Facebook Friend Etiquette
Mark Zuckerberg really hit the big time when he launched Facebook. Sure, they’ve had their issues with privacy and it’s occasional facilitation in child grooming which of course never looks good in the annual shareholders report, but on the whole, it’s redeveloped modern day networking and communication. Now this would be fine if it stopped there.
Back in the days when Blair was in charge, the internet was young and having a Geocity webpage was a desirable accomplishment, social networking really was in it’s infancy. You could argue that the first to come up with the concept were the people behind Friends Reunited back in 1998. It really took off however, with the launch of MySpace and soon teenagers everywhere were becoming more social by spending time browsing technicolour profiles and finding ever creative ways of ignoring each other.
The problem for me is that the term ‘social networking’ implies a level of professionalism that isn’t quite right in our modern world of zinc kitchen surfaces, digital watches and celebrity chefs. But that’s the issue. We don’t live in that world, we live in a world of unemployment, chlamydia and Heat magazine.
The rest of this post is concerned not with Facebook itself, which; as I covered earlier so ‘delicately’ earlier, is just a tool. No. I want to talk about it’s users – specifically, how easy it is to underestimate the idiocy of people in large numbers. The topic I particularly want to address is what defines a ‘Friend’ on Facebook?
I’ve had a number of friend requests on Facebook recently from individuals that I have never knowingly met. Admittedly, my affinity for remembering faces is pretty poor at the best of times, and after a ‘Who the hell are you?’ type conversation, some of them turned out to be people that I did ultimately know, but even in this instance, I wouldn’t class them as friends. They’re more the sort of people that you’d say “Aww, that’s a shame” on hearing news that they’d had a rather intimate encounter with some form of industrial machinery.
Maybe ‘unpopularity’ is something I’ll have to live with but I find it impossible to believe that people can have more than 300 people that the are frequently in touch with and what they would call friends in the real world. In fact, I make a habit of periodically ‘purging’ my friend list and I don’t think at any point within the three years or so I’ve been registered on Facebook, I’ve had over 200 friends. Even with under 200 contributors to my News Feed, I’ve still been forced to hide people – To be honest, I care as much about you’re farm/mafia gang/’insert crappy game here’ as I do about Peter Mandleson stuck in a gin trap.
In writing this post, I asked some people I know; that have a high ‘friend count’, why it was so and the most common answer I received was that they accepted the request because they’d feel guilty if they didn’t! Being an upfront person, I don’t really understand this but each unto their own I suppose. Maybe some people have romantic assertions that they’re only ever six hops away from Kevin Bacon!
Tags: facebook, friends, kevin bacon, mark zuckerberg
July 27th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Agrrr i keep getting randon people adding me – sooo annoying
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