I’d like to ask you a simple question: how many friends do you have? Well, at first glance it seems simple, but in reality it’s not that clear to get an answer, especially when you add in the social networking machine that is Facebook. Think about it, many people have friends on Facebook that they hardly know, and some people have friends that they haven’t even met and don’t have any mutual friends with. I didn’t think I’d be able to say this, but now that I’ve taken a second to think about what I’ve just stated I’m embarrassed to say I fit into both of those categories.
Facebook is very curious in that aspect, for some reason people we would never say were our friends in real life are our friends in Facebook life. Sometimes I’ll just be browsing, okay the more appropriate term may be creeping, through pages and I’ll notice I have a Facebook “friend” I forgot about and think to myself “why on Earth am I friends with this person? I don’t even like them.”
In fact though, the word creeping brought me to a point that works with this whole friendship thing. The point is that even though I question why I’m friends with them in respect to the fact that I don’t even like the person it’s an irrelevant thought. Facebook friending doesn’t really mean being friends, it means giving someone the right to creep through your life. Most of the activity that goes through friendships on Facebook isn’t seen. Most of the activity done is merely observation. In fact, so much of Facebook is comprised of creeping that it’s not uncommon to hear people go on about gossip and utter the words “I saw it on Facebook.” That’s where the lines between real life friendship and Facebook friendship start to blur, and when you get there it’s quite a mess.
Maybe we’ll never know completely who’s a “real” friend and who’s a Facebook friend, but with real life and Internet life meshing into one it’s getting a lot harder to say that it will ever be completely possible to distinguish. But I’ll leave this thought for later, I’m going to go update my status.
This is a little bit too much like a diary entry, especially at the beginning -- but it has a lot of potential. What you begin to wrestle with, which I would like to have read more on, is why our idea of a "friend" is so lax where facebook is concerned. Does this affect our non-virtual life? what are the repercussions of this? More analysis!
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