Cultural Web

By: Amanda Jameson
Do you use MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Tagged, or any of the other social networks? How many friends do you have on these sites? And more importantly, who are your friends? I ask because I’ve recently discovered two different strands of people on these networks – those who only add people from their real life community of friends, and those who add just about anyone and everyone.

The latter of the two is a particularly intriguing breed because they are like collectors – the bigger the collection the better. The only thing that’s different is that quality doesn’t seem to matter terribly. What’s important are the numbers. It’s like a popularity contest online – a way for social network users to tell who’s who in a crowd of virtual millions. Annie has 3,000 friends on MySpace, so she must be really cool. What is baffling is how few of these people Annie will actually talk to. How can a person keep up with 3,000 friends, making each of them feel special and cared about individually? Annie could never do it, unless she decided to commit her life to picture commenting, wall posting, Hi5ing, and sending heartfelt messages back and forth to each friend. And when does she stop adding? Does she just keep going? Pretty soon the number is going to be too big to handle, and then what should she do? Hire a team of friend correspondents?

Obviously, I’m being silly. But the point I’m getting at is that “friends” are people you know well, enjoy, confide in, and share experiences with. Can somebody you met on MySpace really become a “friend”? Perhaps friend collecting stems from a need for greater human connection. Perhaps most friend collectors don’t have a lot of friends in real life and thus seek to fill the gap by “friending” thousands of people online. It seems unlikely that these friends could become anything more than a picture and words on a screen, but what do I know? I just hope people don’t stop pursuing real life interactions with others because they think the1425 friends they have on Myspace are all they need.