Esthela Gonzalez's friends are talking to her, but she's not listening. The chatter is coming at Gonzalez not over a cup of coffee but on Twitter, through her iPhone. Gonzalez, bored by some of her friends' blabbering, has quietly put a few of them on the social-networking equivalent of timeout. Using a $4.99 iPhone application called Twittelator Pro, the 36 year old from Chantilly, Virginia, simply tapped a button that says "mute" and, voila, her friends' tweets are blocked. Best of all, they're totally oblivious to the fact that they've been silenced.
The age of social media has made it easier than ever to stay connected with the people you know, but it has also made it almost inevitable that users will come to feel overwhelmed by interruptions, updates and status reports.
So now, the technology that turned people into 24-7 communicators has spawned a toolkit that discreetly lets users be just a tad anti-social on their own networks. This is the digital equivalent of walking down a back hallway to avoid the talkative colleague who's always boasting about his latest sale. With more than 500 million people connected on Facebook, 190 million on Twitter, and zillions more scattered on other social networks around the world, users are embracing new ways to politely ignore friends and family, just as they do in the analog world.
"The problem with one big water cooler is that you don't always want to be at the cooler with everyone all the time," said Bretton MacLean of Toronto, developer of a popular iPhone app called TweetAgora, which lets users filter out unwanted tweets without the tweeter ever knowing.
Programmers like MacLean say they are racing to meet demand for discreet ways to avoid people technologically. Besides muting on Twitter, other emerging services include Ex-Blocker, created by web design firm Jess3, which blocks social-networking posts from ex-girlfriends, -boyfriends, and other undesirables. Avoidr, developed by a San Francisco techie, promises to keep your friends close but your enemies at arm's length. The service uses information from Foursquare, the social network on which users share their location, to tell people which establishments to avoid to dodge someone who has moved to their zero list.
Those seeking a more exclusive world than Facebook can instantly start private social networks using the Fridge. "All Fridges are private," the company says. "Invite only. Safe from the parents, boss or those pesky stalkers." Even the lowly voice mail is evolving with the avoidance times: Slydial lets more than 10,000 people a day leave cellphone messages without the receiver's phone ever ringing.
Experts in the social dynamics of new media say users of avoidance technologies are simply being human in ways that social network creators didn't foresee when they built these supercharged ways to connect family, friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. "When these social networks came along, the founding premise seemed to be to just connect everyone," said Duncan Watts, a senior research fellow at Columbia University and director of the Human Social Dynamics Group at Yahoo. "My first reaction: Why would anyone think that's a good idea? We spend a lot of time making sure everyone doesn't know everything, and now we are collectively bumping up against this issue of people wanting to avoid people." On most social networks, after "friending" someone else, the default mode is to exchange every possible kind of information and message.
If John follows Jane on Twitter, John sees everything Jane writes, even if John couldn't care less about Jane's endless posts on American Idol. This could leave John needlessly annoyed by Jane, a discontent that could seep into their otherwise healthy face-to-face relationship. The same goes for Facebook: John and Jane might be decent friends, but does Jane really care about John's pictures of his new deck? John's and Jane's options, if they don't want to go hunting around Twitter and Facebook to figure out complicated privacy settings, have until now been dire: Just about the only way to rid themselves of a torrent of annoying posts was to drop each other from their friend lists. But in the face-to-face world, John and Jane would never drop each other over such trivial annoyances. Rather, if John knew Jane always wanted to talk about Idol over lunch in the cafeteria on Thursdays, he would simply avoid her table on those days. The new services seek to re-create that easy, unhurtful form of avoidance online.
"This is all really a question about how to best be polite online," said Danah Boyd, a social media scholar at Microsoft Research New England. "This etiquette is just starting to evolve. People are trying to find new ways to appear friendly when they don't really like what you're saying." Just about everyone - users, programmers, big thinkers - agrees that the new avoidance services require a certain amount of deception, but they argue that these tools, and more subtle ones that will be developed down the road, are needed to avoid hurt feelings and are essentially no different from pretending to need a freshened-up drink to escape from boring cocktail-party chatter.
"I'd never want to unfollow them," Gonzalez said of the friends she has muted on Twitter. "You don't want to offend your real-life friends. That would be a terrible thing to do." But won't Gonzalez's friends figure out that she's not seeing their posts on, say, a new movie they saw? No problem: If the friend sees Gonzalez face-to-face and reminds her of his latest brilliant online movie critique, Gonzalez can simply say, "Oh, I must have missed that." "It's plausible deniability," said Boyd, the Microsoft researcher. "The more technology is fallible and has some holes, the more you can blame it for your failure to do something that is socially appropriate. That makes it much easier to use all these blocking and muting services, because otherwise people will not have the ability to pull this off."
So when an Ex-Blocker user bumps into an ex-girlfriend who has just got engaged, he smoothly says, "Oh, I totally must have missed that on Facebook. Congrats!"
The upside of all this deception, at least for Gonzalez, is that her Twitter experience has become much more enjoyable. "Muting people is very discreet," she said. "I wouldn't be completely surprised if someone has muted me."
