….by insisting on making it a business tool. Yesterday alone (on a Sunday, no less!):
• One business acquaintance (we’ve met three times in five years) tried to “friend” me on Facebook. This feels like an intrusion — Facebook is where my high school/college friends and I post dumb jokes, where my sister makes me laugh about things I don’t remember from our childhood, where other friends say they’re baking something, etc. Why would I invite someone I barely know to be part of that?
• Another business acquaintance (whom I’ve met exactly once, for 45 minutes about three or four years ago) asked me to join TripIt — an online travel planner — that would share my travel plans with him and its other subscribers so that we would always know when our itineraries overlapped (so, presumably, we could rekindle that magic 45 minutes over breakfast or dinner somewhere). Honestly, it sounds like software invented by a stalker. Why would I automatically want anyone (other than my immediate family) to know where I am at all times?
The trouble, I think, is with boundaries. The two acquaintances I mentioned are both, I think, fine people, but I wouldn’t invite them to a family get-together or a neighborhood barbecue — and yet they’re asking for digital access to the same level of privileged interaction, without having earned it. Could they ever be in that circle? Maybe, but not by sending me an automated email.
Any balanced, satisfying life requires connection with others, but there are levels of intimacy for these connections ranging from business acquaintance to personal acquaintance to friend to family to lover, etc. The virtual nature of social media speeds and eases connections of all kinds, but it doesn’t eliminate the need to understand and respect the boundaries of intimacy, both for ourselves and for those with whom we hope to connect. My personal life and my business life are not the same. And I have no interest in establishing more intimate connections with people or businesses who use their newfound ability to connect via social media as pretenses to sell me something, or to cull through my friends to add to their own networks. But I fear that as more and more businesses and business people do just that, we’re at risk of turning a great new social infrastructure into billboard-filled, virtual wasteland. Who'll want to go there?