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Dear Social Networks: I'll Decide Who My Friends Are
from the cheapening-the-'friend'-label dept
There's already been a court ruling noting that being a Facebook friend is not like being a "real" friend, but the vast "cheapening" of the concept of friendship is ticking some people off. In noting how the various social networks keep encouraging you to add more friends (even if they're not real friends), it raises questions about whether or not these social networks are hurting their own reason for being. As businesses, they have every reason to encourage you to keep adding friends. However, if you so cheapen your relationships by adding anyone and everyone as a friend, doesn't it make the services a lot less useful for really keeping up with your friends? Perhaps social networks that are really about managing your relationship with real friends would be better off focusing on the quality of communication between friends, rather than the quantity of friends you have.
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I have around 120 friends on Facebook at the moment. I do not have a single Facebook friend who I don't know in real life. Some are people I know from my current workplace and neighbourhood, and I use Facebook to help organise weekend plans, etc. Others are friends from school, people I've met throughout my life since and family. I use Facebook to keep in touch with them, which is very handy - they are spread across 4 continents. I have used Facebook to get back in touch with, and ultimately meet up in real life with, people I may not have regained contact with through "normal" means.
Yes, there are people who try to get as many "friends" as possible, who try to one-up other people with numbers, but these are usually idiotic teenagers. If anything's "cheapening" these services, it's reports like this that assume that these are the only people using them.
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Sure, you may have 120 acquaintances... but 120 friends? ya, right.
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For the most part it seems that this is the new way for a kid to display themselves as "popular". Instead of having that image in school, it can now be displayed on facebook and myspace as "i have more friends that you so people like me more!"...
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Anyways, as noted, it depends on what you consider 'friends.' Do you measure it in time spent in physical proximity? Or in character-count of emails? Maybe frequency of interactions? I'm certainly not better friends with my boss than I am with my old college roommate.
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Sure, you may have 120 acquaintances... but 120 friends? ya, right.
Agreed. That is a high of a number! But to support PaulT, Anthropologist Robin Dunbar created "Dunbar's number" in 1992. His theory states that that a person's mean group size for a community is 148, and is based on the size of the human neocortex.
Sure, I believe that a person has subsets of people within that group- some relationships being "closer", or multidementional than others. As the number goes down, it is theorized that the relationships become "closer"
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As for keeping up, that's really what I thought the point of these kind of sites were... not to build "popularity" but to use it to communicate.
If something eventful happens in life, these sites are a great tool to communicate to those that you don't necessarily communicate on a regular basis with. I personally have no problem with someone I worked closely with 5 years ago dropping a note that they had a kid and posting pictures.
On the other hand, of course I don't have 100 close friends that I talk to daily, weekly or even monthly. It doesn't mean we don't share a certain level of friendship.
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Its just a game.
I use MySpace to play games, do quizzes when I'm bored, browse profiles when I'm bored and hold pictures for me to show folks.
I mean, its much less an effective tool for communication than it is an internet toy and so thats how most people use it. Like getting a high friend count.
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Re: Its just a game.
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Re: Its just a game.
I have a very good friend who's just moved to Canada, another friend moved to Australia. I myself have moved from the UK to Spain, and have family in the US, Hong Kong, Uganda, South Africa and Costa Rica so it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to keep in touch with friends and family through Facebook. On top of that, by using this "toy", I managed to get in back touch with old school I hadn't seen or heard from in 10 years.
So my life has been enriched and my contact with family and friends is much easier and cheaper than by phone. Don't assume that a high friend count is all that matter with these things - to dumb kids, yes, but not to everyone.
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Its a whole lot easier to break international boundaries with a website than it is a telephone (or anything else).
I just don't get why someone would use it as a form of communication for someone else right in town.
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call it "iFriend"
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Re: call it "iFriend"
... ...
Anyway, just another little pitch on the definition of friend and its usage on the internet of future.
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Oversimplifying friendship
Yes, there is some overlap. Some of our SN friends will be real-life friends, but there's no reason it has to be that way. To argue that a SN "cheapens" the concept of friendship is a gross oversimplification since it assumes a monolithic, one dimensional definition of friendship. Without descending into a semantic debate, it is clear that the burgeoning of online relationships through social networks will necessitate redefining what friendship means. Now that's going to be complicated!
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Re: Oversimplifying friendship
I have a reasonable handful of friends who I met through web forums before this whole "social networking" phenomenon was a gleam in anyone's eye. And I consider them as true of friends as any of my 'real' friends -- we've had discussions, shared advice and experiences, and made an honest connection with each other. Most of what constitutes real friendship is intelletual anyways, and physical proximity is only necessary as a medium for that interaction. Would you consider a penpal "not a real friend" just because you never stood within 5 feet of each other, even if you'd corresponded for a decade and watch each other's lives develop?
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article is correct
Most people do pay more attention to who they add, but not everyone.
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A lot of connections are good for some people
I personally have keep my important contacts in Skype, social networks are probably good tools for people that have trouble keep all the contacts in a different place...
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Friend Count
Not everyone forgets someone when they leave their life. I love being able to meet up with people I haven't seen in too long.
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Overfriending leads to poor monetization
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okay, its friday, back to work
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"Friends"
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Re: "Friends"
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Oh yea, outside playing football.
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>>Oh yea, outside playing football.
That's not nice. But I still LOL'ed. So true, so true.
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LMAO!
As with all relationships it takes both parties to "determine" what they are. If my buddy in China considers me his friend and I consider him my friend, then we're friends regardless if we don't live up to your standards of friendship. Maybe you're just high maintenance? More than likely though, you're just a bitter tard with very few friends.
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Re: LMAO!
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How Many?
1 of those is an acquaintance I've never met, and only corresponded with a couple of times.
4 of those are people I ran an online radio station with several years ago, I've never met them in person, but I've spent many, many hours talking with them over VoIP, DJ'ing shows and generally hanging out. True friends, though I've never met them.
About 40 of those "friends" are family members that I'm close to. Cousins, 2nd cousins, uncles, aunts, brother, sisters etc. I'd guess those count as friends.
2 of those are co-workers who are friends.
About 7 - 10 are friends I regularly see in my small town. We play poker together, hang out, and are very real, close friends.
About 5 are very close friends who have moved away. Facebook is how we keep in contact, in combination with phones, letters and cards.
About 5 more are spouses of the above friends.
That totals 66 friends and one acquaintance. Every other person on my friends list is someone I've had a fairly close friendship with over the years and still keep in contact with through facebook. We call each other occasionally, share jokes, send emails, let each other know what is going on in our lives - but we're not "particular" friends, if the meaning is clear, but we're certainly more than "acquaintances".
I don't understand how it would be so hard to believe someone could have 120, 140, or even more friends, that they keep in touch with through a social networking site.
Add to the fact that I've got 2 children, one of them brand new, so I don't have much in the way of a social life. When I was in high school I regularly hung out with at least that number of people, other times of my life have been more or less, but I think it's asinine to suggest that simply because you can only maintain friendships with a very limited number of people yourself, that the same must be true for every other person.
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Indeed
However, in the end thats up the user.
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personal and professional social networking?
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Meh
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I think Masnick is missing part of the point
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Social Networks change your concept of "friend"...
All that being said, are there people overdoing it? Absolutely. The first and second generations of SNS' probably biased their systems too much towards friend acquisition/network growth. The next stage will require some mechanisms that "trim the hedges" of our social network to the appropriate level. It will be interesting to watch as SNSers struggle with where to set this new bar.
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Huh...?
LOL
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yeah
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how I decide on social network friends
I tend to join everything going but participate selectively as I see the benefit. I gave up on Yuwie because I was turned off by the whole "add as many strangers as possible" attitude. I also have roughly segmented my networks into "business" (eg. LinkedIn) and "pleasure" (Facebook). yes there is crossover.
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Social Networking
--Glenn
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