Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

God is Facebook, Facebook is God

by // 8 Comments

I was mystified by some of the posts from my Facebook friends, until I realized:

They're praying!

"Hoping for a better day and for the strength to do the right things," a friend says, without further explanation.

"Pressing my own reset button and learning how to breathe again," writes another friend, who also appears to be mixing up her Facebook friends, who haven't a clue what she's talking about, with God, who presumably does.

"Every single one of you is on my friend list as a result of a conscious decision. I wanted you there! I am not only glad to count you as friends, but also family. Copy & paste this as your status if you cherish family & friendship. Thank you for being part of my life!"

You are welcome, my child.

Yes, people are praying to their Facebook friends, as if those dozens or hundreds of people form the face of God, and the ears. They're praying they are not alone. They're praying they're not the only one who feels the way they do. They're praying they are loved.

I'm a humanist. Praying to people actually makes sense to me.

So keep on praying, Facebook friends.

We're listening. And, for the most part, liking.

My neighbors, my friends

by // 3 Comments

I have a complicated attitude about friendships with neighbors.

Actually, I have a complicated attitude about friendships in general—and friendships with neighbors throw me off.

I think of my friendships as magical, mystical soul-matings that took place at a meaningful moment in time and then held fast even as the great cosmic wash crashed in around us. I think of them as, aside from my family and my own mind, the only thing I really have.

So I never second-guess the energy and the money and the time I spend with my friends. Even in gobs, it’s well-spent by definition. The ROI is understood. In the parlance of modern management, which has leaked into the vocabulary of the life coach, it’s “strategic.”

But with my life half over, how am I to think of the considerable time I find myself spending with my neighbors, and a circle of their friends? This is a fun, oddball lot of childless, single thirty-somethings, organized mostly around their interest in motorcycling—there’s a mock motorcycle gang that we call The Hard Cases—and their love of beer-drinking on the summer porch.

Those are two powerful organizing principles, I grant you—but ones that don’t quite connect with the purpose of my life: my family, my writing, my family, my writing, my family, my writing.

I think my neighbors sense my unease, my creeping desire to make the happy engine hours we spend together count for something. (Which is probably why I’m writing about it; if I'm writing about it, it counts.)

“It’s just fucking fun, man,” is their irritated, unspoken response.

As another friend of mine said when he was accused over over-thinking an issue, “I’m not over-thinkin’ it, man. I’m just thinkin’ it!”

There’s something blissfully un-fraught about porch beers (or as they call ‘em in the suburbs, “garage beers”). And probably, I ought to just enjoy the happy passing of the time. And maybe, these people with whom fate threw me, are actually becoming my friends.

Which is fine with me, except I'm going to have to get some new neighbors.

The danger of the misreverence that social media breeds

by // 14 Comments

For several years after I broke into this business, I was afraid to call Roger D'Aprix on the phone, because he was a living legend of employee communication. A lot of the practitioners I was interviewing told me he actually taught them how to think about their job.

Finally I called him and we talked and he didn't bite; he gave me a genial interview. Maybe I had been silly to wait so long. But probably, too, the waiting had prepared me to interview D'Aprix more carefully and intelligently.

Eventually, D'Aprix honored me by writing a chapter in a book I edited, and a regular column for the Journal of Employee Communication Management, which I'd founded for Ragan. Now, he serves as the senior judge on the E2E Communication Awards, which I chair.

And over the years, we actually became friends—me as a stander upon his shoulders, he (I think) an occasional admirer of my writing. And, even better, we liked each other, reveling in the occasional chance for a drink or lunch, and exchanging occasional e-mails that were always friendly and trusting and warm.

And then I check my Facebook page and I see this, on the right-hand column.

Roger D'Aprix

Help him find his friends.

Suggest friends for him.

Why is Roger D'Aprix on Facebook? Surely, because he wants to remain relevant. But I don't want to see him on there, because I want to remain reverent.

I see all the democratizing upside of Facebook and other social media. We're each our own carnival barker now. But how will we organize a profession—or a society—without reverence, and reverence's conjoined twin, irreverence?