Are you my friend?


"But Facebook is also causing us to face a redefinition of what friend means and makes it increasingly difficult to behave differently in front of different publics."- Howard Rheingold 

 I have always taken the word friend very seriously because I am not a person that has tons of friends. I am satisfied with having a few or at times one close friend other then my sisters. I don't let people waste my time and so I choose to have few friends. I also grew up incredibly shy so that may have contributed. When I read the section "Facing Facebook's Facts of Life" in chapter 5 of Net Smart  I immediately started think of the casual effect Facebook's use of the word friend to reference connecting with someone.

This section also reminds me of the bad mistakes I first made when joining Facebook. When I signed up I added my phone number to my profile like it prompted me to. Well after years I forgot about the fact it was on there. I was now in my twenties with the same phone number. I ended up accepting a friend request from a man that was a substitute teacher at my high school growing up. We chatted a bit about what I was up to now and those sort of pleasantries. I thought of this interaction as a simple use of Facebook and honestly textbook for its purpose of catching up with someone. Well one day I started receiving texts from him and calls. It honestly freaked me out! It had crossed a boundary that made me very uncomfortable. I  couldn't figure out how he got my number. Finally, I asked how he got it and he said "well it's on Facebook for all your friends to have". He was not my friend in my definition of what a friend is. It creeped me out! I took my number off that day and will never again. That one mistake started an endless creepy saga I will not continue to tell you about but years later I have a new number and will not be sharing with Facebook.

The casual nature of social media to encourage us to put in more information is worry some and has required me to filter what I post and what I allow others to see.  I don't think of many of my Facebook "friends" as a friend in real life.

It was interesting because it turns out many other media outlets and people are very angry with the term friend on Facebook. The following quote from Business Insider really summed up the annoyance many people feel towards it. It may be a bit harsh but given my past naivete maybe I under estimated the power of the word friend.

"Lonely genius Mark Zuckerberg didn't have any friends, so he needed to create a system, a network, to obtain false friendships."

Comments

  1. Ben GutenbergNovember 5, 2018 at 1:42 PM

    That's a very unsettling experience, I'm sorry you had to deal with that. I, too, am not really one for parading my information around, so it always makes me laugh when I see sites that say "creating an account takes just seconds", and the account requires personal information like your phone number. Sure, it would only take a minute or so to type all of that in, but it takes much longer to actually think about if the service is worth that disclosure. I think that the way they phrase it is purposefully meant to disarm you, assuring that you shouldn't question what information to provide, as account setup should take a very short amount of time. This, in my opinion, unfairly trivializes security, as you discuss.

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