Well, I can honestly say that I never saw this one coming. I’m on facebook now. I have always avoided the social networking sites because I thought that they were a waste of time (and…well… they are). I do have a MySpace page but I pretty much ignore it. I only wanted it because, if MySpace ever became cool, I wanted to snag the page name “myspace.com/dickdonohue” (yea, it’s an ego thing). There are a lot of really ugly MySpace pages and that didn’t help the coolness factor. But now, with 90,000 sex offenders getting kicked off, it doesn’t appear that most people will be viewing MySpace as a cool place any time soon. Just to be clear: I’m saying that hanging out where sex offenders hang out is not cool. I’m not saying that now that all the sex offenders have left, the place has no appeal! 
But facebook has really surprised me. It started when a friend created a facebook group for the band I’m in (Great Buncha Guys). Then one of the other guys in the band invited me to join facebook. So I figured I would create an account and it would be just another social networking site to ignore. For the next 2-3 days my email was flooded! I’ve hooked up with old high school and college friends, friends from church and all over. I admit that it has been fun to go back and reconnect with some folks.
For me, facebook has proven to be an interesting adventure in social science. And it has me fascinated. I’ve been spending a lot of time on facebook lately. (I’m sure that it is an unhealthy amount of time.) Here are some observations that I have found particularly interesting:
- facebook redefines “friend“.
My wife is my best friend. I have people that I call my good friends. I have lots of acquaintances. And there are friends of my friends that I recognize when I see them. But I don’t really know anything about them. To facebook, all these people and more are potential facebook-friends. If I went to Portage Northern High School in 1979 and so-and-so is going to graduate from the same place in 2010, facebook thinks we might want to be facebook-friends. The daughter of an acquaintance could be a facebook-friend. To me, being a facebook-friend is not near as big a boast as being a real-world friend. - facebook causes you to personally define “just who is my friend?”
I have one friend (a real friend, not a facebook-friend) with over 700 facebook-friends. Really! Obviously, we have different criterion for “who do I want as a friend?”. Initially, if somebody said that they wanted to be my facebook-friend, I just automatically said yes. I didn’t want to offend. But I’ve become more selective now. If there is some guy in my high school graduation class who never gave me the time of day or who always looked at me with disdain, I’m sorry, you are not going to be my facebook-friend. I actually had one guy who felt we should be facebook-friends because he graduated with my older brother. I don’t know the guy. He lives in a different state. I added him. It was a pity-add. But I have since removed him from my friends list. And I have ignored friend requests. Does that make me a facebook-snob? - In facebook, you have to ask to be friends.
In facebook, to become somebody’s friend, you essentially have to ask them “Can I be your friend?” They send you a friend request and you can either say “yes” or ignore it. Ignoring a friend request has the same affect as saying “no” except that they don’t get explicitly rejected. So facebook has taken out a huge impediment to becoming a friend. This is interesting because in the real-world, people have just become my friends through shared experiences. I have rarely asked anybody face-to-face “Can I be your friend?” On the other hand, in real-life, if you asked me if so-and-so was my friend, I might shrug andsay “yea, I guess so.” But if you asked me if somebody is my facebook-friend, I could give you a definite answer. - facebook is like an psychotic little sister who just refuses to be ignored. It doesn’t matter what you do, facebook is sitting there watching you. And if you do something, she feels the need to tell on you. And she doesn’t just tell a couple of people, she tells every friend you have what you have done as if it is breaking news “Dick uploaded a picture!! Dick uploaded a picture!!” And she doesn’t just post it on their wall, she sends an email, too. “Dick uploaded a picture!! Dick uploaded a picture!!” . “Dick said something to somebody!” It’s a little crazy. So be careful what you do on facebook. Every conversation is an extremely public conversation. Whatever you do will be broadcast to the entire world. Personally, I’m scared to update information on my profile anymore.
If nothing else, facebook highlights the need that we all have to be accepted, to be part of a community, to have a support system. There’s an old song that goes “Make new friends and keep the old. One is silver and the other is gold.” And even though facebook-friends are a dime-a-dozen, I think the point is that there is value in any friendship. Even a facebook-friendship.
Peace!
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