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Extending Situational Relationships With Social Media

We all know that the Internet, online community, and social media tools are great for enabling and strengthening the connections between people of every combination of like-minded/differently-minded and geographically distant/nearby.

Here, I’m going to look at social media and expanding relationships between people who are already like-minded — even excessively so — and physically near each other.

But wait, shouldn’t that kind of relationship take care of itself? After all, it’s a regular, real-world, real-people relationship — the kind we had before all this fancy online stuff.

This is true to an extent, but a peculiar thing about a lot of these real-world relationships is that while they’re often pretty rich, they can also be narrow in scope. They’re situational relationships (I may be misusing or misappropriating an existing term) where you have meaningful interactions with people, but only in certain contexts: The person behind the deli counter; a regular cashier; a bus driver; the usual crowd at the dog park.

You might see these people every day, interact with them, know their habits and their shtick and deep detail about them — but only in the areas that are specific to that context. For example, the counter person might remember everything nuance about how you order your breakfast order and take your coffee, that thing you do when you laugh and what kind of sunglasses you prefer, but not even know your name.

Maybe this is more of a city thing, where people are a little more anonymous and draw stricter boundaries around themselves. Or it could be a personality thing, dealing with extroversion and tolerance for small talk.

But then again, situational relationships are why it can be so surprising to see people outside of their usual context, like the first time you saw one of your teachers in the supermarket, or one of your graduate student teaching assistants in a club (and were forced to consider that they might be actual, regular human beings).

Incidentally, this is what we’re trying to do when we talk about using social media to humanize a business — we’re trying to broaden consumers’ investment into the relationship, by exposing them to more than just the purely commercial context.

How the online stuff fits into this can be pretty sneaky. (Innocent, but sneaky.) For example, say as a customer, you become a fan of the Facebook page of a favorite bar or restaurant, primarily so you can find out about events and specials. From there, given the usual norms of friend / follower etiquette, you’re a click away from becoming linked online with the staff, which exposes you to their News feeds, which gives you more insight into their lives outside of the normal context.

(Not to say that you couldn’t have, you know, talked to them before. But this is a more gradual way to get to know people.)

I suppose what I’m talking about is humanizing humans: Providing us with information about each other, outside of our usual contexts.

Anyway, clearly, social media tools don’t eliminate these barriers. But they can reduce them. Though of course, given the proper privacy controls, you aren’t forced to engage with people in their new context, or add them to your social circle. Maybe you want to keep your separate world separate and you like being semi-anonymous at the dog park, where no one has to worry about who’s a high-powered CEO or what people’s politics are. But it’s an option.

What do you think — has social media expanded any situational relationships in your life? Please leave a comment below.

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