what kind of friends are we?
August 16th, 2009 • posts i've written
Did you know that through the Foursquare iPhone app you can call or text any of your Foursquare friends directly? Yep. All of your Foursquare buddies now have your phone number.
From the glut of friend requests I’ve been receiving I’d have to imagine that many people are just using the ‘friend everyone I know from Twitter/Facebook/email’ feature during sign-up. I have to wonder if I had DM’d those twitter followers asking for their phone number if they would have so willingly obliged.
I would bet that most Foursquare users don’t know you can click on a friend and make a call and that this is unconscious sharing of that information. However, when I was overhearing some colleagues complaining about this feature of the app, “wait, they all have my number now?!?,” I was a bit in shock that we’re all glad to share our present location, but not our phone numbers. But that isn’t right. We’re only sharing our location when we want other people to know it; and we can control just how that message is distributed – to only Foursquare, to Foursquare + Twitter, or the trifecta, Foursquare + Twitter + Facebook. (can you see that I’m at Clover’s Coffee Shop right now, because I’m doing this as hard as I possibly can)
But this all certainly raises questions about how we define our level of intimacy among our peers with the use of digital tools to manage those relationships. It seems that we’ve woven an intricate web of influencing factors: the social norms within these digital networks (it seems rude not to follow back someone – but then do I turn off mobile notifications of direct messages?), the reach of a network’s message across devices, the likelihood of interacting with that person offline, their place among our larger peer group (are they an awesome strategist my friends all follow?), their physical location and proximity to us (can I stalk them and find the best coffee shops?), how physically attractive they are (by their avatar or FB party pics), their relationship status, and a million of other more personal needs/desires that person might fulfill.
I’m not prepared to say whether our digital environments have made this process more or less conscious, but they’ve certainly given us more degrees of intimacy to play with.
All of this also pushed me down the road of considering the degree of intimacy of our digital relationships and its effect on populations big and small.
What follow is a first sketch of that relationship. I’m interested in your feedback on fleshing this diagram out and the interactions that occur between the two extremes.
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This is really interesting but I thing the concept of intimacy itself is really complicated. A couple of variables on intimacy I can think of:
1. Frequency of contact (don’t think this can determine intimacy on it’s own)
2. Affinity and interests
3. Level ‘professionalism’ vs. ‘personal’
4. Desirability of relationship?
5. Level of synchronicity
6. Have we met IRL? How does this create a bond?
7. Social hierarchy – this is a bit anthropological but it’s clear that there are hierarchies which exist. Clearly there are people I follow on Twitter that I feel are ‘more important’ somehow than I and this is no doubt subjective.
8. Maturity of relationship.
That’s just a couple of random thoughts, by no means complete. I think there really is some thinking to be done around this question of ‘What Kind of Friend are We?’. It’s a fascinating question because it’s one of those awkward moments you have very young relationships and friendships before they bed down into something which both people understand.
Can and should this even be classified? Facebook and LinkedIn do a terrible job here by forcing you to define the relationship in such a clunky and disposable manner.