At
my London presentation this week on Social Networking, I restated my
views that three of the five most important types of Social Networking
Applications (SNAs) are about finding people
-- to love, to make a living with as business partners, and to pursue
common cause with. I also reiterated that most SNAs, even when they do
enable you to identify what may possibly be the 'right' people, are
socially awkward: They don't let you introduce yourself to people the
way you would do face to face. And sometimes therefore the transition
from an online relationship to a face to face one can be jarring, and
occasionally disastrous.
What is this strange process we use to
get to know strangers? For many of us, I think, it is a little like the
process of peeling an onion, slowly stripping away the layers of the
other person's surface identity, and allowing the other person to do
the same, sometimes at different speeds and with different styles and
techniques.
In fact, it may be that in our complex, anxious,
imprisoning and often hurtful modern society, it's more like peeling
off layers of bandages and exposing the wounded skin beneath. Not
something we do easily for strangers, and involving a ritual that takes
patience, trust, practice, and tact (or ruthlessness) to accomplish
successfully.
It entails to a certain extent a standing down
from personal power, a willingness to open oneself and be vulnerable to
another person, and hope that person will not exploit that
vulnerability. This is less difficult, I think, with children, and with
people of certain cultures (notably indigenous ones) where there is
less pretense and less psychological baggage to overcome.
The
process can involve revealing part of someone's true nature beneath the
surface, only to discover another layer of opaqueness beneath that. And
one never knows if or when on has reached the final layer, or indeed if
there even is one.
It is unclear to me whether chemistry (e.g.
pheromones) helps in that unpeeling, or rather bypasses the need for
that mental strip-tease entirely, by tapping into a physical-emotional
feedback loop instead of the more difficult intellectual-emotional one.
When you have both, the mix is potentially explosive: the two of you,
physically drawn to each other, and possibly (but not necessarily
mutually) intellectually and emotionally drawn to each other as well.
Even
in business relationships, the chemistry, while not necessarily sexual,
can be substantial: We 'blink' to conclusions about people on the basis
of first impressions that are often arbitrary or even unfair, but once
established, rarely change. Of the 16Mb of information processed by our
bodies each second, only 18 bits are 'conscious' processing.
Weblogs,
if they are candid, provide a means to allow people to be sussed out
and, at least in one direction, short circuit the unpeeling process.
Still, the circling around each other and sniffing each other out still
must usually occur before the relationship can make that uneasy jump
from 'virtual' to 'real'.
What might we do to make the process
simpler and less fraught with anxiety? After all, it's hard enough to
filter out the people with the most potential from all those casual
online acquaintances in the first place, without having to face the
additional hazard of blowing what could be a critical relationship by
an unnecessarily cumbersome first physical encounter?
I think we
need a new 'getting to know you in person' ritual. It should draw on
the successful rituals practiced by creatures without language, and by
indigenous cultures who seem to be much better at it than our culture.
It must allow either party to exit the relationship gracefully, yet
still allow both parties to save face. And it must be genuine, free of
the terrible risk that one party will deliberately or unintentionally
defraud the other into believing the relationship has legs when they
really know it doesn't for any number of reasons (ulterior motives,
overcompensation for lack of self-esteem, desperation, loneliness, or
even psychopathy).
How would such a ritual work? Anyone studied
anthropology or animal behaviour or complexity theory enough to suggest
the 'rules' for such first physical encounters? The cost of lost
opportunity is too great for us to be so abysmal at this critical,
often terrifying step in the social networking process. Do we need some
agreed-upon non-verbal signals, or scripts, at the outset? Could we use
pheromone detectors or other technologies to facilitate it? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
