Hello again!
This is my second post on my blog about Digital Communication. In this post I will talk about MySpace and Facebook, why people have so many friends and if the term friends changed since the foundation of Facebook.
As you all probably know, Facebook and MySpace are the two largest and most used social network sites in the world and became a primary communication tool for large group of people, mostly students. The point of a social network site/profile is to keep in touch with your friends or make new ones. But what are friends on these kind of sites? People make profiles and add others to their friends list so they can start calling them ‘friends’.
An article that I read on www.telegraph.co.uk said the following.
“A lot of the time “friends” listed on the pages of Facebook or similar site MySpace were more like “acquaintances” and the more there were, the less friendly the profile owner was with them.”
I think this is really true.
An example of this happened to me yesterday.
Yesterday a friend of my visited me at the shop I work. She was with a friend, so she introduced him to me. After work I went home and logged in to my computer to read my new emails. In my inbox I found an invitation of him, asking if I wanted to be his friend on Facebook. First I did not even know who he was until I saw his profile picture. I barely know this guy but he already wants me to be his ‘friend’. I think this kind of behavior is a little bit pathetic. His friends count was on 783 so he’s looking for new ‘friends’ to add. This is a good example of people that confuse acquaintances with friends. I never spoke to him since.
Another good statement I found on the same website as above is:
“If you only have 10 ‘friends’ then they are probably your best friends, whereas if you have 1000 ‘friends’ then clearly a lot of them are not more important than just to keep your friends count up”
A researcher on another website wrote that: “The more friends people have, the less they communicate with them and the less intimate these relations are.”
I am a member of Facebook and Hyves and I see this happen a lot, members adding other members just to have lots of ‘friends’ and most of the time they don’t even talk or communicate with all them. I have about 200 friends on Hyves but added about 20 people my self, the other 180 added me, whereas I accepted the invitation.
Most of my friends are old classmates, family or close friends, the rest is a bit vague. I like to leave scraps at my best friend’s profiles so I keep in touch with them through Hyves.
In that point of view Hyves and Facebook are wonderful inventions that help me a lot communicating with the people around me. I think networks as Facebook and Hyves are good concepts and very handy tools to find old classmates and keep in touch with them.
A funy post of another wordpress user can be found on this link.
