Do I really want to be “Internet famous?”

Once your life is out there in cyberspace, it’s hard to take it back into your own cocoon of privacy.

I had this vision yesterday that I want to actually meet all of the 5000 “friends” and followers on my Facebook page someday.

But even if I just had a 1 hour coffee with each one, once a day, it would take me more than 8 years to meet you all.

If I wanted to have a party, I’d need to rent out Ft. Mason Center or a convention center and have a conference.

I am not bragging about this. This feels weird.

To see all my Facebook friends and followers at once, I would need to rent Ft. Mason Center and have a convention. This is…wierd.

I am increasingly bombarded with emails, messages from strangers, and now, even interruptions constantly when I go out in public.

And I’m asking myself:

“Why do I have all these “friends” — and what purpose does this serve?”

Do I really want to be “Internet famous?”

Do I need to be?

If I add up all my “friends and followers” between my website, Twitter, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Quora and Instagram, it’s at least 57,000 now.

With 57,000 “friends” and followers, I would need a massive stadium to reach you all.

I was quite shocked to discover that 5000 people are following me on LinkedIn alone.

12,200 on just one of 3 Twitter pages reaching about 4.2 million per month, 1,400 on Quora, and on Pinterest, I have 2600 followers and am reaching 2 million shares/year.

My fan pages all reach more than 3000 fans (I have five of my own, plus 23 more I have admin access too — which brings the total reach into the millions.) And I’m not even an “influencer.”

My Klout score on some of these pages is now higher than some people who actually deserve to be famous — like Amma, the hugging saint.

What’s the point of being Internet Famous?

In the midst of all of this “fame”, if I whittle down to the “real” friends and family, it comes to about 150, which is a normal number.

One of my famous “friends” John Perry Barlow once quipped that a real friend is someone who will show up at 2 am and bail you out of jail.

A real friend is someone who will bail you out of jail. How many of those do I have, out of thousands?

A genuine celebrity (he was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, author, and technology pioneer, among other things), he had a Barlow Friendzy party once a year where he invites only people who would be willing to bail him out of jail. That usually whittles it down to about 150.

I did some hard soul searching on this while meditating this weekend and the ah hah was:

The isolation that comes from being “famous” and the lack of privacy has driven more than a few celebrities into misery.

Why would we take that upon ourselves as ordinary people unless we have a product that really needs to reach the masses? (Movie, book, music, art, workshop, talk show, etc.)

Being famous is time consuming. Just weeding through the mail and messages alone.

I’ve been around plenty of celebrities in my time, and they can’t even eat dinner in peace without an interruption.

Do we ordinary folks really all need that attention?

I only need one good client or job at a time. There is not point in having a bazillion followers unless I have a product to sell that is leveragable.

I do not need 5000 “friends”, I barely have time to maintain quality relationships with my inner circle of close friends and family.

Has anyone else out there stopped to ask yourself why are you posting on the Internet and making yourself famous? Is it really necessary?

How’s it working for you?

If we are all “famous” then the numbers we all need to reach to rise above our own noise become staggering.

We’re just spamming each other.

This is creating a level of overwhelm that even huge brands cannot penetrate — let alone our own voices.

Has anyone stopped to think that maybe in this era of overwhelm, face to face, personal 1:1 contact is the new way to think outside the box and reach people?

I do see more of this happening lately, with personal outreach from brands and products that I use.

For example, you see more “brand ambassadorship” and sampling in stores, more door to door canvassers and solicitors at shopping centers, more emails that are personal sales pitches rather than spam, more letters from the top of companies if I make a complaint, and more calls coming from live human beings with recognizable accents instead of robots.

I also see more friends opting out of Facebook and going back to email and the phone to have important conversations.

I’ve started forcing myself to go off the grid, one or two days per week, to a location where my phone doesn’t work and I can’t log on, just so I tune into the sound of my own heartbeat again.

I am thinking of creating a “real friends and family” list here on Facebook and focusing my personal posts for them, with only 1 post per day for the public at large.

(More than 500 strangers are following me now. Who are those people? Some of them live in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. Do I really want to tell them all about my personal life?)

I am also thinking of how the next wave in marketing needs to be “quality not quantity.” Where we think more like B2B rather than B2C, or what social media expert Bryan Kramer calls: “H2H — human to human.”

Revealing so much about my personal life to the entire planet feels … weird.

Once your life is out there in cyberspace, it’s hard to take it back into your own cocoon of privacy.

While there are great leaps in consciousness and awareness that have come from this new era of transparency and honesty, enough is enough.

I think we are over posting and over revealing ourselves and it’s time to pull back a little and be more selective and personal.

How can we return to a world where friendship and trust is something people have to earn?