Last week I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s poignant editorial in the New York Times where he explores the “geography of familiarity”. It’s a quick read which you can link to [here].
Mr. Klinkenborg challenges his readers to think of home not as a world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.
As someone that spends a lot of time interacting with people on-line via Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., as well as helping my clients to design and build social networking platforms, I was caught by the notion of “home” being something we “carry within ourselves”. That’s sort of what having on-line relationships is like.
All of those people I interact with on-line carry with them my imagination’s interpretation of who they are.
As a Graphic Designer, a “visual communications professional”, that’s a really important concept to understand. For a social network to be successful it really does need to become, at least part of, the very bedrock of our being. Otherwise what is the value of all that time I spend developing relationships on-line?
Lately I’ve been “un-following” people on Twitter. I’ve been “filtering” friends on Facebook—same with FriendFeed. I tell myself that it’s because I only want to read about those people that I really care about, or be introduced to ideas from people I admire. That’s a huge disservice to the people that “friend me” or “follow me” — as well as a contradiction to Mr. Klinkenborg’s challenge to welcome the unfamiliar.
But it’s easy. After all, I don’t really “know” these people. I can delete them from my imagination as quickly as I created them.
And that’s the challenge for us “visual communications professionals”. How do we create a digital social platform that encourages each of us to have stronger connections? How do we create an online system that exposes more of who we are and reduces the ease at which we delete our “friends”.
