Flashes of Panic

I was reading Clive Thompson’s NY Times article about ambient awareness the other week (have I mentioned that I’ve been a Clive Thompson fan for years now?) and realized something. No, I’m not signing up for Twitter. But I need a policy for connections on online social networks.

The problem is that my network has several centers. Many/most college students, the audience Facebook was built for, have two principal social centers: their college, and their friends from high school. Adults who’ve been out of the bubble for a few years have a lot more. I’ve participated in several networks, face to face and online, from insular and closed to wide-open and public. Some of my friends overlap networks. And in some contexts, it’s not enough for me to connect to someone just because we’ve shared a context in the past; I may still hardly know you.

Also, different networks get different rules. Flickr, for example, realizes that not all connections are bi-directional, so there’s a lot more room to express nuance. Facebook, on the other hand, has stopped pushing people to explain the links in their network. And LinkedIn exists purely for the network. So, for those latter two, I need to think about whose links I accept or request.

On LinkedIn, for example, I’m going to ask myself: have I worked with this person? Have we been introduced and talked more than a minute or so? If I know them online, how? If we’re members of the same public forum, but haven’t necessarily interacted as individuals, do I know what they do, or even understand what they do? Would I “talk shop” with them, asking them questions or answering theirs? If so, sure, I’ll make that link.

On Facebook, it’s a little more constrained, because the size of the network is not the point of Facebook the way it is on LinkedIn. Some links (family, former teammates, etc.) are obvious. When they grey areas come up, though, in general, if I’ve run with a person, they’re in. If I’ve had one-on-one conversations with them, sure. If I’ve only met them online? Mutual membership in a larger group isn’t really enough here, I think; but if we could sit down on a park bench and play a game of Scrabble, or meet for a run, without significant awkwardness, that’s enough. (And when we ask questions like that, things get significantly simpler.)

Now Playing: I Wanna Be Ignored by Ezra Furman & The Harpoons