Social Graph Blues

Over the last ten years we have seen our social graph materialize before our eyes. Facebook and Twitter have allowed us to learn a lot more about people and enabled us to keep up relationships in a way previously unavailable. Expectedly, these tools have lured us to spend more and more of our time with them. Somewhere along the way we have been exposed to another side of the social graph which was not so obvious. Despite the highlight reel that these mediums produce, from time to time, there is not so great news that crawls across our newsfeed.

Ten years ago we would catch up for lunch with an old friend and the conversation would be riddled with did-you-hear-about's,have-you-seen's, and what-ever-happened-to's. At the time of this lunch our social graph was comprised of friends whom we were close to and not close to.

At our hypothetical lunch we were likely to hear some bad news, but bad news seemed a bit more distant than it does today. It usually involved a person from our past whom we were not close to anymore. With this evolution of our social graph, we have a new category of people in our lives. People we are kinda close to.

I have a whole lot of Facebook friends that I'm kinda close to. I watch their lives like a movie trailer - catching bits and pieces of what they are about. In fact I would say that half of my Facebook friends fall into this category. I bet the same is true for most people.

Today receiving bad news is different. I think most of us have scrolled down our Facebook newsfeed and watched a post emerge containing something awful. It takes your breath away. Especially when you look down and see that it was posted just now. This stumbling across someone’s loss, tragedy or other bad news is new to us. In that moment we face our social graph in a way that we hadn't in the past. Bad news from this group we are kinda close to used to wait for lunches where we were more insulated. Now it's right in front of us - as it happens - and we care more than we used to.

Because of this, we find ourselves being involved in more events that cause us to think about our own mortality and more time asking why bad things happen to good people.

Given the choice, I wouldn't go back to the previous social graph model. Helping and supporting people in times of tragedy is our duty as humans and this shift is causing more frequent reminders that our lives are fragile. In my experience this helps to gently guide us in the right direction and appreciate more what we have.

It's an interesting side to the social graph that I haven't heard talked about much.