Last week, after much peer pressure from Sandy Hubbard and Jeannette Baer, I worked to get an invite to come into my inbox, and I joined up with Google Plus. I had been wanting to wait a bit to see if the buzz about Google+ was going to remain hot and heavy for say, a month or so. I’m not really an early adopter type of person. But Sandy and Jeannette are trusted friends and they said I should try it, so, I did.
I’m kind of having a problem with Google+ to be honest with you. It’s not anything privacy-related. It’s not a huge issue, perhaps. But ya see, on Google+, as you make contact with people, you can put them in a “circle.” It’s like categorizing people. When you start out you have a friends circle, an acquaintances circle, a family circle, and I think there’s one more too. When I see that people have added me to their circles, I feel a sort of obligation to indicate that I see their existence there, but I’ve pretty much just been stuffing everyone into my “friends” circle. I don’t want to go through the trouble of categorizing people, and I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings who uses the word “friend” differently than I do.
The whole process has made me think about the word “friend” as it exists in real life and as it exists in the online world, so I thought maybe we could talk about that and see where you come out on this issue.
We shook hands. We’re friends now.
When I was in fifth grade, I was going through kind of a rough time. I had been going to a private school and had met all of those kids when I was in nursery school. I think there were 62 kids total in my school when I left. When I was in fourth grade, I had some health problems that required a surgery. Both of my paternal grandparents passed away, 6 months to the day from each other. By the time I was getting ready for my first day of public school in fifth grade, I felt pretty darned scared. These kids had all known each other since at least kindergarten. I was an interloper, and not only that, but I was a tinier than normal interloper. Meeting people with confidence was not easy, and befriending people was a puzzle I couldn’t seem to fit together.
Let’s just say that I didn’t get invited to a whole lot of birthday parties when I was in fifth grade.
Because I had such a hard time breaking into the social stream (trying to do so when everyone is hitting puberty is also interesting) I highly over-valued positive interactions I had with other kids. If someone smiled at me, I felt sure we were friends. Anyone who was remotely pleasant, in fact, became a friend of mine, at least from my point of view.
As you might imagine and guess, my expectations of these people who I had deemed friends far exceeded what they felt obligated to do. They had nodded at me. I was buying BFF necklaces. There was a strong disconnect there. I had devalued the concept of “friend” so that literally anyone could be one.
I tell this story because I’m a little worried that social media, or the online existence we are all here using, is doing the same thing to the “friend” concept that I did in fifth grade. We are using the word “friend” so much that it is beginning to lose its meaning.
Back to Google Plus
So, I sign in to Google+ and I find out that a couple of women I went to college with are on there. I have known both of them for probably, gosh, 15 years now. I lived in the same dorm as them. Ate most of my meals with them for a good year or more. We saw each other go through pretty icky stuff, and we also watched each other go through pretty cool and awesome stuff.
I put them in my “friends” circle.
Then there are people who I just adore talking to online. Some of these folks I have had the pleasure of talking with in real life on the phone. Others have been there to cheer me up or offer me advice when stuff in the online world didn’t seem to be going too well. I would never want to put those folks into a category called “acquaintances” because they have been too supportive to merit that kind of “barely know you” group. On the other hand, and I say this with all love and respect, it’s not quite the same with them as it is with my college friends.
The problem I’m struggling with is that in the online world, those kinds of nuances are awfully hard to clarify. Are you my online friend? Sure, but if you’ve offered me kindness or legitimate support, that doesn’t seem quite accurate. But it’s different from those folks you’ve interacted with for years and years. How can you name a circle so that all of that becomes clear?
The online world is, in the end, very 2-dimensional. It’s very black or white. On Facebook, you’re either friends or you’re not. But it’s just not like that in the real world.
What do you think?
So I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Are we using the word “friend” too freely in the online world? Does it mean something else now? If you are on Google+ or are planning to join, how would you “circle” people?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Image by Michal Zacharzewski. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mzacha
Well, I think a good thing about G+ is that the person you add to a circle doesn’t know in WHICH circle you’ve added him. You can’t hurt anybody feeling this way :)
“Then there are people who I just adore talking to online” So why not create a circle called “people who I just adore talking to online” ? And don’t forget, a person can be in multiple circles.
The whole philosophy about circles really fits me, and I hope you can’t find peace with it too ;)
I think a “friend” is whatever you want it to be. Use them to organize the groups you send messages to.
You probably don’t share the same messages with your boss that you do with your parents and they get different info than your friends. Put them all in different circles.
When you post you can select Public (everyone) or Your Circles or share with just Friends or share Family or Family and Friends. It lets you select your audience. I think Facebook will do that as well but it was never obvious or simple over there.
Kudos to a very well written article.
Hey, Margie!
I’m like, wow, I wanted to comment on this article, then wanted to look at the author box to commend the author and betcha by golly wow, it was you :) Great feeling.
Yeah, I can totally understand what you’re saying and I’d like to add that I guess that it is. Black and white, superficial, etc.
For me though, it’s a matter of how we perceive our own existence in the online realm.
Are our online personas really representative of “the real us” in real life?
Everything follows from that question. “What is a real friend?” would ultimately redound to our own self perception and how we extend this “being” to others.
Personally, the only real friend that I have is my wife though she rarely stays online.
In the online world, I try to project the “real me” though sometimes, ok, oftentimes, people may misunderstand my statements or even me in totality, but that’s ok, since I know that there’s a person here beside me physically, who can grasp the way I perceive our own shared realities. That’s what matters.
I don’t know, sometimes giving the word “friend” a deeper definition is tantamount to making our circles smaller and more exclusive.
By doing so, we are in effect limiting our engagement with the online world.
I try to keep the Internet at arms length yet spend half of my waking time on it since I share the same common goals with most of the people I interact with.
In that sense, that is what an “online friend” may be for me. People who share the same interests whether for business or for personal reasons.
Sorry about the long comment, I tend to do that :)
P.S.
I can be a real online friend to anyone who’d want to. But the question is, do they consider me to be a friend or not. There’s not much point in having a one way friendship right? :)
Firstly, your “friends” on g+ can’t actually see what circles you’ve assigned them so you won’t run the risk of being embarrassed unless they specifically ask you about it..which is unlikely if you’re not that close to begin with. As for the gray area of what constitutes a friend, you are absolutely right – facebook doesn’t accurately portray what a friend is supposed to be. I think this is the strength of g+. You can finally set things straight and have at least somewhat of a clearer perception of the various relations in your life. This comes at the small price of taking an extra few seconds, or few minutes, to assign newly added contacts to an appropriate circle
This is one thing I like about facebook – you can categorize people into “lists” and change the privacy settings for each list, and these friends have no idea they’re even being blocked from content on your profile. Or that you put them on the “two faced friends” list you’ve created.
Facebook is definitely ahead in terms of privacy and categorization.
I knew Margie would have great observations once she arrived on Google+. The G+ world is better because of her!