I had a sudden revelation today that my blog entry On Friends was missing an important facet – not everyone that gets ‘close to you’ is a friend!
Part of the reason for that is being drawn into playing a game which ‘categorises’ relationships on a similar, but much more extensive, taxonomy as mine.
I count myself fortunate that I don’t have any real enemies (at least not as far as I know!!!). There are certainly people amongst my ‘lower level’ connections who I would say that I don’t like very much, however that certainly doesn’t stop me being civil to them. There have been some times in the past when – for a period of time – there have been difficulties with some people and, of course, I have had arguments with many of my closer friends from time to time.
There is, however, I think something akin to Catastrophe Theory at work with regard to some relationships – call it love/hate if you like. The relationship seems to teeter on the brink all of the time with very little needed to tip it one way or the other. This sort of relationship I cannot speak of from personal experience, but I have seen it at work in others.
I suspect (and bear in mind this is filtered through my mental model of how people work) that the closeness of the relationship determines the outcome of a perturbation of that relationship. So, two people who are very close may find that one minute they are best of friends and the next the relationship is ‘blown apart’ (although my point would be that the reason they become so fiercely against one another is because they are close and the upset to the relationship doesn’t make them any less close, it merely changes the nature of that closeness).
So, this re-characterises the levels – they are no longer levels of ‘friendship’ but levels of relationship where the higher levels indicate closer relationships – good or bad. The closer the relationship the more polarised the good and bad ends tend to become – at the ‘acquaintance’ level it is very easy to swing from one to the other because the way in which we would behave towards them is not that different. However, at the top layer – our closest relationships – it is much more difficult to switch and, when and if it does, it is usually ‘catastrophic’ in the mathematical sense.
This model is, as I suspected it would as I further considered it, getting more complex because the temporal aspect must be taken into account. Often the reason for the ‘catastrophe’ will diminish over time – and, inevitably, all relationships, good or bad, mellow over time – its easier to forgive someone about something that happened years ago rather than something that happened yesterday; its easier to forget the many kindnesses shown to you years ago that strengthened a particular friendship than to forget the kindness shown this morning.
I can think of a number of instances of people who “did bad things” decades ago – the immediate reaction was very negative – however now, although “the bad thing” is not forgotten (and may not really be forgiven) it doesn’t really influence the relationship any more.
The model described in On Friends was never (at least in my mind) seen as being simply linear, one dimensional, or even clear cut. It is fuzzy, multi-dimensional and driven by multiple feedback and feed forward loops. In truth it is probably incomprehensible – and by that I don’t just mean that we do not understand it – I mean that we cannot understand it.
It is also personal and – importantly not reflective – the two sides of any relationship are not necessarily equal – one party may well believe that the relationship is stronger than the other one does – and of course that also impacts the ‘needfulness’ of the relationship. By that I mean that one of the parties may require the relationship to be sustained and strong much more than the other. This is probably the norm anyway, but often there can be a big gap between the ‘needs’ of the parties involved.
Where is this going? Well really this is merely highlighting that every relationship is unique and characterised by a number of different things. They also do not stand still – but are forever changing – sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes quickly and catastrophically. What does this mean for any online social network? Well anything that is as rigid as “friend or not” clearly does not have sufficient variety to cope with the reality of our relationships. Perhaps anything that forces you to interact primarily as a group is equally inadequate (perhaps that is why most of my online interactions are one-to-one, reserving the one-to-many (or even many-to-many) for things that specifically of the type ‘announcement’.
There is clearly scope for change in the way we interact online – the Facebook-like model has the advantage of being relatively simple, and perhaps that is how it ought to be, but I wonder whether that will result in ‘the majority’ changing their behaviour to suit the model rather than (as I think I do) using the model to implement my behaviour. Personally I hope not – but I suspect I will be proven wrong and our interactions will be defined by the available technology rather than the other way round.