Stephanie Booth on Too Many People

Stephanie Booth's post on Too Many People is not about over-population: it's about over-connection. Or maybe connection burnout.

Stephanie sounds a bit world-weary, which is maybe one of the side effects of living in a stream with a gross of friends updating us every few minutes about their location, food habits, or minor annoyances. It like watching Koyaanisqatsi: both uplifting and frustrating at the same time.

(And her post comes at an interesting moment for me, since I just passed my 1,000th 'friend' at Facebook, which precipitated an experiment. I have 1,000 friends there, who knows how many reading my blogs, and hundreds reading my Twitter stream... but I can't seem to scare up a single person to have dinner with me tonight through these techniques (see Starving For Thai: Basil At 7:30pm 6 October -- and this tweet). Yes, of course, it might be that everyone knows I am just an offensive windbag, but I usually do pretty well the old fashioned way, emailing people. This is just a test of the emergency dining network.)

[from Too Many People]

We don’t tell some people certain things. We don’t mention that we’re meeting with Judy after lunch. We act a bit more distant with Tom than with Peter, hoping he’ll “get the message”. We tell Susie we’re too busy to see her, but drop everything when Mike invites us on a date.

Online, it’s even easier. We don’t respond to IMs or e-mails. We read certain blogs but not others. We chat absent-mindedly with Joe who is telling us his life-story, while we have a heart-to-heart discussion with Jack. We mark our status as DND but still respond to our best friend. We receive Twitter notifications on our phone from a select few, and keep a distracted eye on others’ updates. We lie more easily.

So, online, we actually have more freedom of movement (mainly because our emotional reactions are not so readily readable on the moment) to deal with some of these “awkward relationships” than offline — particularly, I would say, what I’d call the asymmetrical ones. From a networking point of view, being online is a huge advantage: the technology allows you to “stay in touch” with people who are geographically estranged from you, with a greater number of people than you could actually manage offline (”continuous partial friendship“), and it also allows you to keep in your network people who would probably not be in your offline circle, because it helps you tone down relationship awkwardness.

[...]

To some, maybe, I’m “just another fan” — that I can live with, even if nobody likes being “just another fan”. But does one have to make conversation and appreciate every reader of one’s blog? If you like somebody’s blog, does that automatically mean they’re going to like you? Find your presence or conversation interesting? The hard reality of celebrity and fandom, even micro, is that the answer is “no”. It doesn’t mean that as a fan, I’m not an interesting person in my own right. It doesn’t mean that if I got to spend enough time with the person I’m fan of, they wouldn’t appreciate my company and find it enriching. But the fact I’m a fan, or a reader, doesn’t earn me any rights.

And increasingly, I’ve noted over the four or five last conferences I attended that there seem to be more people who want to get to know me than people I want to get to know. Or people who are interested in me for business reasons, but of the type where they get something out of me, and I don’t get much out of them. Or people who have been reading my blog for ages and are happy to be able to talk to me, but I know nothing of them.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t want any more people. I can’t keep up with my people, to start with. I feel spread too thin. I want to deepen relationships, not collect superficial ones. Contacts are useful for business, and though I’ve said many a time that the line between business and personal is more and more blurred, business contacts do not have to become personal friends. I know there are lots of wonderful people out there I don’t know. Lots of wonderful people I’ve maybe brushed aside or pushed away when suffering from “people overload”, when all I want to do is climb into my cave and stay there.

Stephanie's 'spread too thin' comment reminded me of a line from The Lord Of The Rings, where Bilbo says to Gandalf "I feel thin, like butter spread over too much bread.' Had Stephanie been a bit more light-hearted about this, she might have taken the tone that Bilbo emplyed when he made his dramatic departure from his Hobbiton birthday party/farewell celebration: "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Even at basic human scale, with a circle of friends bounded at Dunbar's Constant (good name for a bar, by the way) of 150 plus or minus, we can still like some more than others, be held in high or low regard among the group, lust for some, and be stalked by others. It's a mixed bag, a bagatelle.

With significantly more contacts there is a greater variability, and more turbulence in the flow. And the flow itself becomes a figure in the circle in a way, because it is so instumental. It takes on a character on its own, and like the third person in a conversation, it can act like a strange attractor, distorting or amplifying the chaos that we are trying so hard to make sense of.

But, I am an optimist and an advocate for social tools, so I look at the sunny side and see the chatter of a crowd of friends, but on a cloudy day it can seem like being pulled by a boisterous crowd at New Years in some direction you do not really want to go, or even the ravening of a faceless, keening mob.

We have to look to the tool makers to build in safeguards that promote human scale, that keep controls in our hands, that provide greater and greater nuance in online relationships. Otherwise, burnout, backlash, and bail-out is inevitable.

Comments

[Bob Warfield]

The web brings choice, but it is not concise, it isn't intimate, it isn't time efficient, it isn't peaceful, and most of that choice is about extremely shallow variations. Those who focus on these scarcities are focusing on something much more valuable than adding another choice:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/the-biggest-thing-the-web-brings-is-choice-what-does-choice-make-scarce/