{"id":504,"date":"2011-09-14T20:15:32","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T20:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=504"},"modified":"2024-02-21T22:10:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T22:10:26","slug":"when-friends-go-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/when-friends-go-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"When Friends Go Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a sudden revelation today that my blog entry On Friends<\/a> was missing an important facet \u2013 not everyone that gets \u2018close to you\u2019 is a friend!<\/p>\n

Part of the reason for that is being drawn into playing a game which \u2018categorises\u2019 relationships on a similar, but much more extensive, taxonomy as mine.<\/p>\n

I count myself fortunate that I don\u2019t have any real enemies (at least not as far as I know!!!).\u00a0 There are certainly people amongst my \u2018lower level\u2019 connections who I would say that I don\u2019t like very much, however that certainly doesn\u2019t stop me being civil to them.\u00a0 There have been some times in the past when \u2013 for a period of time \u2013 there have been difficulties with some people and, of course, I have had arguments with many of my closer friends from time to time.<\/p>\n

There is, however, I think something akin to Catastrophe Theory at work with regard to some relationships \u2013 call it love\/hate if you like.\u00a0 The relationship seems to teeter on the brink all of the time with very little needed to tip it one way or the other.\u00a0 This sort of relationship I cannot speak of from personal experience, but I have seen it at work in others.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 So, two people who are very close may find that one minute they are best of friends and the next the relationship is \u2018blown apart\u2019 (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\u2019t make them any less close, it merely changes the nature of that closeness).<\/p>\n

So, this re-characterises the levels \u2013 they are no longer levels of \u2018friendship\u2019 but levels of relationship where the higher levels indicate closer relationships \u2013 good or bad.\u00a0 The closer the relationship the more polarised the good and bad ends tend to become \u2013 at the \u2018acquaintance\u2019 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.\u00a0 However, at the top layer \u2013 our closest relationships \u2013 it is much more difficult to switch and, when and if it does, it is usually \u2018catastrophic\u2019 in the mathematical sense.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Often the reason for the \u2018catastrophe\u2019 will diminish over time \u2013 and, inevitably, all relationships, good or bad, mellow over time \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

I can think of a number of instances of people who \u201cdid bad things\u201d decades ago \u2013 the immediate reaction was very negative \u2013 however now, although \u201cthe bad thing\u201d is not forgotten (and may not really be forgiven) it doesn\u2019t really influence the relationship any more.<\/p>\n

The model described in On Friends was never (at least in my mind) seen as being simply linear, one dimensional, or even clear cut.\u00a0 It is fuzzy, multi-dimensional and driven by multiple feedback and feed forward loops.\u00a0 In truth it is probably incomprehensible – and by that I don\u2019t just mean that we do not understand it \u2013 I mean that we cannot understand it.<\/p>\n

It is also personal and \u2013 importantly not reflective \u2013 the two sides of any relationship are not necessarily equal \u2013 one party may well believe that the relationship is stronger than the other one does \u2013 and of course that also impacts the \u2018needfulness\u2019 of the relationship.\u00a0 By that I mean that one of the parties may require the relationship to be sustained and strong much more than the other.\u00a0 This is probably the norm anyway, but often there can be a big gap between the \u2018needs\u2019 of the parties involved.<\/p>\n

Where is this going?\u00a0 Well really this is merely highlighting that every relationship is unique and characterised by a number of different things.\u00a0 They also do not stand still \u2013 but are forever changing \u2013 sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes quickly and catastrophically.\u00a0 What does this mean for any online social network?\u00a0 Well anything that is as rigid as \u201cfriend or not\u201d clearly does not have sufficient variety to cope with the reality of our relationships.\u00a0 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 \u2018announcement\u2019.<\/p>\n

There is clearly scope for change in the way we interact online \u2013 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 \u2018the majority\u2019 changing their behaviour to suit the model rather than (as I think I do) using the model to implement my behaviour.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a sudden revelation today that my blog entry On Friends was missing an important facet \u2013 not everyone that gets \u2018close to you\u2019 is a friend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[86,103,115],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-friends","tag-philosophical","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":505,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions\/505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}