Personal ish

Over the Christmas break I caught up with a friend of a friend who I have only met physically once or twice before, but with whom I have a mutually following relationship on twitter (is there a word for this: 'followship', 'twinterdependance'?). So I guess I kind of presumed that we knew each other a bit and was therefore a bit surprised when at one point he said "oh, are you on Twitter then?" Indeed I was so surprised that I pointed out that he was one of the first people to follow me and it was only after I said this that I realised what meaningless statement it was. He would have had no idea that he was one of my first followers just as I have no idea what number follower of his I was. This was simply the first of a number of points in our conversation that made me realise the essentially unidirectional nature of Twitter relationships. My conversant is a much more committed Twitter user than I: he spends seemingly hours a day on Twitter, has many thousands of followers and is a legitimate user in that he is self employed and therefore uses Twitter as a promotional tool as much as anything else. He fully engages in many debates and through this appears consider himself familiar with a number of other public figures who engage in the same debates, at the very least he consders himself to know them in some manner and potentially to be known to (or by) them. I may be utterly wrong on this, but I suspect he knows them and they know him as well as I know him and vice versa (which knowledge, the evening's conversations led me to understand was somewhat lacking or even downright incorrect on my part). Maybe it is simply I who am surprised by this, having never encountered someone who talks about others as if they have met before when they clearly haven't. I am a very circumspect user of social media, so maybe this sensation of finding out which aspects of a person's online persona is actually part of their personality is much more familiar to more persistent social networkers, but to me it seems odd. I quite often find myself having conversations with friends in which I feel a bit lazy for regurgitating thoughts and opinions I have already written in this blog, but I guess at least it's an indication that I'm consistent. Any of my friends will gladly tell you that I am as prone to ranting on about the ills of the world in real life as I am on this blog or Twitter, the difference being that I probably present a bit more eloquently here (you never get the joy of the full shouty jabbing-the-air-with-my-finger version). I see this as just being consistent, but perhaps I am naive to think that my online persona should simply reflect who I am, or perhaps I am in denial if I think that it does. I find it easy to see that many of my friends are nowhere near as single-issue obsessed as their Twitter feeds would have me believe, yet I apparently can't see that someone who didn't know me as a friend might assume that all I am interested in is the lack of thought people give to their lives and environment. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more to me than that (although not much), so perhaps I simply need not to be surprised when the person I meet is not the collection of issues and ideas that I encounter online. 

We are constantly warning children and young people to be wary of strangers online for obvious and good reasons, but we grownups tend to believe that such warnings don't need to apply to us. Of course we are all (hopefully) on guard for the net's worst predators, but we don't seem so concerned about the potential emotional impact that not knowing anyone online could have when it is presented to us. I am not saying that I am emotionally traumatised by finding out that someone I thought I was friends with from the internet wasn't aware of this friendship, but the cumulative effects of such a disparity cannot be underestimated. That I am a fairly casual and occasional user of social media probably explains why this sensation is new to me, but for more frequent users of social media it must be all too familiar. People must surely become used to it and jaded; they must develop attitudes to society adjusted for the fact that people are something different from what they appear to be. Indeed what's to stop them from turning away from society altogether, or at least society as we know it: the society of present interaction. If only the only thing the 'real world' is gong to offer is disappointment, why engage with it at all? Of course, the alternative is to engage with the real world on the terms defined by the world of social media, dividing your friends and associates up into single interest groups and never allowing your interaction with each to stray beyond the confines of their defined interest. This strikes me as an entirely juvenile way to interact with people and indeed a potentially socially and culturally regressive one. Many of the most serendipitous moments in history have come about through the meetings and interactions of unlikely combinations of people, it would be a shame if we let the inflexibility of digital social networks kill the creative spontaneity of real social interaction. I'm sure many people would argue that digital social networks enhance networking because they allow one to connect to many more people, but I'm not sure this isn't the equivalent of battery farming friends. The resulting mass of identikit connections are unlikely ever to challenge our opinions and preconceptions in a meaningful way, allowing them to be reinforced and narrowed. We could end up holding bizarre sets of beliefs based on selected fragments of the opinions of people we don't know. Perhaps this is no different from the past when such opinions came from newspaper colmunists, but at least then we didn't think the columnists knew us or indeed, that we knew them. 

I recognise many people on my train every day, but because I wear headphones all the time I have genuinely no idea what they sound like, yet on some level I suppose I feel I know them. However, if I was to go to a dinner party with them, I would not presume to know anything about their lives because I only know them in the sense that I am familiar with their faces. Sherlock Holmes would be able to deduce much about these people based on the information I have available to me, but that is what makes him exceptional (and fictional). The rest of us will have to make do with the knowledge that we can only gleam from actually spending time in other peoples' company.