cruel to be kind

Going through the Google plus list of circles I find myself asking one question over and over again and I believe others ask this too:

Do I recognize your name?
Do I recognize your photo?
Who are you again?

Are you ‘recognizable’ enough to be added to circles, now that we become more and more connected?  Yes, normal people only have a handful of friends and this question is not relevant to them. But I bet in the very soon future that number will grow, even for those ‘normal’ people.  Our attention span may be able to manage Dunbar’s number of connections, but we have moved far beyond this with social networking – we stay in touch with people much longer than we did previously and connect deeper with strangers. That was not really planned by nature when it designed our memory banks.

Add to this that brands and companies are getting into the mix, people go explore their hobbies and interests and next you know they add 100 “friends” to have a better chance at social games.  They will figure out that having more choice is not a bad thing. Which is when the question comes up again:

Are you satisfied just to be part of the crowd and watch others perform or is it relevant to you to be ‘more’  – whatever that implies, being the rockstar, the artist who wants to show off his work, the collector, the curator, the what else …? 

This was sparked through a conversation with a friend who I wish would ‘publish’ more. I’d like to read what he has to say. But as much as he might have to offer, for him to move beyond the “my friends will read me” sphere, it has to be  ‘better. faster. stronger.’ (sorry just in my head phones).  Interesting people are just a click away.

Being part of the audience is neither a bad thing nor that everybody aspires to be ‘more’. Seems like we need new terms and ideas about this. Who are we? What do we want to become and how much of our souls are we willing to sell?

The old model of “I rockstar. You audience” cannot work. I think we need to adapt from situation to situation and technology should help manage this. We have so many data points to enter into the system but as long as the only choice we have is putting people in circle for sending and reading …

That is not enough. The machines should be more clever by now.
Can somebody please start working on that? Thanks.