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The Fading Division Between Friends and Work Contacts
By Richard Nantel | September 29, 2007
The line between work and life is becoming very blurry for me. My Facebook friend list includes family, friends, work colleagues, partners, thought-leaders, edubloggers, and a few dogs and cats. Browse their profiles, and you’ll see work-related blog posts side-by-side with family vacation photos; personal messages from friends; listings of what they like to read, watch, and eat; and gifts of virtual fish, booze, panties, and more.
This seems significant to me. Networks such as LinkedIn are 100 percent focused on professional relationships. Although I have a LinkedIn profile, I rarely visit the network. Facebook, on the other hand, connects me to people in a way where I can’t easily classify these relationships as distinctly friend or work contact. Increasingly, my connections are starting to look like this:
This is very different from my father’s life. For his entire career, he’d head off to work in the morning, spend the day with office colleagues, and would return home at 5:30, where he’d spend the evening nursing a scotch and relaxing. He led two very distinct lives: a work life with colleagues and an evening and weekend life with family and friends. The two groups would very rarely intersect and were distinct.
The most important impact of Facebook (and possibly a few other social networks) is that they are becoming platforms that support many aspects of our lives:
- Friendship
- Work
- Learning
- Entertainment
Having the people related to these activities listed together within my profile is blurring the categories in which they might normally be perceived. Through Facebook, I know much more about the people I work with virtually than I did back when I worked in a bricks and mortar office years ago in pre-Web 2.0 days.
Personally, my life and career are becoming more rewarding as the divisions between friends and work colleagues fall.
Topics: Facebook, Social networking, Social networks |
