Friend Me

On January 19th at about 9:00 a.m., I got a flurry of emails at the office from members of the worship committee saying that we had no speaker for February 22, followed by a call from SG asking if I could speak on that day. Oh, and by the way, they would need the topic and blurb yet that day because of the newsletter deadline.

The flurry of messages was part of over 400 email messages that I received at the office that day. I received another couple of dozen email messages on my personal email at home, over 20 at my on-line email, and one at the Long Tale Press email. Long Tale Press is the publishing company that I started nearly a year ago. It being a typical day, on Twitter, I received about 800 updates; on Facebook, my friends updated their status 60 times, plus several postings of links, causes, photos, and funny gifts. I got journal updates from my 63 Live Journal friends and several communities that I follow.

That was the incoming side. It was Monday, so I edited my weekly mobile communications newsletter, Going Mobile, which required quickly scanning over 300 industry news stories and summarizing the top ones. I sent the email version out to 250 people, posted it to my blog for another 150 followers to read, recorded it as a podcast for a loyal listening audience of 35 people. I then posted to my writing blog, updated my Facebook status four times, and sent half a dozen Tweets on Twitter.

It was just another Monday morning. And SG wanted to know what my topic would be for a sermon in a month. I thought, “If you want to know what’s on my mind, Friend Me.” And thus, this talk was born.

I have so many on-line friends, it is hard to keep one separated from another. My family jokes about “Dad and his on-line friends.” Sometimes it looks overwhelming. Keeping up with seven email accounts, three blogs, four social networks, and occasionally looking at those dozen or so others that I’ve joined but never done anything with is an overwhelming prospect. But in thinking about those networks, I realized that they were very distinct, and that they provided very different benefits. And it led me to think about how we compartmentalize our lives, and our friends.

The worship committee has come to realize that if they want me to actually see something in a timely manner then they should send it to me at work. The friends and hundreds of businesses who send messages to me at my personal home account will sometimes wait days before I open the inbox. I disconnected my email from instantly arriving on my phone because it is too distracting—and really, how many email messages do I get that have to have my attention instantly?

As I was thinking about how I engage with on-line friends, I realized that the reason I have so many different accounts is because I compartmentalize. I can’t have every message from friends come to my work email. I try, as much as possible, to separate my work life and my personal life. There are certainly times that I bring work home with me, and I talk to my work associates about what I did over the weekend and Quinne’s ice skating. But for practical purposes, I mostly keep work email for work and only for work.

Similarly, I compartmentalize my friends.

In 2004 I joined National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo and blogged my first NaNoWriMo novel in November. Since then I’ve blogged 5 more. The local writers group all communicated on Live Journal. So I created my Live Journal account to talk to other writers about writing. Personal information creeps in over the course of four years, but even today my primary focus on the Live Journal account with my 63 friends is on writing—what we are writing, what we know about writing, what we can share about writing. I knew my first dozen or so friends on Live Journal in real life—or IRL—from local NaNoWriMo write-ins. The next dozen or so were people who were “writing buddies” on the NaNoWriMo forums. And from there it grew as I met people on-line through writing communities. I've met about a quarter of my friends on Live Journal IRL.

Facebook serves a completely different purpose for me. Three-quarters of my Facebook friends are people that I have met, worked with, and have been or have become friends IRL. Many of these people are co-workers, but this is where my friends also include my daughter and my wife. (DW joined due to peer pressure just last week. I found out through "people you might know.") In spite of the fact that any exposure on one of these sites is total exposure, Facebook is where I keep track of real life friends. When DD asked if she could have a Facebook site last summer, I agreed if she accepted me as a friend. What I saw was that this was not where she was crying out for friendship from anonymous people as parents often fear, but was where she kept up with her real life friends. Most of her friends on Facebook I’ve met IRL myself, and it is great that she feels so confident now about her ability to keep in touch with her friends that we no longer feel constrained to staying in this area if a great opportunity comes available in New York or New Delhi.

I was recently contacted on Facebook by a former co-worker back in Minneapolis who was an usher at our wedding. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in about 17 years. Suddenly she is back in my life, reliving bits of our training background in Minneapolis, people we know, and talking about our families. I got a message from my college roommate when he joined Facebook. I hadn’t seen him in ten years and it was quite the blast to reconnect and see pictures of his family, including his wife who was also a good friend in college. Finally, a high school friend that I hadn’t seen since graduation in 1968 picked up our relationship exactly where it left off then when he contacted me his first month on Facebook saying: “someone once told me that you played piano like you had wooden clubs for fingers. as i remember my singing was excellant!” I responded: “Bill Grogan’s goat thought I did fine.” Two apparently meaningless sentences that connected friends from 40 years ago.

It was also on Facebook that I posted that I was part of the Microsoft layoffs that were announced on January 22. On Facebook I had a sudden raft of messages wishing me well and asking where I was looking. A Facebook group was formed called “Help Microsoft Friends Get a Job.” I’ve received three referrals on Facebook and an invitation to a job fair for people affected by the layoffs. It amazed me that that was where support came from during the tough times.

Okay, then there is Twitter. For me, Twitter is a professional/social community. I opened my Going Mobile blog to the public and made the announcement on Twitter. I started adding a lot of people who did work in or were interested in mobile communications. Nearly half my blog hits came as referrals from my Twitter posts. Then I started gathering readers and writers to follow, and when we opened the virtual doors of Long Tale Press last July, we had a Twitter Party or a Twarty. We talked about what was happening at Long Tale, welcomed new users, talked about the books and the process.

Gradually, I’ve eliminated the people I followed who just talked about community, and am reducing the number of mobile communications contacts since I’m not publishing that blog now. I have fully entered the community of writers, editors, and publishers on Twitter. While we do talk about more mundane things on Twitter, my focus has been on the progress we are making with the publication of our next book, bits about the publishing process, and conversations with writers in 140 character bursts regarding our current works in progress. In real life, I have met only one or two percent of my Twitter followers.

At a conference on building on-line communities two years ago, I met Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, an on-line retailer that started off selling shoes. He talked about his corporate culture and even gave the attendees a book of the Zappos corporate culture that was written by the employees. It was amazing. I follow Tony on Twitter and recently he wrote a full blog entry about his Twitter experience and what it meant. He wrote right after the inauguration, which he attended with the president of Twitter.

Tony says that Twitter has helped him grow personally in four ways. Twitter reminds him of who he wants to be and what he wants Zappos to stand for. Twitter encourages him to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way. Twitter makes him think about how to make a positive impact on other people’s lives. And Twitter helps him notice and appreciate the little things in life. http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/ceo-and-coo-blog/2009/01/25/how-twitter-can-make-you-a-better-and-happier-person

While Tony’s experience on Twitter has, he believes, helped him become a better person, his experience is not universal. The instant nature of communication on Twitter has its traps and many people have fallen into them. A popular notion that has circulated amongst the party-set of Twitter-users is that friends don’t let friends Tweet drunk. But it doesn’t require inebriation to make a huge faux pas on Twitter. A story circulated recently about a consultant who arrived in a prominent Southeastern city to give a seminar on using social media to improve business. The first thing he did was post a Tweet from the airport declaring that this was the last place in the world he could imagine someone wanting to live. Many of his seminar attendees who had great civic pride had read the Tweet and were not impressed. A formal apology followed.

When I realized that I compartmentalize my online friends into distinct groups, I realized that we do the same thing IRL. I met KD from here at church at a grocery store just before Christmas and couldn’t think for the life of me who she was. The same thing has happened to me with several other people that I know in one environment, but simply don’t recognize in another—several from here at church. Possibly the most dramatic example of this occurred some years ago in Las Vegas. I was working a trade-show booth at a time when a small company could afford to send only a limited number of people so we worked the booth for the entire 8 or 10-hour day. It was exhausting. I went back to my hotel, got out of my uniform, and went out to eat. Afterward, on my way through the casino back to the hotel room, I decided to try my hand at blackjack for a while. I got to talking to the guy next to me at the table and finally said, “You look really familiar to me. Do I know you?” He answered, “We just spent the last 8 hours working next to each other on the show floor and our offices are across the hall from each other.”

We sometimes associate our friends and acquaintances with a specific social situation so much that we don’t recognize them outside that environment. Perhaps we do that not only as a way of compartmentalizing our relationships, but also of isolating ourselves. For some reason, we expect our political leaders and entertainers to have lives that are so transparent that we can measure everything they do against our personal standards; but we do not want ourselves exposed to that microscopic examination by everyone we know. We want to know that our work associates are separate from our church associates and that we won’t run into people from church or work in the local bar or casino. Or if we do, they will be discreet enough not to notice.

There is an old story of a minister in a small town church who rode a bicycle as his only means of transportation. He was devastated one morning to find his bicycle was missing. He couldn’t ride out into the country to visit parishioners. He couldn’t get to the hospital to visit the sick. He discussed the problem with his next door neighbor who had sage advice for the young minister. “Preacher,” he said, “everyone in a five mile radius comes here for church. Sunday morning preach a sermon on the ten commandments and when you get to ‘thou shalt not steal’ I’ll keep an eye out for the person who blushes and we’ll know who took your bicycle.” This seemed like a good idea, so on Sunday morning the young minister delivered a fire and brimstone sermon on the ten commandments. He was fired up. The neighbor positioned himself where he could watch the congregation for the eighth commandment, certain that they would catch the thief.

But then the minister changed his tone. He spoke of the love of God and his willingness to forgive; that no matter how grievous the sin God was a loving God and called on us to forgive each other as he forgives us. The sermon was so beautiful—so moving—that people left in tears, thanking the minister for such beautiful words of inspiration and comfort. The last person out of the church was the neighbor who agreed about how moving the sermon was. “But,” said the neighbor, “you didn’t get to ‘thou shalt not steal’ and now we will never know who took your bicycle.” The minister blushed and confessed, “I got to the seventh commandment and remembered where I left it.”

We seem to know that we can’t always live up to the standards that we profess; therefore we try to isolate ourselves from those who might judge us. In a blog-post by MSNBC reporter Bob Sullivan, Bob says:

I know a computer science professor who runs the same Facebook experiment every semester. He invites his students to stand up in front of the room and show everyone their Facebook page on the big screen. No one has ever taken him up on the offer.

Why? They’re embarrassed, of course.

Moments later, the irony sinks in. Every one of them seems happy to share all those funny photographs, witty Wall postings and status updates with everyone on the planet. They just don't want to do it in public, in person.

The truth is that the notion of privacy that we want to cling to not only doesn’t exist today, but in all likelihood never has. The day of party lines, nosy telephone operators, beauticians, mailmen, and milkmen who knew everything about everyone and weren’t afraid to tell, may be over, but our lives are exposed to our friends, neighbors, and employers just the same. The question is whether we measure up to our own standards. I have been caught in the trap of inconsistency myself and it is not fun. But it does make me strive to be ever more consistent in the way I live my life, so that what I say, do, or display is not an embarrassment to myself, my family, my friends, or my employer.

When George Orwell wrote the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, he envisioned a world in which Big Brother was always watching you. Today he would understand that we are Big Brother. We have evolved to a state of being our brother’s watcher rather than our brother’s keeper, and no amount of compartmentalizing and isolating will change that.

So friend me. I’ll try to recognize you the next time we meet!