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)
u00a0well said dave. u00a0i will be sending out a few handwritten letters this week and will let you know how that goes… u00a0i’ll also take on the twitter challenge once my boss gets me connected to it.
u00a0Excellent… I’ll let you know how I turn out…
I will take it, except for the twitter part because I’m not on twitter.u00a0 I love thisu00a0blog Dave and I am so on board with it.u00a0 It is so easy to never talk oru00a0be in contact with anyoneu00a0these days, it is foru00a0sure a challenge that we will need to stay on top of forever in this technology age.u00a0 Thanks for the reminder.u00a0
Good Taryn… I’ll be checking back in a week with the results of my own personal challenge. u00a0 Good luck!
u00a0Here, Here! u00a0Thank you; refreshing and inspiring and I will try to join you on this quest! u00a0Now, I will try to call my mom and not just email her!
Thanks Denise… I will be giving an update next week… it’s been a great ‘experiment’ and I hope to do it more often… let me know how it turns out for you.u00a0