I’m the person in our office who fields the phone calls after roommate assignments are sent out. I’m the person who talks to students and parents who have quickly browed the social media presence of the assigned roommate and already decided, less than twenty minutes after the email was sent, that the roommate relationship isn’t going to work because there’s a picture, a status, or a liked page that undermines the personally held expectations of a roommate relationship.
It’s easy to have those conversations, to explain to the students and parents that they can’t make a decision based on a quick glance at a social media profile. It’s easy to tell them they have to have a conversation and get to know each other before they can decide whether or not the relationship will be a successful one. In fact, beyond a conversation, they have to move in together and give it a couple of weeks.
And here’s what I’ve learned in a lot of years of having those conversations – when they do that, when they really give it a shot, it all works out.
Social media isn’t the cause of this though. The cause is human short sightedness and unwillingness to engage beyond the surface. And, ultimately, we’re all guilty of this, though maybe in ways that are less conspicuous than the roommate relationship conversation.
We don’t know each other.
We think we do. Social media has lured us into thinking that we’re friends.
In some cases, it’s true. The relationship has developed in other spaces outside of Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. I met Kathryn on Twitter in 2010. By 2011, we were collaborating on projects over the 2200 mile distance that separated us. In 2012 when we met face to face, it felt like being reunited rather than meeting for the first time.
But there are more with whom that hasn’t been the case.
It’s an illusion.
There are people who I like and respect from afar, but don’t really know if my assessment of their character is accurate because I don’t interact with them on a regular basis.
There are people with whom I thought I had a positive relationship and was proven wrong by their words or actions.
And there are people I’ve done the same to.
Because we really don’t know each other and we aren’t willing to try.
Every summer between my functional area’s annual conference and the end of orientation in August, I deactivate my social media accounts. It’s an exercise in self-care, but it’s also an exercise in challenging me to think about what relationships matter. Those that persist outside of the realm of social media are often surprising to me; they’re also the ones that clearly matter. It’s an important step back and reframe for me of how I conduct business, how I connect with others, and where my energy is best spent.