For this week’s Monday Video comes a piece near and dear to my heart – as a lover of connecting!
How do you connect to people online? (the video)
How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.
This resonates with the question that people always asked me when I first started teaching online facilitation: “can you create real connection and relationships with people online?” Darn tootin YES WE CAN!
What has evolved for me, however, is the distinction of the RANGE of connection and relationship we have, from the weak ties of the network which coalesce first around topical interest, to the more contained and measurable relationship in bounded groups, to the intimacy of pairs and triads where, across a diversity of tools and modalities, we reveal ourselves to each other.
These connections are not the same. They are not formed the same way. The type of relationship and trust is diverse. The usefulness is different across the continuum.
The second important thing this “online connecting” thing has taught me is that it is an amazing pallette to paint our identity out to the world, and to have others contribute to that portrait.
This is big learning for me since 1997.
P.S. The music D’Arcy used is from the amazing http://www.symphonyofscience.com/
Great video! I particularly liked the flash card style presentation suggesting the strength of identity through our online connective channels “Twitter, Facebook, This is me”, and the last speaker’s comment about the situational – and opportunistic – nature of choosing connection channels. What I didn’t like so well was the speaker who talked about the “old way” of commenting on blogs (vs. more “immediate” channels such as Twitter).
I agree with your commentary on diversity, evolution and depth. So far, at least, I have not found the depth of connection on Twitter that I often find on my blog, and other blogs, and yet I find more and more people choosing to tweet vs. comment, on my blog and others. Twitter connections can progress toward deeper connections, but I find the Twitter channel needs to be augmented through other channels (as another speaker aludes to).
I’m still evolving my connection protocol via the various tools … my current favorite connection strategy, for the most meaningful content I find online (or in blogs), is posting a comment on a blog, then tweeting about it … which I’ll be doing with this blog post 🙂
FWIW, a nice compendium of short stories about connections via Twitter can be found in the eBook, Twittertales.
Finally, I notice that you don’t have a “tweet this” link among the other sharing links you have on your post … I’m wondering if this omission is by design.
Hey, no intention around no “tweet this” button – I just haven’t had time to add this. You know, one’s own blog is the last thing that gets attention! I’ll have to look into it over the holidays.
🙂