Seth Godin recently wrote about what I am wrapping up into a category labeled Faux Intimacy and I havent been able to shake this one passage from the back of my mind:
Amazon, eBay, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, Facebook—they are all tools designed to make it easier to reach more and more people with a variation of faux intimacy. And this broadcast approach means that communication breaks down all the time… we have mass, but we’ve lost resiliency.
In the services we use we are encouraged to bring everyone we know into the walled garden de jour but we are not encouraged to make each of those (or even just ONE) of those connections truly meaningful. Godin continues,
So, here we are in the middle of the communication age, and we’re actually creating a system that’s less engaging, less resilient to change or dropped signals … [it’s] not always systems that work very well.
Even email is hurt in this "fast" web where much of the faux intimacy is hard to manage in a timely, meaningful way. The trend in 2012 was for people to tackle the inadequacy of email with regard to making enterprise level solutions. I see consumer level communications ripe for innovation in 2013 where the focus is on slowing down, building better, longer lasting, more meaningful communications between real people, real friends.
(I am excited to talk to anyone about this that will listen!)