Dave, I thank you for this post. Here it is, first-day morning and I’m blowing off another Quaker meeting due to rainy weather, a mild cold, things to do, and the fact that I’m not a great Friend I guess. What better circumstances to reflect on what it means to be lower-case "f" friend?
Dave Winer expresses a very tightly coupled view of friendship. I suspect that an assertion of friendship from Dave carries with it fierce loyalty and affection, an affirmative bond. Dave says, "…a friend is someone I trust to be with me when I am at my weakest and
most vulnerable. And they are people who, no matter how painful it is
to see, are willing to be with me when I am so helpless and weak. If I
would trust my life with you, and vice versa, we are friends."
I get that. For me, that would describe what I think of as a "trusted friend." But my view of friendship is I think broader than that. In nature, as in life, there are strong forces and weak forces. Dave writes about a friendship that is like the strong force binding neutrons and protons together in the atomic nucleus. My view includes weaker forces, like gravity.
One of the great drawbacks of social networks like FlickR or Orkut or Friendster is the database requirement of classifying the nature of the relationship. Friend? Close friend? Antagonist? Real jerk? Sycophant? Degenerate? Relationships are cool or warm, antagonistic or cordial. Classifying relationships is embarrassing at best.
If I’m willing to hook-up with you at all on a social network, I’m generally willing to call us friends. But, out of respect for how you manage your database and the face you show the world, I’ll be happy not to be too effusive.
One of the points Dave makes relates to the artificial nature of net relationships, the false intimacy that we sometimes infer to be real. I know many people through my blog. Though I’ve never met them, I’m glad to call them friends. I have also met many people face-to-face because I blog and I’m happy to call them friends as well. Yet most of these are "weak force" relationships. You guys know who you are and you are hereby absolved of any requirement to bring flowers to the hospital room.
Now take McD. Here’s a person who is generally a nice guy, smart, witty, charming. What he writes often speaks to me. I don’t know him as a person, in fact his identity is shielded from me behind his conscious anonymity, but I’m okay with calling him friend. For all I know, he’s not really my friend. For all I know he has sent an arsonist to burn down my barn. But I think I won’t dwell on that. I think I’ll welcome the relationship and if it matures and/or strengthens, that’s great! If not, so what?
Or take Brian… here’s another person I’ve never met, but whom I admire due to the fact that he’s consistently funny, on the money politically and ethically, a good writer, and a genius to boot. Unlike McD, Brian isn’t an anonymous presence. But then… it’s the Year of the Dog, and on the Internets… well, you know what they say.
The title of this post is sort of tongue-in-cheek. Dave’s essay goes to great lengths to limit the set of his true friends. But — bear with me, we’re taking a little tangential perambulation — twenty-five years ago we were faced with an enormous interoperability challenge in the world of computing. I worked for a company that owned DEC, Tandem, IBM, Wang, and lots of other gear from companies like Burroughs and Diebold. Mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers (now we call them PCs) all needed to talk with each other and certain standards evolved that made that more or less possible. The world was divided into ASCII and EBCDIC. Interoperability standards were hinged on communications protocols endorsed by national and international standards setting bodies and de facto "industry standards" that were proprietary but in common use across platforms. If you were running a Burroughs minicomputer and I was running a Tandem, we had some choices about how to exchange data over the network, but it was likely that we both would agree to configure an IBM protocol (the de facto, if proprietary standard) and talk to each other as if we were both IBM computers.
Dave Winer is a major figure in the development of current interoperability standards. Using the industry standard XML, Dave has been at the front of the pack influencing interoperability since at least 1998. XML RPC, SOAP, and of course RSS are among his major contributions. Another XML effort, OPML, is currently underway. If you’re an industry analyst, consultant, writer, publisher or simply a pop tech afficionado, if you have any interest in interoperability then you want to be aware of Dave and his work.
I am, of course, but a humble fan-boy ("not worthy, not worthy"), a journeyman technoid in the world of dweeb. I’ve met Dave, and done my best to cultivate a positive relationship. It is a relationship that falls far short of friendship (he never writes, he never calls). But Dave is such a human being, who wouldn’t want to be his friend?
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
[raises hand]
I for one like the netty webby forms of *friendship* that have developed via blogging (for me) over the past three or four years. I actually find that sustained but periodic interaction with people online allows for much reading and *feeling* between the lines, and there are some people I would definitely go a long way out of my way for that I have only met once or twice, or not met.
Some of them stimulate my linky thinking, and some of them inspire trust or confidence, because you can pretty quickly get a sense of how straight, honest, not duplicitous they are or are not. I trust quite a number of my online friends at least as much as I trust my offline friends .. and that’s a lot.
That said, there’s something about DW that would not predispose me to seek to even inititiate friendship. first, the way he defines it feels :*hard* somehow to me .. in the sense that I think I would always feel as if my friendship might be at danger, or ready to be broken exactly because it is so tightly coupled, so laden with force and “trusting my life with” … if one dared to disagree strongly enough with him, would/could a friendship either develop or weather the storm ? And I have had the experience of testing mighty disagreement with some of my off and online friends - the friendships have lived through it.
I’d add to this my experiences with meeting DW twice, and each time we spoke I had a clear physical sensation that to him I wasn’t really even there or worth condescending too. Quite an eerie feeling, actually, and not even remotely inviting of continued acquaintance, let alone something called friendship.
I’ve met Brian, when we were both in Toronto. It remains an experience I remember warmly .. I can’t speak for him but from my end it was a couple of hours very well spent, and I am glad I suggested it.
Apologies in advance for commenting twice.
I just re-read DW’s post more carefully than the first time. I think he’s still reflecting on his past on-off relationship with Adam Curry, and generalizing it so as to disguise that he really wanted to remain friends and biz partners with Curry. I watched them make up publicly on-stage at Gnomedex last year, and then things went downhill again afterwards. Davewants, to be recognized as the main inventor of podcasting (oh, he probably is, but by now, so what), and he’s still pissed about all that has gone on that hasn’t necessarily traced back to his doorstep.
No idea if I am right or wrong .. just an opinion after re-reading that post and having read many of DW’s similar but shorter diatribes about friendship, loyalty, betrayal, dishonesty, etc.
i remain your Winer (no relation) Friend. running a Burroughs minicomputer.
And
i’m a dog. really.
Jon, I couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I didn’t!
Leslie, ma petite Winer dog, I am warmed by your friendship. Thank you.
Ken… that was eloquent, if terse.
lol Frank. It’s about all I can muster with regard to that particular topic, but somehow I felt like it needed to be said by someone.
My rule : If I was attending a random conference in a large hotel; National Ashtray Designers Association Bi-Annual Gala Dinner, The Annual Meeting Of The Movement For The Re-introduction Of Wooden-Handled Steak Knives (WOODEX-06) or The Regional Roadshow-case-expo Of Hotel Bathroom Miniature Shampoo & Bath Oil Bottle Cap Safely-Closed-But-Still-Easily-Open-able-By-Weak-Hands Closure Torque Limit Setting Committee & Steering Group, and I knew that you were also attending said conference but were lost somewhere in amongst the sea of people and I went to the bother of asking the organising staff to put out a “Could Frank Paynter please come to the information desk…” meet-up message out over the tannoy so we could hook up, then I would consider you close enough to be called a friend.
I was at that conference… the bottle caps, not the steak knives. If I had known you were there I would have put out a message over the tannoy, Gary. If I knew what the tannoy was. Is it the public address system set loud enough t’annoy everyone within earshot?
Ne’mind. I Googled it. Must be sort of an audio kleenex thing in Britain.
There I go again, forgetting my locale.
“The term “tannoy” in colloquial British English is used generically to mean any public-address system, though the word is a registered trademark.”
From : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannoy
As I suspected, the “kleenex” of the British PA industry.
“Kleenex is a brand name of facial tissue and a registered trademark of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Because of the success of this brand, it has become a genericized trademark in American English and many people in North America today refer to any tissue as a ‘kleenex’.”
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLEENEX
Friends
Theres an analysis of friendship happening on some major blogs right now.
I read Frank Paynters blog almost daily and I tend to agree with a lot of his writing.
Frank joined the discussion on the topic of friendship. In Franks leng…
thanks for the group lurve, fellas.
Yeah. Net friends is an odd one. I guess anyone who takes the time to seek out and find my evermovable blog is to be considered a great friend. (I love that term. A former landlady - vedddy English, veddy propah - used that term once referring to a great friend of hers. Never knew what that meant.)
Meeting - as I did with Jon and have with only one other blogger who shall remain nameless only because he’s anonymuse, one of those - certainly accelerates a friendship, must say. I owe several bloggers a meeting - memer being one, say, there’s no excuse there.
As I am not a tech (unlikely you would ever find me attending a conference) Jon’s effort to meetup was welcomed warmly. And I think I’ve developed a very looose measuring tool for ‘net friends’. If amongst the offline in my life - most of whom haven’t got a clue about this aspect of my life - I find my self saying, offhand, “my friend in South Africa”, “this friend of mine in Australia” or “I’ve got this friend in Wisconsin” or what have you, I catch myself, and think, yeah these people are my friends. It’s yes or no.
And, like blogging itself, it’s a two way thing.
As a sidebar, kinda funny: me being me, sort of an open sort, I’d developed a writerly relationship with a blogger woman once who dropped me like a sack of laundry. She’d written via email about some very personal stuff in her life - which to me is all that counts, and no frank it wasn’t related to sex - and then boom, nothing. I have to assume she said too much and felt embarrassed.