Consequential Strangers

This must happen all the time to bloggers:  Earlier today, I intended to write about other connections I’d made through social media over the last many months (see What CS Taught Me).  But once Jason Simon (right) popped into my head, I went to his blog, where I found it far more interesting to respond to his question, What is your dream?

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the origin of my various online connections, but I believe that Jason, who writes the Caffeinated Conversations blog, found me through the Gumption blog by Joe McCarthy.   In turn, I found Jason via Google Alerts, when he tweeted Joe’s review of CS.  What a great example of the wonderful, serendipitous, and sometime overwhelming connections we make in cyberspace!  We’re geographically and sometimes ideologically worlds apart. But somehow we manage connect.

Therefore, Jason’s question is right on target.  What is your dream?  Given this culture of continuous connection, what do you want your social future to look like?   Following Jason’s entry, in which he put forth the idea that through conversation we can change the world for the better, was Megan’s comment, in which she said,

I think if people are able to share ideas and cultivate relationships, it’s great, but really, there is no electronic substitute for talking with other human beings face to face. I have started referring to online “friends” in quotes, simply because I grew up with a different definition of what a “friend” really means.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself.   I  jumped right into their conversation, both to describe my own dream and because Megan’s need to put quotation marks around “friend” is precisely why we need new words to describe our  relationships–and not just our online contacts.  This is my comment:

Megan, a way to describe at least some of your online friends is to think of them as “consequential strangers”–people other than family and close friends. But I’ll bet that many of your online exchanges are with people you know in both contexts–on and off line.

My dream is that we stop calling online relationships “virtual” and questioning whether they’re “real.”  My dream is that we begin to appreciate and value all relationships and to think of those that matter, in small or great ways, as “meaningful,” regardless of where we meet or how deep the level of intimacy.  Our social ties span a continuum, from stranger to soulmate, but because close ties have been studied more and, until recently, talked about more, acquaintances  somehow seem unimportant.  But they’re not.

Implicit in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was the idea that once we all look past the outer trappings, whether skin color or status, and dare to cross traditional lines, we will be better able to appreciate our similarities and see our differences as benefits.  And every bit of research I’ve uncovered over the last three year confirms this as well: The more we “integrate” our lives will all sorts of people and all sorts of relationships, the healthier, happier, and more successful as humans we will be.

I worry about the perils of online socialization, too.  But if we’re conscious and careful–if we learn to manage our (relatively new) online lives so that we reap the benefits of having so many others to call on–the advantages will outweigh the risks.

Besides, the genie is out of the bottle:  Every day we make new connections at an unprecedented rate and volume.  We consume tens, maybe hundreds, of byte-sized morsels of “conversation”–through emails, in chat rooms and on bulletin boards, and via social media.

Perhaps this avalanche of acquaintanceships will overtake us.  Or perhaps we will look back a few years from now to realize that many of the definitions we grew up with have changed and we simply had to adapt (for better and worse) as earlier generations had when newfangled technology threatened the status quo.  Either way, we’re all standing on the same hillside.