Do you know that today it takes the average adult 47 times to see something before they SEE it? I don’t have the exact source of that data, but it came from a speaker at “World’s Greatest Marketing Seminar” a couple years ago.  To me that seems a bit “over-stimulated” – that we see so many images and messages that our ability to truly see what is before us is being foiled.

I work with people on the use of social media and other web-based technologies, but as a student of human sociology I’m very troubled by the over-stimulus that is occurring at the speed of our technology.  I’ve decided that I’m going to start doing a lot more observation of this issue and am curious to see what the long term effects of our technology on our humanity.

I am becoming over-stimulated by the number of friend requests on Linked-In and Facebook from people who don’t know me from Adam and many of whom don’t even have a common connection to me.  They then send me a generic message or no message to be connected to me.  Do they really need what I have to say to be added to their stream?  Do I really want to take the time to get to know them when they connected with me through no compelling means other than I got put on their mass invite list? Do I want to invest the time to ask them – “hey why did you send me a generic message”? .…hmmm wait I think I just had an idea for a social test….

Every second on Twitter, another over-zealous internet marketing is telling us how to get 10,000 more followers?  I don’t want numbers, I want people that personally decide to follow me because of something about me or what I say and vice-versa I want to follow them because they have something inspiring, educational, or compelling that makes me want to know them across the miles of digital space.

I think we, as a society connected through the social web, risk desensitizing our human-to-human relationships in exchange for the little statistical number of people we mostly don’t know.  Because, when we add so much “noise” to our radar we miss what is being said by people that really matter.  With that said, I think we can also connect to people beyond our immediate circle of friends and enrich and deepen our social circles – BUT that is very different than friending random strangers with whom you don’t share a common belief, friend or association.

The point of this post is to stimulate the conversation of “how” to we shift the trend away from the mass innundation of impersonal messaging and instead make our social web work in favor of our natural human instinct.  Ideas?

My immediate thought is that we have to still get “off-line” with our friends (phone, greeting cards, etc), opt to go to Tweet-Ups (meeting the real faces behind your Twitter account), and begin to question the people who randomly try to connect with us simply to add to their statistical numbers.

What do you do to make your social network be real human relationships?  My one action is that I am investing in Send Out Cards so that I can start getting back to the off-line power of communication.