Persona Prime

I’m watching more and more people every day getting mad at twitter and facebook. These poor misguided folk unfortunately take it out too often on associates, acquaintance, people they know or “Friends.”

Defriending is such a sad word… it implies such drama. And in the end creates more drama than is necessary.

I rarely Unfollow on twitter anymore. I used to typically unfollow out of hurt feelings for those that weren’t following me back. But I realized that relationships are often inequitable.  And that I don’t care,  I’ll follow who I think is interesting.  And I’ll friend on facebook people I have met and want to continue to connect with.

Now it is mainly a spam issue – you direct message me with spam- I will definitely unfollow you. if you spam your feed enough that I notice. I will also unfollow.  If I don’t like you or don’t remember you- I defriend you.  It’s kinda rare.

but that is about it.

So much of this defriending and unfollowing has more to do with information overload.  The overload makes us feel a need to disconnected.  So ironically to connect, we cull our lists and disconnect.  We raise the status of those we feel more connected to.  We threaten just to see who is listening. (Guilty right here I bet I can find at least 3-5 LJ entries along those lines.) We close lines of communication to others based on random rules. (I have mine I just listed one in this post.)

But before you do that… realize the reason why you are doing it.  Typically bad communication interfaces or bad privacy implementations created by software.  Not the people.  Do you really dislike me because I tweet too much about stuff you don’t understand?  See at a party – you wouldn’t care.  You would walk away and check in later.  You would be ready to talk to me when I said something interesting esp if I called your name.

I have found that currently – my biggest vector of happiness is relationships.  So many of y’all are mainly virtual these days.  But that doesn’t diminish my feelings for you.  Distance and lack of time weakens the ties sometimes that is true.  But that is just lack of communication aspects that I understand and don’t take personally.  Doesn’t mean I don’t love you (or like you my dear casual acquaintances.)

But I leave you on the list… Because I do want to leave that channel of communication open.  I followed/friended you in the first place for a reason.  To open a door.  Just because I am not listening doesn’t mean you can’t contact me directly.  I will try to respond… even if you are in my inbox for a year (sorry dave karpf.)

Unfollow me sure but realize then I can’t DM you.  Unfriend me – but then realize might be harder to invite you to a party or find your contact info.  I’ll try to not take it personally – if you do the same…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 4:44 pm and is filed under 30 days of happiness, Persona prime, Personal style, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.