fictionsmith

Let me be straight with you.  I practice Baby Bear Superficiality.  What’s BBS?  Well, I just made that up, but run with me here please.

(Friend Request: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_HQsR6R2o)

We made a couple short films on Monday.  Friend Request is about operating online on a very shallow level of ‘friendship’ in social networking.  You play games with them, give people things of absolutely no substance, and when you’re done, you reach the end of the year wondering what you’ve done that will last with them.  Or, you simply hide them if you are annoyed by their activity.

Let’s call this Papa Bear Superficiality.

(Please Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYi9eEMCoao)

The other short we did was a very simple ‘vlog entry’ style short film.  This is a prime example of Baby Bear Superficiality, skirting on the deep end of online relationships (or we’ll call it Mama Bear Superficiality).

If someone is hurting and they are constantly posting about it, they are deemed ‘whiners’ and are blocked, hidden, or tolerated.  Perhaps the origin of the problem is calling on those we don’t know very well to care deeply about us and our issues instead of finding it with in-person relationships.

Please Subscribe is a plea to care about the person, not the personal branding of the vlogger (or the facebooker).  Whether online social networking sites are a decent place to do that is another debate…

So many of us practice Baby Bear Superficiality.  We occasionally play games with people we barely know, but not to a point that we are ignored.  We share hurts, but only occasionally and only when we are overwhelmed (a person who hides me because a close family member has died probably shouldn’t be your friend even on a superficial level).  We balance our online social life to offend as few of people as possible to reach as many people as possible.

Why?

Do we hope to become some sort of online celebrity? 
Do we want popularity? 
Acceptance? 
To be a friend to as many as possible? 
To care for as many as we can reach?

Everybody is different, but I think after the smoke clears and our two semi-biting commentaries on social networking run their 60 seconds, we all have to decide how to be a friend, and how to show love to our neighbor… and define how many people we can be an effective neighbor to.

vcD.