(January 07, 2008) The commoditization of friendship is just the next step in the development of prime real estate on the word wide web. Do you remember when ‘community’ meant a place with buildings and people or at least a sense of belonging? Can you recall talent pipelines full of people not data?
Language has not kept pace with the changes that come from and through technology. The relentless marketing machine dumbs down experience in order to standardize terminology. It’s how strip mining works in cyberspace.
You might trace it back to the Clintons. Remember “Friends of Bill”? That was the term of endearment for the world’s largest (at the time) political Rolodex. Friends of Bill paid small fortunes to attend Renaissance Weekends. Being a friend, in theis context, was more important than actually knowing Mr. Clinton.
Recently, I asked a fellow who I’ve met a couple of times, swapped email with a couple of times and am generally aware of in the industry to be my friend on Facebook.
He said:
Hey John,are we “friends” ?i know we “know” of each other virtually … but i was actually going to try and limit my facebook to people I actually converse with 1:1
wanna start that ?
I replied
I went to bed wondering about the same thing last night. I really value words/concepts like friend, network and community. They are getting sliced really thin. Community means mailing list. Network means database. Friend means record.I don’t particularly like it.Have you noticed, though, that there’s an interesting new category? I think of it as people who are aware of each other and should be friends?
If we needed to talk to each other, we just would. No intermediaries or networking required.
That’s what I meant when I sent you the invite on Facebook. We’ve known of each other a long time and would most likely pick up the phone if the other called. The difference is as simple as I’m responding to your concern rather than going “okay” and hitting the enter button.
That may be too thinly sliced for your tastes.
If I’m beyond your cutline, that makes perfect sense to me.
However you decide, it might be interesting for us to have a deeper conversation about the implications and limits of friendship online in various settings.
Is one setting different from another in Profound ways? (Can you have 89 Million connections on Linked in and 3 friends on Facebook with a straight face? Why?
Do the differences in setting make a difference in Recruiting technique, reach or research results?
Like that.
Thanks for provoking my thinking another notch and good luck.
What do you think?
John Sumser. – © 2008 Two Color Hat, Inc. Santa Rosa, CA
