Social Networks Follow Us

We join a “#social network” and then the networked within start to follow us. We also add new “friends” but don’t much differentiate amongst our choices. We have true friends, special friends, acquaintances, strangers with similar passions, strangers with ulterior motives, causes, game systems, and many other categories of #groupings and #microcrowds, but we fail to automate the connections in an actionable manner. We might as well be “friending” the whole world if we don’t differentiate our interactions. Without flavors of “friends” we lose our context, our ability to use our relationships in a way that builds a stronger lifestyle rather than engendering attraction to the shallowness of our current situation when highly entwined in online social interaction.

It currently takes too much effort to stay well connected, with our collective engagement fractured to an extent that has never been seen before in human history. We interact with and are distracted by highly attractive but subjective information spurts, forced into our attention window by our environments. We gain much in this interaction, but I believe many people on the edge of the adoption curve can foresee a tipping point and the glut of “attention grabbers” will reach a level of personal exhaustion. When we receive the next invitation for anything that grabs our attention we might simply shut down and stop processing, even at the shallow processing level that we’re at today.

What might help >> Open identity systems. Cross site collaborative widgets. API’s. Yes, and…

I know who I am. I know who my friends are. I know how I would classify all the other breeds of contacts that I have. Give me a method, manner, protocol, process, schema or dogma that works to keep my life automated, my contacts pleasant and my lifestyle interesting.

Filed under Integrity, Microcrowds, SNAP |