This is a bit of a riff on an older post that I’ve been thinking about pretty consistently. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and discussing about personal habits on the social web, and it has me examining my own.
Why I Don’t Follow.
I don’t reciprocally follow 100% of the time. Some people might say that’s bad or wrong, but I don’t particularly care. One of the things I value about Twitter as a channel is the interplay of voices and the instant conversations that develop between close friends, vague acquaintances, colleagues and strangers. If I followed double the number of accounts that I do now (which is hovering around 350 and already feels too big for me sometimes), my ability to process and communicate effectively within Twitter would decrease sharply. With very few exceptions, I don’t follow celebrities – I’d rather live in a stream of real people that I really connect with than find out what Speidi is doing at any given moment.
I don’t follow when there’s no utility to the follow. As an extreme example, the Alert Nerd Twitter account only follows myself, Matt, Sarah and Chris – it’s an easy way for people who are readers of AN to find the authors. And we can handle engagement issues with a Twitter search feed for “@AlertNerd.”
Why I Do Follow.
I try to follow everyone who engages me in conversation, especially if they @ me more than once (attendant to that, I always try to reply back). I follow people who are interesting. I follow people who are recommended to me by my friends.
I’ve gone from not ‘getting’ Facebook to using it as a convenient life-organizer. I usually avoid the quizzes and the games and the other ephemera and I use it mainly as a tool to keep tabs on the people that I care about, plan my social calendar, and talk to friends. And when I say friends, I mostly mean friends and not random acquaintances I haven’t seen since high school – I’ve deleted several of those over the past year because it seems silly and disingenuous to be connected to them. They don’t care about my life, nor I about theirs, so why pretend? I am not a ‘Pokemon’ social networker (except on LinkedIn, where I believe it’s actually somewhat valuable) and I don’t think I need to be Facebook friends with every person I know. The reason for that is simple: I erect a high wall around myself on FB from a privacy perspective, but my friends have very open access to my contact info and other things that shouldn’t be a matter of public record – I believe in access and transparency, but only to a point, you know. I try to limit my friending to people that I know personally or know reasonably well virtually. I do not friend my family (except for my sister) because I quite honestly don’t need them to have my cell phone number or see unflattering photos of myself taken by others.
LinkedIn is an all-skate for me; I’ll connect with anybody I even tangentially know. Unlike the other sites, LinkedIn’s purpose seems to be that kind of catch ‘em all networking that I avoid when it comes to other sites/networks/communities.
I find the lines that we draw in the ephemeral internet sand over how we behave online and how we segment our lives incredibly interesting. Call it professional curiosity. Learning more helps me to do my job better. And gives me something to post about. And this mostly daily posting schedule is pretty alright, I think.
Tell me more in the comments.
