Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Networking?


More and more often I am getting Facebook friend requests and Twitter follows and so on from people I don't know. They are sometimes (the Twitter followers) banks I might use, bands I might like -- or who think, anyway, that I might like them -- and occasionally porno advertisers. If they are none of these things they are writers.

For a while this made me really uncomfortable and now I have accepted it for what it is, though I do not know what it is. I confirm everybody, as a rule -- for a while I tried to make rules about who I would confirm and who I wouldn't, but the rules were too confusing and complicated and I worried about hurting feelings, though I doubt anyone cares. I usually follow the writer back, on Twitter. Why not? Sometimes I "hide" the person in Facebook if I think they are boring.

When you "friend" someone you have never met or spoken to what are you trying to accomplish? Is this a way of saying you want to talk to a person or be closer to them, or only that you want them to become a component in your self-promotion network? I often wish that people who wanted to talk to me, if that's what they want, would talk to me. Of course I'm very shy myself. I never talk to the writers I admire if I can help it. I remember going to a panel at AWP and avoiding looking directly at the faces of the speakers so there could be no chance of accidental eye contact.

Why do I have so many "friends" and yet so few conversations?

4 comments:

  1. People do get pissed. I deleted over 3,000 people from FB and later when a real friend of mine posted a link to something nice about me there was a string of angry comments from people who I'd "deleted," and their sentiment was screw me for being the jerk. Still, I much prefer being able to follow people I actually know--have eaten with, cried with, shared something real with. And even those few have such filled lives they are difficult to keep up with. It's like, a day away from FB and I'm so behind!

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  2. I have felt conflicted about this as well. I've never been ultra-private but for a while I felt weird about friending or accepting friending from people I didn't know, but then I enjoyed reading updated/etc. by creative and intelligent people, and learning from them things I wanted to know were happening, etc. A good test might be to ask yourself if you've had a moment in the past week or month or whatever when you saw something they threw up and said to yourself, Interesting.

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  3. For me everything just feels too chaotic when FB is stuffed with people I don't know at all.

    I decline almost everybody that tries to friend me that knew me in high school, because high school sucks.

    I'm losing faith in FB. Seems like a very long time since I had a fun conversation on there.

    ryan

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  4. Yeah, I do actually decline people I knew in the past sometimes.

    FaceBook is an inferior twitter for me, these days.

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