There’s a hole-in-the-wall vegan restaurant near where I went to college in Maryland. I went there a few times with friends and family. It was a decent place to eat, however one particular trait of the owner drove me absolutely insane. He always addressed me as “friend” time and time again. I passed this off as him being a hippie clinging to past ideals, but was hard resisting the urge to correct him.
Once Facebook opened up to anyone (previously it was limited to anyone in college or high-school), as well as releasing the Facebook platform, the blogosphere lit up, with popular bloggers (like Robert Scoble) and their followers signing up for accounts. It’s the latest hot thing (previously it was Twitter, and before that it was Second Life, along with dozens of other sites). I’m sure soon there will be another hot thing, and they’ll all move on, in a vein similar to the way modern day MSM operates.
What disturbs me is the way they are using Facebook. Everyone is “friending” each other and accepting everyone. Did anyone ever stop and think, as they are accepting people en masse, do I really know this person? Have I worked with them? Am I actually friends with them? Do I know who the hell they are? Whether or not Facebook is a tool for personal life, for work life, or a combination of the two, when there is no real connection between users, the utility of general purpose social networks goes to zero. By adding “general” I am admitting one caveat, where for social networks geared around particular topics (recipes/photos/reviews), you might find other users whose tastes and interests match your own, and therefore want to connect and share information. But when your friends list, your news feed, is all from people you don’t know, how useful is it to you? Do you care about each individual, and what is going on with them? When you post something to Facebook, are you sending it out it to your friends, or sending it out to 4,600 people who happened to take the extra step of creating an account and clicking the “Request Confirmation” button under your picture (as opposed to just posting it up on your blog, which they and many more people read)? If you were to one day sit back, and look at your self-constructed social network, is it of any use to you? How can you distinguish between the people you went to school with, the people in your fraternity, your friends and family, and just random people who you (be honest) could care less about?
I’ve been on Facebook for 3 1/2 years, since it first arrived at my college. Since then, it’s always been a place for people who truly do know each other to track each other’s personal lives and interact with each other. For every person I added who I didn’t know, the usefulness of GP social networks decreases. Which is why I don’t. You can ask me about any of my 380 friends, and I can tell you something about each one of them, including how we know each other. The phenomenon of mass-friending has always been the case, since the early days, when incoming freshmen would go on a spree of adding random schoolmates in the hopes of appearing as if they are more popular. It’s the exact same thing now.
Call me a “Facebook elitist”, but Facebook is for friends. Real friends. If I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, why should I say we are?
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