Bill Cammack » echo chamber

Unfriending Ethics

Bill Cammack — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:45:53 +0000

Egregious photo of myself with Kathleen! :D

Social Media is insanely skewed towards positive feedback. Because of this, a stigma is attached to negative feedback, regardless of how truthful that feedback is. People are literally AFRAID to say or type ANYTHING that they might be criticized for… by ANYONE… which necessarily and obviously creates a disingenuous society.

Put another way… As long as you’re being nice to people, you can say whatever you want. As soon as you’re not being nice… TO ANYBODY… you’re out of bounds. As long as everyone agrees with everyone, there’s lots of above-board chatter and clinking of glasses. As soon as someone disagrees, the chatter moves to the back-channel. The criticism or negative belief thrives behind the scenes, it’s just that there’s no trace of it in the same places where there’s a ton of positive feedback.

Keep It To Yourself

For example, I attended a flashmeeting one time (an internet-based meeting where people communicate with each other via webcam and “pass the mic” back and forth to each other) which was called in order to “critique” people’s website ideas. People were ASKED to attend this meeting and give their [honest] opinions about what they saw/heard/read. One of the first people to speak didn’t like the implementation of the site in question and proceeded to say so. This person was not being harsh or demeaning at all. They were saying what they thought was WACK (not good) about the site and what they felt the person needed to improve on.

In what was most likely the middle of their comment, they suddenly disappeared from my screen, and the moderator appeared. The person’s video and audio was cut off entirely. The moderator then went on to explain to all of us that we were here to offer POSITIVE feedback about the sites and then said, without actually saying it, that if we had anything other than that to say, keep it to ourselves.

The rest of the meeting contained only positive feedback. I thought at the time, and still think that it was incredibly retarded to call a meeting to critique things and then OUTLAW any criticism that might make the site creator feel badly. If your site SUCKS, it SUCKS. Period. If there are things you can improve on, it’s in your best interest to hear it before you continue down the wrong path, at least in that particular person’s eyes. So even in cases where the comments are beneficial to you, just about nobody’s going to say anything that might be interpreted as “negative”.

Linkbaiters

This, by the way, is what makes linkbaiters popular yet infamous. They say things that everybody was already thinking, but nobody was willing to say. People like to subscribe to linkbaiters on the internet the same way a crowd forms around a fight, IRL. If they had to throw their own hands and risk getting punched in the face, they’d run away, screaming.. But since someone else is fighting, they’re perfectly willing to get as close as possible to watch, ooh, aah and cheer for a good beatdown. People have built entire sites around this concept and have become moderately popular inside the fishbowl / echo chamber because of it.

So, essentially, unless people are willing to carry the stigma of being labeled an internet villain, they’re not going to say ANYTHING negative about ANYBODY, *evAr*!… Unfortunately, this behavior spills over into their personal relationships and makes people incredibly disingenuous when it comes to unfriending people.

Living in Public

One of the side effects of Living in Public is that to some degree, everyone knows your business. They don’t know all of your business, but they know enough to make judgments. I have the unique position of knowing a lot of people… I mean A LOT of people. Not “know them” as in I’ve seen them around on the internet and we clicked “accept” on friend invites, but that I’ve actually physically hung out with these people and we’ve developed whatever relationships we’ve developed during that time. Right now, for instance, I have 1,367 Facebook Friends and 586 of them live in my town, New York City. This means that I could hang out with a different person every single day for way more than a full year without repeating people. JUST in this town, and JUST from the people I know from Facebook.

An issue that arises from this situation is that you end up making the acquaintance of people that have problems with each other. Some of them started out as friends, and probably even introduced you to their friend at the time, and now they’re enemies. They’d never actually USE the word “enemy”, though, due to the aforementioned stigma, so they’ll just say they’re “not friends”. That’s all well and good until people start contacting you on the back channel, asking you why you’re still friends with XYZ after they did ABC to whomever. Then, if you refuse to hop on the bandwagon for something that isn’t your problem AT. ALL., the person that was *JUST* begging you to get down with their program gets mad at YOU for “choosing the offending person over them”.

Frenemies

One popular way for people to deal with these situations is to become the pathetically-termed, yet insanely funny “Frenemies” (an enemy disguised as a friend). This concept came up in a conversation I was having with a friend and I thought she had made it up herself. I didn’t realize that people actually do this. I figured that people that had a problem with each other would just say so, agree to disagree and let that be that. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the political cascade that would occur if, for instance, two people that work with each other every day proclaimed that they were now rivals, to whatever degree.

Due to the “Whose side are you on?” nature of the echo chamber, camps would develop inside that office and then resonate extermally throughout their entire social set. In order to avoid this, these people pretend to still be friends while they talk about the other person “behind their backs” on the back channel. It’s not actually behind their backs though, because since everyone knows everyone else’s business, everyone knows they’re enemies, but everyone ALSO knows to play it off as if they’re not during IRL hangouts and especially in anything they write on the internet.

Hide in Plain Sight

Keep it up! You’re about to be unfriended. [Bre and Bill]

This behavior also extends to individual relationships that aren’t in any kind of spotlight. If you’re on Twitter, for instance, there’s a site you can go to called Qwitter that will email you if someone stops following you and tell you when it happened. I’ve also had people tell me that they noticed that their Facebook friends count went down by one since the day before and wonder who it was that “quit” them. Clearly, that would be impossible for me to figure out with > 1,300 Facebook friends, but it’s still an interesting question… “Who unfriended me, and why?”

Unfortunately, due to the nature of our surrounding environment, it’s better for people to attempt to slither away, unnoticed, than for them to say “I didn’t like that you did or said XYZ, so I don’t want to be your 1,367th Facebook Friend anymore!” If they were to tell you what they didn’t like, you’d then have the ammunition to disseminate throughout the back channel, “Would you believe that XYZ unfriended me because of ABC?”, so it’s in their best interest not to say anything to you at all and just hope you didn’t notice.

Another style is to not unfriend the person at all… merely refuse to respond. This is a tricky one, because a) people become really busy as we’re trying to do what we’re trying to do on the internet, all day, every day, and b) I know personally that I get so much correspondence that I just can’t / won’t respond to everything or else all I’d do is answer emails every day. When someone’s paying me to answer my own emails all day, that’s what I’ll do. Until then, that’s not how we’re livin’.

This is a pretty good technique for people that don’t live in the same town and socialize in the same circles. For people that DO.. The jig is up when y’all run into each other in person. As soon as your unfriendly demeanor is determined, it’s *YOU* that might get unfriended, as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and everything else remains within arm’s reach on my G1.

So… ARE there ethics to unfriending people? SHOULD there be? COULD there be? Personally, I don’t believe there can be, because our culture is skewed towards hiding and talking behind people’s backs instead of attempting to resolve differences that arise between us.

What do you think?

~ Bill Cammack

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Living In Public

Bill Cammack — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:05:21 +0000

This is a response to Chrissie Brodigan‘s post, “Donâ€™t Feed the Trolls: Dealing With Social Media Sins”.

Not that I give a damn about disclosure, but I’ll mention that Chrissie is a friend of mine (as is probably everyone else she’s talking about in her post):

Interesting.

I posted about this back in June: [http://billcammack.com/2008/07/12/freedom-of-consequences/].

Basically, in order to “live online” as we do, one needs to remain mindful of the lowest common denominator. Whatever you’re “saying”, make sure that if your employer or your grandmother or your “significant other” or you CHILDREN see it, that it’s an accurate representation of yourself that you’re willing to OWN… because odds are that eventually you WILL have to own it, and probably in a fashion that you didn’t consider at the time.

Even “That was then and this is now” is only a partial defense. Look at the Presidential campaign that just went on. John McCain acted like A JERK for the whole time, and then when it was all over and he lost, he gave, IMO, a heartfelt, genuine, really respectable and admirable speech. Things like that can alter people’s perception about a person, but the facts and memories remain about their prior behavior, even if the ‘pain’ of them is muted by the person’s present actions.

So, ultimately, the WIN is Prevention and not Cure. Does that call for sacrifice of some (or many) things one would want to do or say? Yes. The question, however, is what do you really want in the end? Do you want to have social media friends, who don’t know everything you think and feel?… or would you rather be known for what you think and feel and let the chips fall?…..

Social Media is characterized by asynchronous relationships… basically, stalking, in a one-way fashion or a mutual fashion. I might get two comments on a post I make, and then everyone I run into IRL is like “I read your post, blah blah blah”. You can’t suspect that the people you hear from are the ONLY ONES that dislike what happened. Those are merely the ones who are willing to risk THEIR OWN social media reputations by wearing THEIR hearts on Twitter in the same way you constantly wear yours. It basically branches out and people take sides behind the scenes, which is what causes “floods”, because a lot of people get fed up at the same time… a lot of people that the person in question probably wasn’t even AWARE that they knew of or had any opinions at all about the situation, which they thought, for some odd reason, was contained to a small group.

On top of that, our NYC set is different from other groups, because we’re in so much physical, IRL contact with each other. I’m very used to going to parties where I know 60 people on the Facebook “definite” list. I have over 200 mutual friends with several people on Facebook, and a lot of those people live here in NY or NJ. Obviously, all of these people are not going to get along with each other. The only way to navigate this group is to remain neutral. I can care or not care about the situation, empathize or not, but ultimately, it’s none of my business, and I’m not going to tell or suggest to people what they should do, and I’m not going to choose one side over the other, between people that have historically been decent towards me and have developed some sort of beef between each other.

So, to apply my own theory… When I go to that party that at least 60 people that I know are going to show up to, I have to be mentally prepared to OWN anything I’ve said about them since the last time I saw them. I also have to OWN the videos I make and the blog posts I make and the currently 710 pictures of myself on Facebook, where I can’t turn around and say “no… I don’t know that person” or “no… I wasn’t at that party”. I have to own what I say and do AT the party. I have to own the media I output about that party and the cycle continues. So, basically, every stitch of media that you output, you need to check yourself on whether you’re willing to own it, ad infinitum.

As this pertains to your suggested rules for offenders:

You always “Acknowledge Action”, because it’s in “Black & White”, and YOU put it there yourself. It’s not like paparazzi ran up and quoted you and put it in the tabloids. If you post from a position of ownership, acknowledgement is obvious.

You can’t “Become a Victim”, because you’ve already owned the media. You already know WHY you said what you said or did what you did and you already thought about how you would defend it before you pressed “send”. “Defense” is merely informing people about what you were thinking when you posted it. The only real question is whether you unintentionally slighted someone in a way you didn’t anticipate when you posted, in which case, if you feel like apologizing for it, that’s completely appropriate. If they take offense at something you fully MEANT to say and currently stand behind at the point of the ensuing conversation, the issue becomes whether or not you were out of bounds with what you said and whether “the shoe fits” as far as what you said about them, which THEY would need to recognize, and get out of your face.

The Final Frontier is blocking people. That doesn’t keep them from finding out about YOU, but it keeps YOU from hearing what THEY have to say about you. If people aren’t going to be rational and have intelligent discussions with you (assuming YOU’RE acting rationally, to begin with), then the solution is to agree to disagree and hope to avoid those people as much as possible.

So, Yes… It’s EXTREMELY COMPLICATED to live in public, even the limited “public” of our echo chamber, but that’s exactly what it is… an Echo Chamber, which means that everything you say and everything everyone else says is going to keep coming back to you. Your best bet, as I’ve outlined, is OWNERSHIP from the giddyap, so you’re fully prepared to deal with the ricochets.

~Bill