Greetings to all, and Good News!
Our Everyday Ambassador discussion expanded last week to Christian Science Monitor, where my Op-Ed about the Facebook IPO was published, “Is Facebook Destroying Our Capacity for Meaningful Relationships?“
As always, I hope you will give it a read and leave your comments, which are always so thoughtful and help to explore the nuances of this discussion, and share widely, to keep engaging more voices in the conversation.
Many, many thanks for your support!
xo ko
Last night I was faced with the choice to respond to an invite to be trained on a piece social media technology or going to the annual meeting of my neighborhood association, people who live near me. I chose to go to the neighborhood meeting. After reading your article I see my choice reflects the same points you are making.
In fact I did meet an old colleague with whom I would like to create a better relationship. Plus I met new people who have something qualitative to add to my life and to whom I can relate and share as well.
I’d like to hear more on this theme. :-)
Suzanne this is such a beautiful anecdote, thank you so much for sharing your experience with the community, and I hope it encourages other readers to do the same! I love the choice you made, and agree that you never know what you’ll find in terms of relationship buliding in-person. I just arrived back in Ethiopia this week for a short work visit (lived/worked here for several months last year), and it was so heartening to receive warm welcomes from people like security guards at the guesthouse, and vendors on the street, who I used to spend time with instead of spending more time checking email (which was really hard to do at the time, to break myself from the constant-connectivity, but worth it!) Thanks for sharing, and for reading! Would love to keep hearing more from you. xo ko
Insightful post Kate, as always!! It hits the head on the nail. Many times I log into facebook and look at the number of “friends” I have an its up in the 500′s, yet when I browse through to perhaps invite people to a birthday celebration, I find myself only inviting about 50. Don’t get me wrong 50 is still a lot, but what it makes me realize is that I am connected to people that I don’t even know anything about! What is worse is that I haven’t even tried to start building a relationship with all of those people.
Most of my facebook friends I gained in the beginning stages of my facebook “life”. At the time I befriended people regardless if Iknew them or not simply because they were affiliated with organizations I was affiliated with or at one point came in some kind of contact with. However, now I am more critical in who I befriend. I ask myself whether or not I know such people and do I see myself cultivating a relationship with such individual? While I think I am being “smarter” in who I let take a closer look into my “life”, I don’t think I am still adequately using facebook to what I truly should be using for – that is as a means to cultivate & maintain relationships after initial in-person contact was done not the other way around.