Know Who Your Friends Are [?]

In a recent discussion with an acquaintance, the subject of Facebook came up. He told me he had opened a second Facebook page so that he could communicate more intimately with his true friends. Like a thunderbolt from out of the blue, that struck me as a very smart thing to do, and I thought it should be articulated. Is your Facebook page really a place you can commune with the 10-15 friends and loved ones you really care about, without the ears and eyes of a bunch of eavesdropping onlookers, some of whom you hardly know at all? If you’re like me, you’ve had your Facebook page for a couple of years now, and have amassed a group of 50 – 100 or so friends (so-called). Lots of people have many more, and this fact should help to make my point – they are not all friends. Most of them are acquaintances. And the fact is that you act differently around friends than you do around acquaintances.

Dr. Grant McCracken, anthropological blogmeister at This Blog Sits At, sent me an article from the Economist that’s right up this alley called “Primates on Facebook” . The writer cleverly equates the kind of relationship that can be considered a friendship to one in which – if we were all primates living in the wild – we would be prepared to engage in intimate “grooming” behaviour. Parting the hair, hunting for fleas and crunching down on their tiny carapaces. Yum! Now that takes a true friend! This same article says that “an average man generally responds to the postings of only 7 friends on Facebook by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or wall.” OK… so for women the number is 10 – but either way it ain’t a throng – and the point is that people intuitively know they only want to connect with a few good friends.  So why are they letting all their acquaintances look on?  We’re back to the question of whether you will truly act like yourself on Facebook.  If not, then there might be a place for what my friend… er, sorry… acquaintance has – a second account.

Fact is, Facebook has rather debased the meaning and significance of the word ‘friend’, which is rooted in the Old English word frēond, which means “to love”. In most online social networking relationships, there really is not the degree of intimacy that qualifies someone as a loving friend. Very often, the relationships are more about business than love, so I’ve started redirecting some of my friend requests to my LinkedIn profile. That’s where healthy, green-blooded, what’s-in-it-for-me connecting really belongs.

What rings in my ears is the voice of my old school headmaster, Chas: “Know who your friends are, and cherish them. Know who your acquaintances are, and know that they are not your friends.” Good advice? I think so. And then there’s another Chas who really cuts to the bone (as he was wont to do) – Charles Bukowski: “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.” Hmm. From “Notes From a Dirty Old Man “(1969).

INSIGHT?  There are different tiers of closeness in relationships. Facebook is a one-size-fits-all solution and – because of that – does not offer the ‘customized’ closeness one would like to have with some people.  To its credit, however, Facebook has invented an entirely new tier of social relationship.  And that’s cool!