Realty Bites

Do you have distant family members who send you a Christmas letter every year but don’t interact with you at any other time? How about friends who send a canned greeting card on your birthday but don’t include a personal note?

I call this type of communication “relationship pinging.” It’s a term I coined about twenty years ago. At the time, I was receiving messages from a former college classmate who would send a mass e-mail to everyone in her address book. The theme was always the same: “Here’s a cause or charity I’m interested in at the moment, and I expect you to contribute.” She reacted angrily when I responded, simply, “Unsubscribe.”

I’ve had people alert me every time a dog goes missing at a Wal-Mart somewhere in America. Some people send me every joke that comes across their desk. Others want me to know about every bulletin they see on Fox News or MSNBC. These messages are always about them, not me or us.

The etymology of the term “relationship pinging” will be obvious to some of you. In the early days of personal computers, Internet connections were not persistent. That is, if you failed to type a keystroke every few minutes, your connection would “time out” and  be lost. You would then have to log in again, a powerfully annoying feature. Some bright young programmer came up with a little bit of code you could run on your computer that would “ping” the connection at regular intervals to keep it from timing out. A ping was just a tiny packet of meaningless information sent to the server to remind it that you were still there.

Relationship pingers are doing the same thing — trying to keep the relationship alive with minimal effort and no meaningful contact. It’s a phenomenon that has existed for centuries, but it is particularly prevalent during the age of Facebook, when people have replaced actual friends with “buddy lists.” People no longer get together to share stories of their lives over a sidecar. Instead they post to their “wall” once in a while. Some have taken it to a perverse extreme, tweeting every few minutes to let their “followers” know, “I’m eating the awesomest burrito right now.” (Thanks to Alex Watts for that one.) The personal relationship is dead.

I sometimes feel this blog is an extension of that problem. There isn’t enough interaction here to give me the sense that anyone is actually reading my posts. Of course, this is mostly my fault for not publicizing this blog, but I wonder. Do people actually read blogs? I don’t know. But I’d love to hear from you.