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Are just your "friends" in your virtual living room?
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Are just your "friends" staring into your virtual living room?
A Facebook user said, “I have ‘friends’ that I am not friends with. Some of them went to a party I attended and some of them are friends with my friends but I have never met them.” Social media has morphed the word “friend.” It has made its definition broader or perhaps worthless.
By Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition, the word “friend” has several meanings, but the meaning most commonly attributed to the word is “attached to another by affection or esteem.” It is likely that many of a users’ "friends" are not friends at all.
Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Myspace have made friends collectable. Now “friends” are akin to baseball cards in that the collector tends to have many cards with only a few that are truly valuable.
The difference in this collection is how the friends are compiled. Some are people that the user knows on a conversational level, some are people that the user has met once or twice and some may be “guilt friends.” A “guilt friend” is a person that a user decides to friend because they share several friends in common or this person has requested to be added as a friend. One Facebooker remarked, “I feel so guilty if someone wants to friend me and I don’t add them. I don’t want to be rude.” Interestingly, that user may never have met the person.
Clearly, these friends include those who will stand up in your wedding and accompany you on family vacations but there are also many friends who a user may not even like listed on their “friends list.” Yet, most users will not thin their list out for fear of stomping on feelings or more selfishly, to appear more popular.
One user said that he was attempting to include in his friend list “only those he actively talked to.” He added in response to the idea that thinning the herd, so to speak, may be heartless but “you don’t talk to half the people on your list anyway. Cut it down. Be the man everyone wants to be.”
Maybe that user has the right idea – maybe too many people have access to our virtual living rooms. People who don’t know a user can peruse their new baby and 4th of July festivity photos. Or maybe, the concept of “friend” is situational. Some would say that social media friends can be limited to only certain parts of a site – this is true on the street as well. Overwhelmingly, though “friends” are granted access to the whole site.
Does this mean that the idea of a friend has less meaning? Or is it just another word that means so much that it means nothing at all?
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