I can still remember the first time a classmate told me he didn’t want to be my friend. It was first grade, his name was Jared, and he didn’t like the fact that my mother included my brother in our play dates. At the tender age of 7, Jared felt this was an unnecessary intrusion on our friendship and decided to end it. The pain of my first ‘friend’ rejection was palpable and seared through my heart like a hot knife through butter.
Time passed and since then, I’ve gone through many friends in grade school, college and my professional life. Along the way, I’ve had to curate this circle of friends. I’ve divorced myself of people that fall into the ‘batteries not included’ category (people who suck energy from you, but provide little to no value in return) and surrounded myself with individuals whose time and attention I truly cherish.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more discerning about who I spend time with and how much time I devote to these relationships. And yet for some odd reason, I haven’t been able to apply this ‘friendship filter’ to my identity in the world of social media.
I, like so many others, accept friends and business associates on Facebook and LinkedIn with reckless abandonment. In fact, I don’t think I’ve rejected anyone in either forum since activating these applications. Truth told, I’ve ‘archived’ a few people on LinkedIn, but never overtly said, ‘no, I do not accept your invitation…’
My alter ego often attempts to liberate me but always seems to fail. He encourages me to write back to randoms seeking my friendship on Facebook with a, ‘Who you kidding…we’re not friends – borderline acquaintances maybe – but friends, I don’t think so…the answer is no.’ My alter ego suggests I decline 25% of the LinkedIn invitations I receive and brandish the fact that I’ve limited my inner-circle to a chosen few. But, the polite Brad graciously accepts these invitations and moves on with my day.
So friends, my question is when will digital social media truly replicate terrestrial behavior?
When will we become liberated enough to say, ‘I’m respectfully declining your friendship’ or ‘Thanks for the invite, but I don’t want to include you in my LinkedIn professional constellation of contacts’?
I surmise the time is closer than you might think. We’re all getting inundated with inputs and feeds and grasping for simplicity in our daily lives. Less will become more in the world of social media and our friendships and contacts will be culled to represent only the people we like, respect and value.
My parting words of wisdom…liberate yourself by creating micro-community friendships and business contacts today.
Stumble It!
Interesting. This has been a thought of mine since Friendster. With a name like Friendster I was picky about who was on my friend’s list. When I fell out of “real” friendships I would delete them from my online list. Was that wrong? I just thought it weird to have the face of someone I don’ t keep in touch with in my friend’s list. Oh, it’s all too confusing. In the end I decided to go the über-liberation route and deleted all social networking sites, with the exception of LinkedIn. I felt that it has such an honest service. It was all about one’s career. However, the network of contacts section can be unpromising. Many people are networked with one another without knowledge of each other’s work ethic. But, to me it’s a great way to get in touch with someone in related industries. +n
i guess this is why u haven’t accepted my linkedin invite.
There is a Zen phrase (I know of your affinity for such things) that “the key to the door of heaven also opens the door to hell.”
That’s technology for you. Look what email has done for (and to) letter writing (and writing in general). For all the benefits of email, I still miss the considered correspondence in pulpy envelope with lined paper and the smear of ballpoint ink.
Not that I could give up email for a day.
Twittering is even more extreme. Even the intentionality of addressing a message TO someone is gone. The value of the content of tweets is usually quite appropriate to their delivery mechanism.
Other social media are having the same effect. We all have friend lists that are miles long and only inches deep. Are we really more connected? Or just collecting baseball cards.
A LinkedIn profile with 500+ names on it says a lot about a person – good and bad.
Now that everyone ‘knows’ everyone else there’s not a big value in ‘knowing’ anyone – at least at the LinkedIn level.
Accepting or rejecting names on social networks is almost beside the point.
Sorry to get to this so late.
It’s an interesting topic.
I’m like you- I accept everyone who links to me. Well, everyone I’ve actually met IRL or had online conversations with, anyway.
Occasionally I’ll get requests from people I don’t know at all. And I’ll always write a quick note to them explaining that I regard a LinkedIn link as an explicit endorsement and since I don’t know them at all, I can’t accept their invitation.
But to your main point, there’s been a lot of talk about how to classify our social media connection. Plaxo Pulse tries to break them into 3 categories: Friend, Work or Family.
Family is easy. But what if I consider X a work friend and X considers me a friend-friend. If I like X, chances are I’m not going to risk offending her by saying “no you’re not.” But then I do the math and think, “Well, if X is my friend-friend… why not W, Y & Z, with whom I’m actually much closer than I am with X.” And so on and so on.
But if we’re being Zen about this, as per “C” – it’s probably better to err on the side of kindness.
Karma and all that, you know.
Typically, I don’t consider “social network” friends to be on the same level as “real life friends.” I think of the two things as different “friend media” if you will…there are friends, best friends, casual acquaintances, social network friends, etc. So if someone adds me on LinkedIn or Facebook, I accept. Sometimes they just add you like a notch in the belt. But sometimes they use the social network to actually introduce themselves in a mature, socially adept way. Which is pretty cool.
Here’s something, though: I have a LinkedIn contact that I’ve worked with very little. Nice guy, seems okay, but the jury is still out for sure. He’s asked me for a recommendation. I archived the request; I’ll add anyone, but my explicit recommendation…that’s something else. It gets more interesting: A couple of months went by and he’s emailed me asking for the recco again. So now I’m backed into a corner where I have to tell him “Sorry, but we haven’t quite worked together enough for me to do that.”
Now, if I just wrote the stupid recco, he’d be happy, he’d probably be more fun to deal with in the future, and I wouldn’t have to embarrass him. But instead…
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation
Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Hexagram!!!
[...] with Facebook and the manufactured interactions it stimulates on several occasion’s (see “Rejection: Painful But Inevitable on Facebook and LinkedIn”) but this video pretty much sums it [...]
[...] builds on a post I wrote back in May, “Rejection: Painful But Inevitable on Facebook and LinkedIn”. In this post, I asked: When will we become liberated enough to say, ‘I’m respectfully [...]
Got this rejection on LinkedIn recently. Not so much painful as hilarious. http://tinyurl.com/c2y3rn
It was unexpected, though.
I know it is a late comment … so be it.
That is an interesting issue you addressing… and I do agree. Less is definitely more. However the relationships on the social networking channels are gained in a different way than in our daily lives. And my present experience is: before you come to the “less” you have to go through the bunch of “more”.
My fellow on Facebook shared this link and I’m not dissapointed at all that I came to your blog.