Lone Gunman

I’ve recently arrived in Seat­tle and over the com­ing two weeks will be slowly mak­ing my way down to San Fran­cisco. I’m on hol­i­day; life is good.

I’m aware that things have been quiet around here lately, so as a pre­lude to the “return” of Lone Gun­man I’ve got a cou­ple of fine guest writ­ers lined up while I’m away.

For the com­ing week your host is david (b) hayes.

David recently got his own tag here on Lone Gun­man thanks to his won­der­ful post, Why You Hate Your Face­book Friends [LG]. How­ever it’s David’s linkblog, Link Banana, which has made the most impact here as it’s been the source of many of my favourite posts over the last few years.

His long form blog, Frozen Tooth­paste, is another a favourite read of mine. Of course, David is also on Twit­ter so fol­low him here.

Join me in wel­com­ing David by leav­ing com­ments on his posts.

Thanks to David and to you.

The meth­ods through which we cre­ate and main­tain rela­tion­ships are con­stantly chang­ing, with recent decades boost­ing the move from a purely location-based model to one where rela­tion­ships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Inter­net (and, to a lesser degree, the tele­phone and mail sys­tems). How­ever, while this new way of cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing rela­tion­ships has dis­tinct advan­tages over the ‘tra­di­tional’ con­cept of location-based friend­ship cre­ation, many per­ceive it as inferior.

Tak­ing his cue from a quote that did the rounds on Twit­ter last year–Twit­ter makes me like peo­ple I’ve never met and Face­book makes me hate peo­ple I know in real life–David Hayes attempts to shed light on the advan­tages of Internet-originating rela­tion­ships by per­fectly describ­ing the way friend­ship cre­ation has evolved over time (by means of describ­ing the con­straints to doing so). The con­clu­sion echoes my sen­ti­ments exactly:

I view the higher value placed on place-originating (or “real-life”) friend­ships as wrong­headed. It seems only log­i­cal to me that it is bet­ter to build your rela­tion­ships from a pool of peo­ple who speak your lan­guage and have sim­i­lar soft-qualities to you, than to attempt to start from a geo­graph­i­cally con­strained group and then attempt to find soft-quality matches in a face-to-face series of inter­ac­tions. This is fun­da­men­tally what the inter­net allows: the friend­ship process to start from a set of com­mon­al­i­ties around soft attrib­utes, and then poten­tially aim for geo­graphic match­ing. This is the oppo­site of the stan­dard process, but cer­tainly the one more likely to yield deep and long-lasting relationships.

Inter­est­ingly, even though our only com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been through numer­ous back­links and a cou­ple of tweets, I wouldn’t hes­i­tate in call­ing David a friend. Most likely, the major­ity of my Face­book friends (i.e. my phys­i­cal world orig­i­nat­ing friends) would not under­stand this.