Friend is not a verb (Erin)

Most of the people on my social-networking pages are actual friends, or were at one time. It's a great way to keep in touch with people you aren't close enough to write regular e-mails or letters to, people you would have lost touch with entirely had it not been for the sites. It's also a way to send a quick note to people you do care about in the real world. It's fun when you find an old friend from elementary school, and then find two or three more from THEIR pages.

I'm aware that younger people use these sites FAR more extensively than I do. I'm old fashioned, at the ripe age of 28, I like comboxes and message boards, and having an actual topic of conversation.:)

Critics consider the phenomena of chronic "friending" to be a kind of memetic narcissism, and excessive self-regard is surely part of its appeal.

All my connections on Facebook are close friends - real ones - or people I knew at one time and am reconnecting with, or family members.

Also I meet people, the friends of my friends, who are sometimes interesting. I hardly need to point out that this kind of thing happened long before the internet.

Why any of this betrays "memetic narcissism" or shows that I have "excessive self-regard" is beyond me. Emily Walshe seems something of a sour-puss. Maybe she should go back inside her library where she seems more comfortable.

I gotta say this reads as old-fogeyism to me, as another entry in the inexhaustible genre of using a reductive definition as the basis for a jeremiad. There have always been many kinds of friend relationships, all of which include some measure of self-interest. The concept of networking "friends" long predates Fb. Have we not always cringed when a politician or a corporate speech-maker or an anonymous marketing voice speak of people they are manipulating as their "good friends"?

Most Fb users understand the difference between "real" friends and "Facebook friends," and many use a hierarchy of privacy settings to differentiate them.

Also, creating an ongoing medium of contact between you and the people you meet briefly, or friends of friends, often helps them become real friends or at least lasting acquaintances rather than lost memories.

Finally, as an introvert, I've found that this multi-leveled definition of friendship has helped me greatly in the basic social skills necessary to career survival. I used to be incapable of the medium-range intimacy required of acquaintanceship. Facebook has helped me learn it at a comfortable distance, and I've found that it contains real emotional connections mingled with its utilitarian benefits.

FB is like a big cocktail party. We mill around with acquaintances and friends and sometimes people we've never met before, with snippets of conversation here and larger discussions there, etc. We come-and-go as we wish, it's no more than that.

There are narcissists in every neighborhood, but one doesn't use them as an excuse to not like neighborhoods.

I am part of Gen Y, with have four hundred friends on facebook - none of whom are casual acquaintances. These are childhood friends, high school classmates, college buddies and grad school fellows. People with whom one naturally loses touch as we move along life's path. Online Social networking means that my generation gets to stay in touch however tangentially with the people who have shaped our lives. I have high school friends in Japan, Australia, UK, South Africa and in almost every state in the US. Would I have been able to keep up both with a few of them without Facebook? I doubt it. Instead of losing touch, I get to see their college pictures, and wedding photos.

We don't make tons of superficial friendships as you have suggested, we extend the lifespans of our friendships beyond what they traditionally have been. A childhood friend one has not seen or interacted with in 20 years is a lost friend. My generation gets to stay connected, so that those friends retain a space in our orbit twenty years later.

That said, I have also formed friends online exclusively - but not by posting on social networking sites - by engaging with people who randomly caught my attention.

I'm a minister, and served in churches & have friends from seminary that I've only been able to regain regular contact with through facebook. In that way, it's a blessing. For a long time I stood outside, thinking it was just an annoying fad. Then I found it does indeed have redeeming qualities and uses. Now I find those standing outside with arms crossed in judgment (as I was) pretty stinkin' annoying themselves.

If the "friend collectors" but you, you just ignore them. No big deal, really. I only click "confirm" if I know them well enough to invite them over for dinner, and want to keep in touch. Our congregation also uses it as a way to keep in touch.

Facebook, like phones, stationary, and blogs, is neutral. It's what you do with it that matters.

I have spent many, many years trying to forget anyone I ever went to school with. If anyone is trying to get in touch with me, don't.

Or "hole", as the case may be.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

pentamom, I think it's gracious of you to agree with me. I'd be your friend on facebook! ; )

Has anyone pointed out yet that on Facebook itself, the option is to "Add Friend," not "Friend" someone?

Anyway, I can keep in touch with my cousin in Iraq b/c she's on Facebook. With 15 minutes of computer time a day, she will only send emails to her immediate family. With FB she can update everyone she wants to at once. Do I need to know it was 117 where she was yesterday? No, but it's nice to be reminded of her life so I can pray for her & send her things that won't melt. Frankly, a lot of what my friends tell me in person every day is not earth-shattering, but I am glad to know it.

Clasqm, I hear ya. Those with whom I want to stay in touch with me know how to do so. Those with whom I don't, don't. I'll grant that there must be a couple of advantages to social networking, but for the most part, I do find something incredibly narcissistic and innane about it, much as I do how many people must be connected by cell 24/7. (Out at dinner last week, a friend was called no fewer than three times by her kids, 13-20 years of age. No one was dying, nor was the house on fire, just a lot of, "When are you coming home?" and such.) I can email updates and photos to family and friends just as easily as I could update them through a site, or I can text someone with a message as easily (okay, pending a QWERTY keyboard) as I could Tweet, or so it seems from my having looked at some sites.

Further, I want as little information about me on the Net as possible, especially information - a hacker and identity thief's dream - that's collected by a site. It's bad enough that, having done a search on myself using several methods on the Net, I'm aghast at what can be found out about me, including my birth date (complete with year) and home address that's rarely used for mailing or personal account purposes.

Slightly O/T, did anyone see the article on the MSN home page this week that talked about how, after the Baby Boomers (i.e. moms, dads, grandparents, older folks) latch onto whatever the hottest networking site is at the moment, the kids who initially made the site popular start fleeing to the next big site?

The Sicilian Woman
I can email updates and photos to family and friends just as easily as I could update them through a site.

If you think that, you have never used Facebook, or you have a rather interesting email client.

And good luck emailing people more than ten photos at once. Pictures are roughly 1.75 megs, most email servers only want about 20 megs per message.

But the real question is, isn't email exactly the same thing? And the same thing with IM and twitter? You've apparently decided that technologies have some sort of inherit morality, so communicating with people via X is okay but Y isn't. It's the same thing! You can even have facebook send messages to your email.

Meanwhile, you've pick a method that's more time consuming. Instead of just putting up the entire photo album of your trip to wherever, you've now got to figure out how to email 20 different people 175 megs of pictures, a non-trivial task. (There are websites that can do it, like flickr, but using a website is apparently immoral or something.)

Further, I want as little information about me on the Net as possible, especially information - a hacker and identity thief's dream - that's collected by a site.

Ah, you haven't used facebook. Gotcha.

The information on facebook is whatever information you put up there. The only information you have to give is your email, your name, and your birthday. (And you can disable anyone from seeing your birthday, they mandate that simply because of stupid laws about teenagers.) It is polite to put a picture up so people can actually see that you're the person they think you are.

I'm not quite certain how this concept that personal information magically appears on facebook started.

DavidTC I save my photos in small JPEG files, and I send a few photos, maybe five, at most. I've never had the need or desire to share a whole photo album, so emailing photos hasn't been a problem for me.

I am also aware of the limited about of information needed to set up an FB account. However, that does not negate the fact that if you have a "wall" (as a real-life friend described to me) with comments about your activities and such on it, that that and your photos, and all of your contacts and their information and whatever else, can't be hacked into, with a much larger trail and wealth of information about you than would be available through an email account, I'm thinking.

I don't IM. I did it a few times years ago, and hated it. I'd much rather call someone and hear his/her voice. (Come on, you knew that was coming.)

Also, are you aware that human resource personnel often search these sites to learn about employee/potential employee conduct, and some people have lost their jobs over things on their sites? At my university, students are told in orientation that they can be expelled if something found on their social networking sites is found to reflect poorly on the university. And this is a well-known, public university.

I am unapologetically a more private person than most, and I'm careful about what I send out on emails, too. Posting on this blog is about as "out there" on the Net that I wish to be, so for me, personally, I'll happily stay out of the social network generation.

Lord Karth, interesting post. I find myself agreeing with you, for the most part.

Lord Karth
Lord Karth, as you've never used Facebook, perhaps something needs explaining to you:

Facebook is not a blog and it is not a discussion forum. It is a place for people to send each other quick messages and post information for others to find.

It is the equivalent of a whiteboard on a dorm room door. It's called a 'Wall' for a reason. Read 'bulletin board' or 'whiteboard' for 'Wall'. That is the main purpose, that is what 90% of the people use it for. People do not use it to hold discussions, they use it for two things:

1) To coordinate actual activities in this increasingly complicated world. Instead of calling ten people to see if someone wants to see a movie with you, you just send a message to everyone by checking their name.

I have to laugh when someone asserts that facebook reduces interaction...me and my friends all have weird schedules and it's hard to reach each other, so 75% of the stuff we do is someone saying, on Facebook, 'Hey, who wants to go see 'Star Wars' this weekend, and when?' and people asynchronously figuring it out, something that would be near impossible for any other method of communication.

2) And the other use for facebook is to read vague notes about old acquaintances they haven't seen since high school. Hey, look, that guy that was trying to start a band apparently succeeded. And those two people got married...didn't they hate each other? (It's a valid point that such people are not your 'friends' and shouldn't be called such, but that's a terminology quibble.)

Those two things are essentially all that 90% of people use Facebook for. Criticizing it for the level of discourse demonstrates that you really don't have any idea of its purpose. There aren't any 'discussions' happening on it

People who want to blog know where blogs are. They know where forums and discussion groups are. They don't know where newgroups are, but whatever. Facebook does not even have any sort of obvious functionality to write long posts and hold discussion on them. You can write long 'notes', but there's no way to list them or keep them visible or have non-friends see them...they're essentially for stuff like directions and other stuff that would make an incredibly long wall post, and you don't want to make a limited-recipient private message.

And I have no idea what you think the point of YouTube is. I thought it was pretty self explanatory, but you seem to think the point of it is the inane discussion going on under the videos, which is entirely full of cretins who spend all day watching videos.

No, look a bit higher on the page. The point of YouTube is, in fact, the videos. Almost none of which have any 'discussion' at all in them, and that discussion isn't happening on YouTube.

You are, in essence, criticizing movies because a guy is sitting in front of you talking. No, actually, you're criticizing movies because you sat and read poorly-written reviews of them during the movie, and thought the reviewers were imbeciles. Well, they probably were, but that's not very relevant.

The Sicilian Woman
DavidTC I save my photos in small JPEG files, and I send a few photos, maybe five, at most. I've never had the need or desire to share a whole photo album, so emailing photos hasn't been a problem for me.

So you can't email them as easily as you can post them on facebook, because apparently you have to resize them. Which was rather my point.

You, in your very small and limited manner of emailing photos, might be happy with doing a lot of work, but it is objectively easier to use Facebook. Or any other site designed to post photos, although with Facebook people you know are notified of them automatically.