Social Media Made Me a Better Friend

I am a bad friend, I always have been. I am the guy who doesn’t bend over backwards to stay in touch and if you move out of state away from me, I will take it as a personal message that you don’t want me around anymore. It is not a good thing, I have needed to change. On the bright side, I also don’t hold grudges. I usually get over stuff pretty quickly and I give the benefit of the doubt with reckless abandon, “I’m sure at some point Balloon Boy’s parents actually thought he might have been in the flying silver swimmer’s cap.”

But all that is changing now.

In the past few years, I have been told that I was a “relational infant” and needed to grow up when it came to relationships. The problem has not been that I don’t care, I just don’t know how to show it. That is, until the social media boom in the last few years.

If “Relationship Me” is a young Forest Gump, than Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging are my leg braces. They are the gutter bumpers to my bowling game and the Wikipedia to my term paper. Social media and communication technology have taught me and assisted me in becoming a better friend.

My problem was part my own sinful self-centeredness mixed with my undiagnosed ADD and a broken internal speech filter. Basically, I never made time to keep in touch with many of my friends because I was waiting for them to contact me. When they did contact me, I had a hard time staying focused while they answered the “So, what have you been up to?”question and when they finally finished I couldn’t help but offer my 2 cents on what they needed to do to change their life. I know, I would have hated me too.

I have a paranoid fear that soon, social media and personal communication technology will come to a screeching halt. I have no evidence of this, but I would not be surprised if an electromagnetic pulse bomb (aka “The Pinch” from Ocean’s 11) or a massive attack from Chinese hackers knocked out the things we take for granted every day. In light of this, I want to record the lessons I have learned so that I can still be a good friend in the Dark Ages to come. (I am printing off a hard copy after I publish this.)

A little RSS goes a long way

Perhaps the greatest invention to come from the Web 2.0 boom is the syndicated feed, aka RSS. This technology has made keeping up with my ALL friends and acquaintances a matter of browsing for a few minutes. Facebook is great at this, giving me a birds-eye view of my friends postings immediately when I log in… they call it “The Feed.” The down side is that apps such as Farmville and Mafia Wars now pollute my feed and confirm what I sort of knew before, many of my friends are losers and therefore I am too.

RSS has taught me a valuable lesson about relationships, sometimes just knowing what is going on with your buddies is enough to keep the relationship fresh and nothing says “We’re still friends,” the way that “thumbs up, I like this!” does. Basically, its friendship streamlined and made simple.

If you can’t say it 140 characters, don’t say it at all

Remember that broken filter problem I had? I got a new one called “Twitter and text.” Twitter is essentially a feed much like RSS but it feels more real time and simple than Facebook or Google Reader. For a guy like me who has struggled to think before he talks, Twitter has helped me learn brevity in my reply to friends. Furthermore, there is a sense of commitment that comes after spending time editing, tweaking and trying to shrtn wrds 2 ft n ur post. Twitter forced me think before clicking “Tweet this.” If it was possible to save drafts of all your unpublished Tweets, my drafts folder would look like a virtual stockpile of relational weapons of mass destruction.

Thinking in terms of 140 characters or less has made a poorer speller but a better thinker. The times I have gone over that limit while texting have been very bad, resulting follow up phone calls (did you know that phones can do that?) and even impromptu rendezvous to clear things up. Thanks to Twitter and text, I am learning the value of being slow to speak and thinking when I do open my mouth (or, um, fingers).

I am sure there are many lessons out there that I and others have learned about relationships from social media, but in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I want to keep this short and ask what you think? Try to keep it brief and be sure to make yourself a hard-copy before the Chinese attack.