Social Networking, Good or Bad for communication?

This blog post was triggered by a blog post from one of my friends, if you are looking for some interesting blogs to follow then I would certainly recommend his.

Anyhow, as readers of his blog will be aware he often goes off at tangents in one blog post, much like I do I guess!

So this is not so much inspired by the actual purpose of his blog post as much as it is by some of the pre-amble, which is really a whole discourse on the topic of social media/blogs and the internet in general as a means of having ‘meaningful’ communication.

I won’t regurgitate his whole line of thought here, coz you can go read it for yourself, suffice to say I doubt that anything I say here will be at drastic divergence to his opinions, although I come down much more firmly in favour of social networking as will become clear as this blog post unpacks itself.

I started by simply writing a ‘comment’ to his blog post but the realised it was too long to be a simple comment and deserved a blog post of its own, hence here we are.

OK that’s me gone off at a real tangent, been reading too many of Mikes blog posts.

One of the other reasons why I feel I want to address this here is because a friend of mine, who isnt a fan of social networks, said that at a conference he was recently at one of the speakers said somnething along the lines of ‘social networks are causing people to have less real life enocunters and much shallower relationships, I challenged this then and I challenge it here and now, that speak has obviosuly not tried social networking site, certainly not seriously used them for any period of time that enables him to make this judgement because it is my experience, as I sahll explanin the 3,000 words that follow, that quite the reverse is the case.

In fact this argument is so akin to the one that was around about 8 years or so ago that people were loosing the art of letter writing because of the advent of E-Mails, and hwhereas it is true to say that since e-mail has come into the fore there has been a dramatic drop in real letter being sent, and some of that is sad, there was/still is somethign special about getting a hand written letter or card, from someone but it is also a fact that more people are communicating more regulalry with more freinds via e-mail than they were ver doing by post so far from seeing the demise of communication it saw it increase BIG TIME.

So, basically, I am a real fan (as if you need to hear me say that) of social networking.

I have accounts with

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Myspace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Friend Feed, Flickr, Youtube & possible a couple of others that I have forgotten about! It took ages to get all those links in there so do please make me feel its worth the effort by clicking through to some of my profiles.

Anyhow, first question going through your head is probably, how on earth I keep up with all these accounts; well the simple answer is I can’t! I don’t even attempt to, most of the accounts are historic and I rarely use them, the first 3 are the ones I use and are in order of their importance to me, but I do manage to post updates regularly to all of these via a little bit of clever work by my friends over at Pixelpipe.com who provide a great free service to enable simultaneous update of many services, including all the above and also my Google talk account and other chat services as well as a few blogs, so I enter a status or upload a photo to Pixelpipe and it finds it was into all the services that take that particular form of update. Especially useful with the little app on my phone that enables me to take a photo and then upload it with just a couple of clicks.

So I am a bit of a fraud, in fact there are times that I forget exactly where all these links are, it was only recently that I discovered that all my status updates & Photos are going to a blog that I no longer us, in fact it was the predecessor to this blog.

Anyhow, I have been using the internet since the late ‘90’s and my first step into Yahoo Groups, which was really an early forerunner of the modern Social Networking sites, was in 2001, when we received some information (in a newsletter of a group which existed for all of a few months!) but this was our introduction to a group called CARING UK, a group set up for Christian Parents of Children with Autism, this was run under the umbrella of Through the Roof, a national charity, then headed up by its founder, Paul Dicken, there was a sister support group on Yahoo called ‘Roofbreakers’ which was really aimed at and for anyone who was a Christian and affected by Disability, either in themselves or a family member, incidentally both of these groups still exist although there is very rarely any activity on them, the principle of these groups was simple, you e-mail the group on a specific e-mail address and the message gets sent out to all the other group members who can contribute with help advice and support.

It was in the very early days of this group that we got chatting, first on line then via a phone, with the guy who set this group up, Robert Bell, we seem to have pretty much lost touch with the Bell family, largely due to our own laziness in not looking them up, anyhow we had a couple of family get-togethers, they came to our hose on one occasion and we went to theirs on another, this lead to a number of group wide get-togethers, Epping Forest & Cambridge being the venues that stick out in my memory a being lovely enjoyable days, meeting up with people with whom we shared a fair amount in common and had chatted over some month yet never meet.

It is through this group that Through the Roof decided to start some holidays for families of children with Autism, we have been on these twice, with some folk we got to know through the yahoo group as well a people who didn’t have any connection with that particular forum, we developed real bonds with people there, both other parents/families and the staff/volunteers working there, and I am sure that, if they continue to hold them, we will be back.

So that was our introduction to what I would see as Social Networking although totally indistinguishable from the likes of twitter & Facebook.

Move forward to 2007 And I start to hear things about this site called Facebook, now I am pretty internet savvy and used to shopping and banking on line, using MSN & Skype and using the internet for reasearching a topic etc, but Facebook, my initial reaction, I just didn’t ‘get it’ however it wasn’t long before I realised that I ought to at least investigate the strange phenomina that people were talking about, largely because it was becoming apparent that I was missing out on a fair bit of interaction with others, mainly people from Worship Academy, which I was half way through at this stage.

So I take the plunge and sign up, I soon realise that many of my friends and acquaintances from church as well as Worship Academy, are already on Facebook, I start messing about with it to find out how it works, over time I have developed connections with people who I used to have contact with, mainly people who used to live in Bedford but have moved away, as well as those who I already and still had contact with, there were a few folk from the original Caring UK group on facebook too, so a number of people came to the fore, it is amazing how you find people, and they find you, through this wonderful setup, We have regular ongoing contact with people who we used to see once a year, if that in some cases, and this ongoing contact has lead us to meet up, in one case we had a day at Mablethorpe Beach with a friend who we had come to know and love through Grapevine, but only ever saw her at this annual event, which we now don’t go to for personal/family reasons. SO to have the ongoing contact is good and to have managed to meet up with her was fantastic, the things memories are made off.

Also, I explored one of the apps on Facebook, that was to do with your locality, basically you signed up to this app within your location, in our case a Bedfordshire Village, and make contact with others in the same locality, well I signed up to this and ‘found’ someone who lived in the same village, she goes to the parish church, we got ‘chatting’ and realised we had a huge amount in common, we ended up arranging to meet up, myself and Joy meet her at a garden centre coffee shop, for coffee, and we ended up chatting for so long that we stayed for lunch and I am sure we would have stayed for logner had I not needed to get back to work.

Anyhow, through this one connection we were introduced into a social circle in the village that we didn’t know existed, being fairly much newbies here, and have had the privilege of going out for a meal with this social grouping on a few occasions, usually the guys get together once a month and the ladies do the same, on a different date, no babysitters required!

Also, I developed a friendship, via Facebook, with a guy who had done Worship Academy a few years before I did it, this via a Facebook ‘friends of’ group, we struck up a friendship right from the off and have meet up several times, both just us guys and our families, and had some wonderful times.

It is also through the power of the internet, although not strictly Social Networking, that I got to know of this guy Mike, who’s blog post I am actually responding to, I became aware of his blog, not sure exactly how now, and realised that here was a photographer who didn’t take life too seriously and was local, so perhaps, maybe, he would take me ‘under his wing’ as it were and help me understand photography better, so we arranged to meet up, I have since linked to him on several social networking sites although he is not an avid user of these so not usually much in my feeds relating to him but I still read his blog and we have meet up a couple of times, with a 3^rd meet up still to be organised.

Also, it is through facebook that we made contact with a couple who we were friends with when they were in the area but as they moved away we drifted apart but through picking up on a  comment he placed on facebook it came to light that he was undergoing tests for cancer, it was a priveledge to be able to share word of comfort and support with him via the technology available to us, it turned out not to be a problem.

There are others we have meet in real life who we got to know via Facebook and would otherwise have never meet, Last summer, we had a BBQ for a support group which I had become involved with on Facebook, and this BBQ is to be repeated this summer, really looking forward to it, this was a gathering of some dozen people who had never meet before but who all shared something in common, which was what brought us together in the support group, it was a great social event and a real encouragement to those who attended.

And there are likely to be a few more meet-ups over this coming weekend, over the past few months we have become part of a family of people who listen regularly to UCB, a Christian Radio Station, and they really are like a family, but largely made possible through Facebook, where we can interact with and chat to people on a wide variety of subject, mainly related to what is on the radio at the time, this weekend there is a big ‘shindig’ for Christians called The Big Church Day Out, it i over 2 venues and 3 days but we are going to Leicestershire where we expect there will be a good number of UCB listeners, we are hoping to meet up with several of them at this event.

But Facebook has been about much more than just meeting people, for me it has been about support, over the past couple of years, a many of you will know, I have suffered from chronic depression, during which time it was increasingly difficult to open up and speak out where I was but through blogging I was able to open up and spill out some of my emotional brokenness, I also used Facebook for this, it is through this kind of thing that I was able to receive a huge amount of support, both from people who were a long distance away but also from people who were close enough to, and able to, offer real practical help, it was during this time that our friend Paul Dicken, mentioned earlier as the founder of through the roof, he had by this time retired, with his wife, to a lovely property in North Wales, we had made contact with him via facebook, and it was through reading my writing that he decided that we needed a break, so he invited us up to stay with them, they have some rental property, which are fantastic and I couldn’t recommend them highly enough, we stayed for a long weekend and it made a huge difference to us, it really did, at so many levels, impact my life and our families lives.

Facebook and twitter are also the place that you can turn to if you want to find out the smaller detail of someone’s life, like what kind of music or movies they like, what they did over the weekend, etc all these small details make up a whole new picture of people who you would otherwise just pass the time of day with, now you have the makings of intelligent & informed conversation, or the opportunity to ask how that exam or test went, did they ever hear back from the Dr, or whatever has been on their mind, this is using the power of the internet to enrich our daily encounters with the people we meet on a regular basis.

On the other hand, I would be the first to admit that not everything I have put up on the internet has been helpful, mainly not helpful for me, jut sharing too much the inner workings of depression, this was unwise and there is always a danger of this happening, however on balance I am convinced that Social Networks are a real opportunity, to deepen our understanding of and relationship with those who we see regularly, in whatever capacity, to renew relationships/contact with people we have lost contact with, to have ongoing relationships with good friends who we used to e-mail once a month or so, and even to make new friends, there are so many ways in which Social Networks have enabled you to encounter people across the country, indeed across the globe, with a common interest of some sort or another.

Obviously I have to add a note of caution because it is not generally recommended that you meet up with strangers in the way that we have done, BUT I think that there are sensible safeguards that you can put in place to enable such meetups in a safe way that enables new relationships to develop and grow. Some such guidlines I would suggest are:

• Dont rush into meeting, get to know them well on line first, make sure they are consistent in the way they talk and what they talk about.
• Dont meet people with whom you have a very closed on line relationship with, i.e. it is pretty safe to meet someone who you share 20-40 friends on line with, who have a track record of being reliable and genuine with all of those folk, but if you share no friends in common and are not too sure exactly how/why you got to know each other, think twice.
• Meet in a public, and neutral, venue, don’t accept a lift with the person. One of our friends did actually meet up with us at a railway station and leap into our car for a drive out into the middle of nowhere, well we knew where we were headed, I think she had hesitations when we seemed to be in the back of beyond! But we shared something like 50 mutual on-line friends most of whom knew this meeting was taking place and we had got to know each other over quite a long period of time, so I think she knew it was pretty safe but still not to be recommended.
• Make sure that a few of your friends, mutual friends on line and real friends who you know, are aware that the meeting is taking place and where it is happening, if possible meet up with more than 1 person and/or take another friend along. Talk to your mutual on line friends about the plans to meet-up and see how they react, if they urge caution then take their advice.
• Children & Young People especially are potential prey to some pretty nasty people, you should NEVER meet up with someone unless your parents are involved, and probably coming along for the meet-up too, never accept the need for secrecy, as this is an indication of problems. If they are who they claim to be WHY do you need to meet in secret?
• Make sure that you bring a mobile phone with you so that you can call for help should it be needed.
• Be very wary of people who have very few on-line friends. If they have lots of friends on line then you can be more certain that they are who they claim to be but even then some caution is necessary, but if they have very few friends there is very little to establish their identity.

OK so with the ground-rules laid, all I can say is get on with social networking and see your existing connections and relationships deepen and develop as well as getting the opportunity to get to know new friends who you would never meet through any other means.

I for one am so grateful for the advent of social networking for the way in which it has enriched my life, I like it to a tapestry, with the advent of social networking there has been a huge number of new threads added to the tapestry of all sorts of colours and types, some of these threads only show up ina  very small area of the tapestry others are all over it, but even some of the threads that existed before social networking have become more beautiful because of social networks, they are much more prominent that they used to be, in some cases they had stopped being threaded into the tapestry but have suddenly come back and started weaving their way, but this whole rich mass of threads makes up the tapestry of my life and I am so grateful to everyone who has placed even the smallest of threads.

Life is made up of memories, many memories, and my conviction is that the memories that have been created either directly or indirectly as a result of social netowkring, have been, on the whole, extremely positive, not just for me but also for my family and I know that we have enriched the lives of many people who we have come to know, or developed closer relationshionships with via social networking.

And to think this started off as a comment to someone elses off the cuff comments on his blog post.