Interesting conversation going on last night about the “social obligations” that we might have when it comes to using social media, and making friends. It is always nice to have someone follow you, and it is usually expected that you would follow them back, but that is not always the case. There are always low level conversations about food, lattes and where omelets come from that some folks just don’t care about.

Is it really an obligation on my part to friend you back? No, not really, if you get friended on a social site does that automatically obligate you to listen to the drivel about something you just don’t care about at all or ever? No not really.

Sure you can drop out of friend feed or Facebook, or any other social media, but what it really means, and this is where I agree with Scoble is that you chose to follow the wrong people. That is ok, but you know you can unfriend them fairly quickly rather than drop out of the system entirely.

We have been using social media like a drunk takes to a bottle of vodka, and we are just now realizing the hang over praying that we can find another bottle to reduce the pain.

If people just start friending everyone on the planet, of course it is going to hurt; it is going to hurt a lot because you won’t get what you are wanting out of the system. If you dive into the buffet of noise that social media has become then really you do need to take some responsibility for that. You can always unfriend people, been known to do it myself rather than simply whine about it or drop out of a system. Not everyone on the internet is someone you want to make your friend. While it is great to have 5000 Facebook contacts, how realistically can you really sort out the good stuff from the bad stuff?

You can road test friends, new friends and see if they are providing you information that you want, it is always worth taking the risk on, but you can easily unfriend them just as quickly. Better than diving back into the bottle of social media and getting punch drunk on the noise level. Sometimes you have to push away from the table, or put down the drink, and ohh, the sun is shining outside, time to go fishing.

Tags: social, media, overload, friends, friend feed, drop out, contacts, friendship, following, drunk, drunken sailor, pain