Recently read the funniest comment I've ever seen on facebook.
Alex Steed, a guy I met in college, shared a comment that he was disappointed in the lack of respect displayed by a certain friend leaving a comment on a note/picture of his. Alex is a good guy- he wasn't trying to make anyone feel guilty or stupid, just lamenting the typical result of trying to post something serious on facebook. What he basically wrote was he thought his facebook friends would be more grown-up.
His friend's comment:
"If you can't trust your closest 1,425 friends, who can you trust?"
Alex has 1,425 friends (I checked).
This post is by no means a shot at Alex. He's one of the most honest and hard working people I've ever met, but I just couldn't resist sharing the humor in this conversation of comments.
I have several friends that have thousands of "friends" on facebook. It's all a matter of putting in the time, or bothering to, of adding each person you encounter. I think of friends differently than most people. I don't believe a person can have 1,400+ friends, not in the real world, and not by my definition of the word friend. Some people accumulate "friends" for show, others in a forthright attempt to keep in touch with every person they meet, even fleetingly. As my dad likes to say, To each his own. Of course, when he says it he means "I don't like the way you think."
Recent Favorite Reads
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- Haruki Murakami
- The Life and Times of Michael K -- J.M. Coetzee
- The Inheritors -- William Golding
- The Crying of Lot 49 -- Thomas Pynchon
- The Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy
- The Beak of the Finch -- Jonathan Weiner
- Karlology -- Karl Pilkington
- If Not Now, When? -- Primo Levi
- Guns, Germs and Steel -- Jared Diamond
- Death in the Andes -- Mario Vargas Llosa
1 comments:
This is really funny because I saw a status update of yours on Facebook and I thought, "Wow, Luke - I wonder what he's doing. I haven't thought of him for a bit." And then I checked out your profile, saw your blog, checked it out and saw that the first post was about me.
I hear this conversation a lot, largely because of my line of work. I work as a nonprofit and small business communication consultant, and a lot of the conversation around these areas are in social media so discussions about friends, friendship, social connections, etc. come up all the time.
I believe the problem is ultimately with Facebook's lexicon, and not much more. When Facebook started, it *was* ultimately a place for "friends", as the user population was relatively finite and limited to college colleagues. As the pool of people who use the service expanded, the idea of a "Facebook friend" stopped looking anything like the sort of friendship we know about "in real life." At the same time, however, technology has always had this effect. Think, for example, of the concept of "extended family" being something that only became an on-going connected reality in the age of the postal service and telephone. Beforehand, the family with which you shared an intimate connection was ultimately limited to those who were in our immediate proximity.
These technologies are ultimately changing the ways we navigate and visualize our extended networks. I have so many Facebook "friends" for several reasons: a) It's largely related to my work and I don't like using LinkedIn to manage professional contacts b) I go to a lot of conferences and connect with a lot of folks there that I continue to stay in touch & keep up with out of personal and professional interest c) I believe pretty strongly in maintaining a strong network so that when a friend releases a CD or an album or whatever, or an issue important to me is up for a vote, or when some information needs to be distributed, I hope that I can spread these messages somewhat far and wide. Are they all friends? Not at all. But again - that's largely an issue on the end of Facebook vocabulary.
However, Scott's comment about "closest friends" was really, really funny.
With regard to my disappointment, I don't think that dialog on Facebook should make disrespectful discourse somehow OK - simply because it isn't happening face-to-face (I know that you weren't suggesting this - I am just re-stating my general point), and that's why I posted what I did. I was offended by some comments that came from some of my Facebook contacts and I spoke up about it and it was all pretty simple and over with. I think that because Facebook offers what feels like an intimate one-on-one or one-on-several conversational environment, people forget that the audience is very public and they ultimately say ill-conceived, thoughtless things. Whether we welcome it or not, conversational and connective technologies are changing the way we communicate and think about relationships and this is ultimately why I spoke up.
I'm glad you wrote about this, Luke. I hope this finds you well.
Post a Comment