Attachment and Relationships

I was reading more about relationships last night. Specifically I was reading about attachment and characterizing relationships. This of course got me thinking about revising my ideas of technical tools for identifying relationships.

We like to put out relationships into small boxes; boxes like ‘friend’, ‘co-worker’, ‘girlfriend’, etc. This works well as long as the relationship doesn’t change. Of course everything changes. A friend is someone who you can trust, but sometimes friends screw you over. Is a friend still a friend when they screw you over? Or did they lose their friend status? Makes me think of the opening to the Spearhead song “Never too Late”:

Don’t fear your best friends
because a best friend would never try to do you wrong.

And don’t fear your worst friends
because a worst friend is just a best friend who’s done you wrong.

So when thinking about categorizing friends into even the simplest ‘best friend’ and ‘worst friend’ categories, there is still an impermanence to them; they can change quickly. This poses some interesting problems when trying to think about sharing relationships on the internet. Luckily, from what I have been reading, these labels are not the true meaning of relationships.

Technically I am thinking about a decentralized system that doesn’t really try to define and rate relationships, but rather watches connections. These connections could be used to create ‘friend clouds’ similar to the tag cloud on many blogs (including this one).

Philosophically there are much tougher problems. Many of our social constructs are based on these definitions of relationships. The Dali Lama seems to manage having relationships without attachment, and anyone who has ever seen him mostly likely experienced the same warmth that I experienced when I saw him in DC. Yet even the Dali Lama has not figured out how to have these healthy relationships when sex is involved. I think this is where commitment comes in.

I am not exactly sure how commitment and attachment differ. It may be best described in terms of compassion. I don’t know yet. I do know that relationships do not need to be mutually defined. Anyway, I am getting way off track.

I stumbled upon an interesting technical solution that addresses part of the decentralized need for sharing relationships on the internet. Extensible Friends is a way that each person can have control over the connections that they make to individuals (and groups, incl. companies). It is interesting work and I may try to implement it here.

I don’t think that I will attempt to provide the tools for sharing relationships on the internet (I am busy enough with statzen), but I do think it will have a large impact on this new interactive web that is growing.