Social connectivity not networking!
What I need the most?
Social networking is the greatest thing we have come up with. We can now reach out to people more farther than we once could. Especially the generation that came before the internet/social networking bubble understand this well. But I think that the social networking as what we have today needs more vision to it.
Lets talk about the way how our facebook friendships work.
After signing up, you add a few of your known friends and then you add more friends from the circles of your friends. You post your activities on a virtual billboard. People who are interested in your activities will express their interest. You talk to those people. And on it goes…
Now how about conventional way?
You meet a person accidentally or by a deliberate arrangement made by someone else. You know nothing about them yet to start exchanging ideas. Slowly you explore more about them. The more you interact, the more you know about them. And in time you are friends already. There is no formal agreement where you propose friendship and the other party accepts.
Friendship just happens.And Friendship is earned.
This very fundamental attribute of earning trust by interaction is lost with the fanciness of online social networking. You already know a lot about the other person before even you want to know about them. And once you have made them as a friend, they become a part of your collection of friend tropes on an online shelf and possibly you will forget many such connections in time .
Facebook has become a pokedex for people.
What facebook serves is that, it provides you outreach. It expands your neighbourhood virtually to an insanely extreme scale. This is what exactly our current social networking platforms do. With the ambiguity induced due to the over use and misuse of the word friendship, it has lost its meaning and power to it. You don’t go around calling your neighbours as your friends. You neighbours are neighbours. You friends are can be your neighbours. But not all neighbours are necessarily your friends.
There are two major problems with both conventional and online forms of social networking.
- Continued connectivity
- Identity
The value of a friendship is mentally evaluated by the amount of effort you put into it to hold on to it. The number of quality moments you make with your friend empowers friendship. Now, is there a way to ensure the same on both forms of social networking?
With your outward appearance both physically and social character, you build a character for your self. A part of it is you being absolutely yourself and the other part is crafted to let yourself fit into the society you live in.
As an individual, you can be happy with yourself if only both your outward and inward personality/character got same attention. With your current outward personality’s weight crushing the inward personality, you are constantly in war with yourself. Disagreeing with yourself and hating yourself unknowingly.
You want your trusted friends to know about your inward personality too. You are basically looking for a shrink who can sit on the other side of the confession box and listen to you. Not just some guy on the other side but someone you are can trust. Your friends.
Some level of anonymity is actually good. People need privacy. People need to feel and be secure. If only the same could be achieved by online social networking, it would be a little more complete.
