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Online “friends”
By Rosie Perera | April 18, 2008 at 12:45 am
I had a conversation last night, in person, with a real life friend, about how the meaning of the word “friend” is being diluted these days, thanks to the influence of social networking sites like Facebook. A whole generation is growing up thinking that a “friend” is a contact, someone you are linked to by common membership in a network, someone you have exchanged messages with, someone who is fun or useful to be connected with.
I currently have 239 Facebook friends, and I already find that number quite overwhelming. I recently turned down a request from someone I’d never heard of before to be his friend. I wrote back:
Hi ____, thanks for contacting me. I reserve FB “Friends” for people I know in person. That’s one of my ways of keeping technology from being my master or my idol. However I’d be happy to hear some of your thoughts on how you keep from losing yourself in your relationship with technology. Another way for me is deactivating my Facebook account for the periods of Advent and Lent and giving up all “non-essential” Internet use. There’s room for latitude in interpreting that, but I’m amazed at how much is really dispensible, and how much time I waste online on an average day. It brings my relationship with God more into focus to drop the technology noise in my brain to a minimum periodically.
He liked my response, and the conversation that ensued was what prompted me to finally get this website and blog off the ground.
I came across this quote in an article on CNN today on how the larger social networking sites are losing members to smaller, special interest sites (emphasis mine):
In a statement, MySpace added that its users have created thousands of groups around shared interests and hobbies, such that users can “live their entire life online.”
One user cited in the article said of the niche site SkiSpace that it “offers a sense of intimacy and comfort.”
I have experienced real online community, and it’s quite fascinating when it happens. But there is still something unsettling about the notion that online relationships could provide all the friendship that a person needs. I am not sure which comes first — people lacking in real life intimacy seeking it online, or people who spend too much of their lives online losing the ability to form flesh and blood relationships. It’s probably a bit of both.
In any event, I believe that we as a society are becoming more impoverished in personal relationships, more isolated, and more dependent on technology to mediate friendships for us. And I do not think that is a good trend. I am not advocating that we give up using sites like Facebook, only that we become aware of the extent to which that kind of socializing is a substitute for, or is impacting our ability to have, real life intimacy.
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