The premise of this experiment was to navigate my way down through my list of 400+ Facebook friends to see if I could write each person a unique, sincere and heartfelt holiday greeting based on our own individual relationship with one another. Pretty cool, right?
Polishing off my old McDonnell Douglas 1987 Florida State Science Fair Recognition of Achievement plaque, I sat down to flesh out my social experiment's hypothesis. The control was easy enough: communicating with each "friend" about the holidays. The variables, however, proved to be a bit more challenging to manage:
How do you communicate something so simple, yet so personal to a diverse group of individuals from my various walks of life; many of whom, I dare say, I've had actual in-person contact with maybe two times or less and some I've never even met!
This roadblock caused me to reevaluate the focus of this idea. The need to ask myself a series of self-evaluative, introspective questions arose:
- Who are your Facebook friends?
- What is the personal and quantifiable impact and the value of their friendship with you?
- Is there marked crossover between your real friends and your Facebook friends?
- And at least two dozen more queries which left me tied in 6-inch ribbon curls.
I was about to throw in the towel on the whole project, when a series of events over the last 10 days or so lit a path of discovery and inspiration.
It started with the most amazing evening with one of my dearest friends from my days in the pageant business. If the dictionary had a picture next to the words "true friend" it would be her beautiful Miss Illinois headshot. She is truly the best gift I could ever ask for. Ever!
The next day I had lunch with a couple of family friends. Inbetween bites, I noticed some twenty-somethings at the next table "voice texting" on their iPhones, which just seemed strange to me. I couldn't quite place my finger on it so later than night I pulled out my cell and unearthed this incredible feature on my smartphone...called a TELEPHONE! I determined I could actually use this device to personally reconnect with people as long as I had this mysterious nine-digit code called a phone number. Weird, huh?
This past week I enjoyed lunch and exchanging holiday pleasantries, cards and gifts with a couple of my favorite business colleagues (by the way, giving is hands-down my favorite part of Christmas) and then had a blast hanging out, karaoking and ringing in the holidays with many of my Elgin peeps at one of my favorite nightspots, Villa Verone.
The breakthrough for me, however, came this week when during one of my social media-induced comas I noticed a former colleague and friend, who I keep in touch with through Facebook, posted that she was coming home for the holiday weekend. My first thought was, "That's nice. I should comment on her post that we should get together while she's home to catch up." Silly, right? Then it hit me!
...3...2...1...we have comprehension!
Who are your Facebook friends? Right sized question, wrong shaped syntax.
Perhaps the more pertinent questions we should be asking ourselves are "How are you currently connecting with your friends?" and "What barriers are preventing your Facebook friends from being actual friends?"
Okay, this is going to blow your mind but the answers to both questions are actually one in the same: Facebook.
During my attempts to flesh out this social experiment, I looked back at the year that was for me. Despite what I would consider to be one of the most fulfilling years of my life, I actually discovered some startling and disappointing things about myself.
I used the term "fulfilling" to describe my 2011 because I feel like I really came into my own professionally this year. I am in a place now where I have renewed confidence in myself and all of my abilities and feel comfortable enough with this sometimes amusing puzzle I call Jason to add several new and exciting components to my plate to achieve a nice life-work balance. In other words, I am feeling fulfilled and want more of it in 2012.
The problem for me is I haven't been "fulfilling" my responsibilities to my friends and more importantly, to myself.
Look, I am certainly not the only person in the world whose busy workload affects my amount of personal free time. Hell, just look at the lack of updated content in this blog!
For someone like myself, who really places an enormous value on a person's friendship, it really saddens me when I look back at this year and realize that I haven't done a better job in holding up my end of that two-way friendship street.
When I do get the occasional opportunities to put the brakes on my life to stop and take in the sights, how do I catch-up with and communicate with my friends...my actual friends? How do inject myself into their lives and they into mine?
A Facebook post
A direct message
A chat
A Tweet
A Retweet
A Flickr photo tag
An e-mail
A text
My increasingly frequent use of social media as a communicational crutch with my friends and colleagues has made me a bad friend and has done them a complete disservice.
Whether out of convenience to accommodate our busy lifestyles or simple ambivolence to the dynamics of relational connection, the accepted societal norms of how we communicate with one another have shifted from less personal to more social. Society's loss, I guess.
What's worse? As much as I decry this, I hate to say it but I've just been too busy to notice or do anything about it.
In the end, sometimes it's just easier to fire off a Facebook message than to stop the world and take time out for people. Well who said something as important as real friendship was supposed to be easy? If it was, we'd all be making thousands of friends with as minimal an effort as clicking a mouse or tapping a key. Now where have I heard this concept before?
We spend valuable minutes and hours of our lives seeing what the digital projections of our contacts in Cyberspace are doing but we can't take five minutes to call that same person to see what they're up to? That stops for me now!
My New Year's Resolution [feel free to insert bad joke here about how long that will last] is striving for more personal connection with all the people in my life in 2012.
Now as a self-professed social media junkie, am I'm going cold Twitter turkey or closing up the Facebook shop? Are you kidding me? Hell no! Not by a long shot! The fact is communication amongst friends, colleagues, business contacts, even family members has changed and we either adapt or we die. I don't know about you but I have a lot of living left to do so I've decided on the former.
I love how social media enables me to stay in touch with people I know, people I used to know or even complete strangers who are just plain interesting. I will continue to use tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn among others to keep people abreast of what's going on in my life and check in to see what's going on in theirs. What I will no longer compromise on is the substitution of social media for relational connection with my friends.
Go back to my former colleague who came home for the holidays this week. In the past, I would have just commented on her post with a simplistic Christmas wish or perhaps some stupid, empty promise that we all have made before such as, "Hey! We should really get together soon," which we then, of course, never do.
The fact that I used Facebook as a means to successfully connect with her in person not only shows the value of social media as a tool in maintaining relationships but also reveals the true value of our friendship. That's what I want for my friends and for the important relationships in my life.
Birthday wall posts are great but if I value your friendship, this year you are going to receive a birthday phone call from me or at least an e-mail asking when we can go out to celebrate?
Should the need arise for me to discuss an important work or personal issue - whether its an idea I want to run past you, to get your advice on something or to tell you how I really feel about something - I'm going to make time for you in my schedule to talk with you in-person, face-to-face (your schedule permitting, of course) because I value and respect you and the impact your input can have on what I'm doing.
If I want to send "hugs" your way to tell you what you mean to me, I'll just come see you and hug you in-person over sending some spam-filled wall post from a convoluted Zynga-esque app.
And if for whatever reason you don't hear from me on any of the above, please call me to connect because it's awesome to know that you value our friendship together as well!
The point in all this is don't confuse communication with connection. Communicate with your Facebook friends. Connect with your friends.
Oh and despite the eventual failure of my overly-ambitious social holiday experiment, I am a man of my word. Although not personal to each of you, here is my Christmas wish (again, my blog so bite me PC holiday police) for all of my Facebook friends, which you can feel free to tag yourselves in:
Love and appreciate all of your friends, Facebook and otherwise, but cherish those who make your life so fulfilled by fulfilling their's with the best gift you can give: the gift of you.
Also here's a Christmas card for you with some of my favorite "hugging photos" of me and my friends. If you're not on here, then you need to grab a hold of me sometime this coming year so we can hug it out and take our pic for the Holiday Hugs Christmas Card 2012. I'll be waiting with arms wide open! :)
