheer from me. If I’m down, you’ll never know it, because I’ll be offline. (I’m even a bit self-conscious about posting this comment, since it sounds so negative.)
Friendship is as old as civilization. For the first 99% of the history of this human trait, it was done in person, with the friends grunting at each other and interacting in reality. But social media completely synthesizes the experience. We now type, and call it talking. We think we feel a presence to someone else, because our monitors are 18 inches from our faces. We have to resort to acronyms for laughter. We’ve constructed such a spindly tower of metaphor for this technology that I’m afraid that the denizens of Web 3.0 (if not 2.0) will never feel compelled to leave the house. But there remains a primordial brain lobe that will not be convinced you’re a friend, or even that you exist, until we meet. At that point — maybe — we can be friends. But not until. I’m feeling a social pressure to ignore that skeptical backbrain and embrace the metaphor. I can’t be the only holdout, can I?
Social media is not friendship. It’s the dirt from which friendships can grow (I hope!). It’s a place to bring existing friendships, for interim nourishment. But it’s essentially a patch of dirt.
[…] Happy birthday today goes out to CC Chapman - one of my fellow podcasters and someone I consider a Friend (with a capital F.) (See Friends vs friends.) […]
CC,
The distinctions you and the above commenters make about various online forms of “friendship” are good ones.
Take a look at XFN (the XHTML Friends network), a simple way of expressing a variety of forms of friendship (like friend, acquaintance, contact) on any of your pages on the web with hyperlinks, which was developed, to reflect perhaps the 80% (certainly not all, deliberately, to keep it simple) of common real world online friendship references:
http://gmpg.org/xfn/
You can even express that you have “met” someone, or that they are a co-worker or just a colleague.
Blogging tools like WordPress even have built-in support for XFN in their blog rolls:
http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-implementations
Many social networks now support XFN as well, including Twitter, which reflects the “follow” relationship as a “contact”.
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-xfn-friends-lists
Thanks,
Tantek
I already left you an audio comment about this one.
I think of everyone as a “Ph”riend. That’s so much cooler, eh? Like how the cool kids call things “Phat!”
Cheers,
Dave