During my recent, longer-than-expected absence from the virtual world I’ve been keeping busy. For those who are curious, my time can be briefly summarised as being spent enjoying a mix of wandering, pondering, working, thinking, scheming and dreaming.
One thought that has occupied some of my attention is the way I interact with people online and how that differs from my real-life communications. I know that online communications often encourage superficial, casual interactions and certainly the random, spontaneous engagements I’ve had with all manner of people I would not normally encounter has often been interesting, and sometimes more than just a little inspirational. However, if I’m to be true to myself (and that’s probably a very good thing to be), I have to admit that developing casual relationships with an ever-growing number of acquaintances is not really my style. That is a philosophy which holds true to both my real life and online self, but perhaps a philosophy that I have not been applying all that consistently.
I would much prefer to have a meaningful conversation with three people with whom I share common interests or a common standing, rather than a meaningless or frustrating conversation with two hundred people who I share little or nothing in common with. The rule of quality over quantity definitely applies, and perhaps becomes even more relevant to me as each year passes by.
So again, I’ve come to the Jerry Maguire moment (a film which for some reason resonates strongly and gives me much to reflect on). While the words of Jerry’s mission statement relate directly to the business of sports management, I have always felt there is a much wider relevance, particularly in light of my recent reflections…lets see it again...
‘The answer is fewer clients. Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.
Let us be honest with ourselves.
Let us be honest with them.
Forget the dance. Focus…’
It would probably be much easier to just insert the entire mission statement here and have those words much more eloquently communicate exactly what it is that I am struggling to express. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that I want something more than just to collect more and more followers, friends or acquaintances. I want to have something deeper than simply having a huge number of people to virtually interact with or to feel validated about the person that I am by ‘talking at’ or being ‘listened’ to by a huge number of people.
The reality of the situation is that the vast majority of these people are probably not listening to me and will probably never be interested in engaging with me in any personal way. That's exactly why i dislike networking events. I’m not wishing this to sound like a complaint or a plea for attention, simply to say that people develop online relationships in different ways and with different purposes. What works for one person will not necessarily work for me.
I also don’t want this to sound all serious, doom-and-gloom, and overly-analytical. It’s not as if I want every conversation to be deep and meaningful, all I hope for is that the interactions I have with people online are able to be more personal than impersonal. And that brings me to the subject of another thought that I’ve been reflecting on – the expectation, or rather, the pressure to be predictable and one-dimensional in an online world.
This is something that I’ve particularly found true of myself. I do not have a singular focus or interest in my life. In other words I am not particularly obsessed or focussed on any one aspect or any one thing, but I’ve felt a pressure to represent myself as a person who is always one way or another – never a combination of many things. Perhaps being a generalist rather than a specialist is not a good way to be, but it certainly is a reality for me.
I used to worry about my lack of a consistent theme or subject on my blog, as many people will tell you that it is important for readers to be able to ‘expect the expected’. Perhaps my absences from the blog from time to time can be blamed to some degree on this concern that my words are too random and the things I write about are too unrelated to any one central idea. I have slowly come to realise that I do in fact have a theme on Tiny Salmon – a theme of whatever interests me at any given time. Sometimes I want to reflect on my place in the world, sometimes I want to talk about movies or books that I’ve enjoyed, other times it feels like enough to just share a photograph. I aim for consistency in my inconsistency.
So where has all this thought taken me? It has brought me back to the blog with a renewed level of commitment and enthusiasm. Hopefully this leaves me feeling liberated and refreshed.
All that remains is for me to thank you handful of readers, for indulging me as I’ve worked my way through this overly convoluted thought process. Hopefully I haven’t succeeded in boring you senseless, and if that’s the case I hope you shall return for another visit soon so that we can discuss something extremely important or something which may seem very insignificant in a meaningful way. Remember to feed the fishes...
This has been a strange sort of year, and as the months drip by and we pass through the time between each season I always feel a little ‘out of sorts’. I’m sure I’ve written about this kind of thing sometime before. And so with all this strangeness going on, it seems that I’ve once again been missing in action from here more than I ever intended to be.
