Please God let me not become invisible.
How, you say, could someone become invisible? When our online “lives” encompass so much? Why, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Flikr and YouTube and MySpace and I have a blog…. And if you add up my Facebook friends and my Twitter followers and LinkedIn whatevers, I have exactly 4,917 “friends”… so how could I be invisible if I have that many friends?
Photo credit: Liu Bolin
When was the last time we said more than 140 characters could contain to one of our Twitter followers? When was the last time you talked on the phone with one of your Facebook friends? When was the last time you had a business lunch with a LinkedIn collegue? When was the last time ANYone went on MySpace?
Do these “relationships” have any substance at all, or are they just invisible interactions, so shallow that their depth is microscopic? Have we spread ourselves out so far that we are rice-paper thin, oblivious to the fact that the slightest bit of passion, the tiniest flame, would shrivel our existence into charred ash? (sorry, I am mixing metaphors here, back to the the invisibility thing…)
When was the last time we had a real relationship?
Let’s not be invisible anymore. Let’s be a real human person and actually touch other real human people (and I mean touch someone… shake a hand, hug a neck– no sidehugs allowed).
I am writing this challenge for myself:
– Write an email to a Twitter Follower that you’ve never met or talked to.
– Pick up the phone and call an old friend that you’ve re-met on Facebook.
– Write a hand-written letter to a family member.
If you’d like to join this challenge, please do and leave a comment on how it turned out. Or, you could stay invisible, just lurk around or maybe leave an Anonymous comment on my blog… be careful because you might just get an email from me.
(Inspired by Steven Pressfield in What Matters Now)