My social graph
// April 6th, 2009 // Social Media
My social graph should be a Venn diagram – one of those graphs made of different sizes and colours of circles that everybody else learned how to interpret at school.
Me, I stopped listening at the point of realising they looked like a big window full of balloons. Swept up in that idea, my imagination took me out of the classroom window and into a sky full of coloured helium balloons.
I guess that doesn’t tell you much about my social graph. But it does help explain why I have trouble understanding why my relationships are best described by a graph when I’ve always considered them to be more a painter’s palette of oils or simply a noisy room full of diverse, interesting and creative people who have been kind enough to ask after my health, push a morsel of food in my direction and crack open a good bottle of wine.
Venn diagrams are beautiful because instead of growth or decay they show us how similar we are, how even the most different of us is connected through a series of overlaps linking, say, fascist with conservative, conservative with moderate, moderate with progressive, progressive with socialist, and socialist with Fidel Castro. Now Castro: there was a guy who knew how to compulsorily acquire friends.
Plotting the data points of my social graph I wonder if perhaps I am a close relative of the tulip, the internet startup and that nice young Mr Ponzi, because my social graph shows me accreting new followers on new social networks more quickly than I can say, “but what’s it all about and why, for heaven’s sake, would you want to follow me?” On Facebook I have 354 friends. On Twitter I cracked 1,000 followers this very day. LinkedIn tells me I could at the stroke of an Enter key tell a completely ludicrous “350,000,000+” people that I’m looking for new career opportunities. I bet they’ll all be excited to hear that.
Perhaps I will realise soon that nearly all these millions of people want to sell me something that I don’t want or need, want me only for the other connections on my social graph, or want me to help them transfer several billion from Nigerian bank accounts. I have been thinking that I’m at a party and I’m the special guest when really I’m caught in an Amway presentation and I’m the new conscript.
Perhaps my social graph will burst. Like a bubble or a balloon. Which is why my social graph should be a Venn diagram.
