3by9

Birds of a feather flock together

I cannot remember who told me this but I was told (in school) for every positive (pro) there is a negative (con). The pro of the internet being cheap is that everyone (just about) can get on the internet. A con is that people think they have business skills they don’t have and start projects they normally wouldn’t start if a substantial financial investment was required.

Another pro for the internet is that it can be relatively easy to have a presence online. A con is that most people do not realize the impact of the decisions they make.

On Saturday night I went out with my friends and we decided to chill out after. One of the conversations led to ex-boyfriends/girlfriends and someone wanted to show us their ex. He pulled up his Facebook profile and the look on his face was priceless, I wish I had the camera ready to take a picture. Then he said, “HELL NAW!!!” and he started taking deep breaths. When he logged on he was presented with pictures his friend uploaded. Normally that is a good thing.

His friend was pictured with someone he couldn’t stand and to make it worse, a link to the both of their profiles so anyone looking at his profile could jump to the profile of the person he didn’t like. Yes, I know the guy could have micro-managed what was displayed on his profile but he didn’t want to deal with that. The better solution, for him, was to un-friend and that was the default reaction of the group (and that is what they said their friends did as well) for consistency. On Twitter the ability to micro-manage is not available.

I’m not going to bring up the thought of having to maintain friends like this across multiple sites.

That is a very interesting situation. His friend had every right to take and upload pictures to his account. The guy with us had every right to not want someone he didn’t like on his front page. I can see both sides of this issue. The guy with us thought about it for a minute and made the statement he was going to un-friend the guy. I understood that too.

This started a separate discussion about friends online and the difference between true friends and connections. An interesting point came up that I honestly did not think about (but I understand the logic). Let’s say someone comes across one of your profiles where your friends are visible. The person is considering being your “friend” and looks through your current friends. Unfortunately, the person finds someone he or she doesn’t like. The trend I realized last night: if the dislike is stronger than the positive feeling he or she has for you, the person will not be your friend online. Essentially, by subscribing to people you don’t really care about one way or the other could be prohibiting people from interacting with you because, in this wave of public interaction, they would see interaction with people they don’t like showing up on their profiles. With Twitter it would be @ responses. Facebook, it could be pictures.

I know I do this offline. I will not associate closely with someone who is too closely attached to someone I dislike. I dislike people for reasons like inability to trust, no ethics, lack of honesty, manipulator, etc. meaning, anyone that would want to associate with someone like that isn’t someone I want to be around. As long as I’ve been online I rarely cross paths with people I prefer not to interact with. I realize that is because I do most of my interaction via IM, email and my blog. I’m not the norm, most people do the opposite of what I do.

I realized that the implications of what one does online can be have more impact that expected. And of course, as per usual, the response to this will be: “That will never happen to me, I don’t have to worry about that.”

Until it does…