Much
of our social life is spent establishing and navigating the
undocumented boundaries of relationships. In our astonishingly complex
modern world, we are constantly entering into (and breaking off)
relationships, and watching them evolve, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Each relationship has a 'contract', a set of rules that govern what is
and what is not acceptable behaviour for the participants in that
relationship. Mostly, these contracts are implicit,
and the rules follow learned social behaviour: It's OK to kiss grandma
(in fact, it's expected) but not OK to kiss the person who you just
met. Some contracts of relationship are explicit,
such as employment contracts and marriage contracts, though in many
cases these merely clarify implicit contracts and are designed for
lawyers to use when the contract breaks down, rather than for use by
the parties directly.
There are, it seems to me, five general types of relationships:
- supplier-customer
- co-worker
- family
- neighbour
- friend
Each of these types can be either symmetric (where each party to the relationship gives and receives the same benefits) or asymmetric (where each party gives something different, of approximately equivalent value to the other parties):
| Nature of Relationship: | What We Offer | What We Expect in Return | Asymmetric:
~ employee to employer
~ supplier to customer
~ child to parent, | employee to employer:
labour, knowledge, respect, obedience
supplier to customer:
products, services, useful information, entertainment, respect
child to parent:
personal fulfillment, respect, obedience | money, appreciation, attention | Symmetric:
~ co-worker peers
~ project collaborators
~ family peers
~ friends
~ neighbours | experience, expertise, help,
useful information, collegiality | experience, expertise, help,
useful information, collegiality |
Symmetric
relationships are generally implicit and sustained by mutual agreement
-- if one party feels they are not getting what they want or expect
from the relationship, they simply terminate it by withdrawing from it
unilaterally, and it is ended. Asymmetric relationships are more
difficult to terminate: because of the unequal relationship and the
fact that there is often an explicit contract with consequences for
breach, negotiation is usually needed to terminate (or amend and
salvage) the relationship.
It is for this reason, I think,
that most of us prefer symmetric relationships where the contract is
implicit -- they are easier to amend and extricate ourselves from.
The
problem comes when a relationship sours and when, because it is
asymmetric or the contract is explicit, we are stuck with it
involuntarily. All kinds of very human things can cause a relationship
to sour:
- lack of respect
- feeling of obligation of one party that outweighs the perceived benefits ("it's more trouble than it's worth")
- an imposed or implicit hierarchy that one party thinks is inappropriate ("how dare you tell me what to do")
- a lack of trust or betrayal of trust
- an atmosphere of competitiveness
- personality
conflicts (one party feels the other is unreasonable, or behaving
immorally, or lacking in appropriate aesthetics, or there is just poor
chemistry between the parties)
- a lack of reciprocity (an unrequited or unsatisfied love, want or need)
When this happens, even what would normally be a symmetric relationship suddenly becomes unpleasantly and uncomfortably asymmetric,
often to the point of being unbearable. The problem is, the party that
wants out of the relationship may be or feel compelled, by explicit
contract, by financial needs, by lack of alternative opportunity, or by
sense of personal obligation, to stay in the relationship. This is an
unnatural and potentially nasty situation, one that anyone stuck in a
dead-end or soul-destroying job, or an abusive or suffocating
relationship, can attest to.
My reason for laying out this
'theory of relationships' is to try to describe the love/hate
relationship between bloggers and blog readers (and, in a broader
sense, between the media and their audience). This relationship is
inherently an involuntarily asymmetric one -- the blogger and the blog
reader have different 'skin in the game', and the commitment of the
blogger to the relationship is different (and usually more intense)
than that of the reader. This is different even from the relationship
of other information and entertainment media 'producers' to their
'customers': published writers, publishers and broadcasters receive
financial compensation from their audience (directly through
subscription fees or indirectly through advertising) and, for a lot of
producers, that's all they expect from their audience -- so attention
and appreciation, when they get it, is just a bonus.
The
blogger, on the other hand, generally receives little more from the
relationship than attention and appreciation, and that is often fickle
because, with no financial investment involved, the relationship, for
the reader, is very tenuous and easy to terminate (and there are a lot
of other bloggers begging and grateful for their attention). Of course,
we say we are grateful for
comments and criticisms, and indeed we are, but the truth is that, in
the absence of the comfort that people value our work enough to pay
real money for it, we live for attention and appreciation -- we want to
be 'popular'.
And that's the problem. This is a pretty thin basis on which to build a relationship. Such relationships are almost innately uncomfortably asymmetric,
and all seven of the relationship-souring qualities of fragile
relationships bulleted above are painfully familiar to bloggers, at
least occasionally. Even a Skype or telephone conversation, or a single
face-to-face meeting seems to create a much sturdier foundation for a
relationship than the anonymity that pervades the relationship between
writer and reader. I know columnists and published authors feel this
too -- they may get paid for a particular book or set of articles, but
as soon as the audience strays they are left feeling betrayed and
dismayed to have been abandoned by a readership they devoted hours of
energy and passion to cultivating, but discovered they really didn't
really know at all.
Of course all writers will tell you that they have to write, and that they don't really need
lots of fawning readers to be fulfilled. Yeah, right. They'll also tell
you that they don't need that stuff in the food pyramid cartoon above. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
