I like Facebook. I like to use it and I found it quite
useful as opposed to many views on contrary. I think the ability it provides us
to share things with the people around us and even a bigger circle(“circle”
reminded me something +) is amazing.
But, the “friend” concept in Facebook was tickling my brain for a while. A word, such strong as “friend” shouldn’t be consumed that easy. I thought I need to prove this.
On my last birthday, in October 2011, I made a test. I
basically removed my birthday information from my information section two days before my
birthday and monitored activity on my wall on my birthday. The result was
interesting. Given that there were over 100 "friends" saying happy birthday from Facebook the previous year, this year it was only 3! Even less then my
estimations!! Of course, remembering birthday is not the single indication of friendship, however, the numbers obviously tell something!
So, Facebook is good, but always remember that your “friends in
Facebook” are only your “Facebook friends”.
(Thanks to my friends those who called, emailed or even messaged via Facebook!)
(Thanks to my friends those who called, emailed or even messaged via Facebook!)
Even though I feel like I should agree with you which I kind of do, I don't think birthday test is adequate for such experiment.
ReplyDeletePut it this way, way before we had electronic calenders, we had diaries. We would put down birthdays of our beloved friends and phone or meet up with them on their birthdays. Obviously we were young back then and our social behaviour was different.
Then came the age of digital. So we would use reminders that would send you an e-mail on your friend's birthdays which is sort of what Facebook is doing now.
The only difference is we weren't so close in touch with our friend back then as much as it is now. And that's due to the way social communication has evolved in years.
In times of good old letter and home phone, we were mainly communicating using peer-to-peer or by-proxy methods i.e. write a letter to each individual friend and ask about other friends that the individual is more closely in touch with.
When mobile phones, SMS's and e-mails started entering in our lives they were no different than their predecessors apart from the fact that they were more reliable, faster and digital.
So up until then it was, as I mentioned before, mostly peer-to-peer communication. Then came the mail groups and IRC where you could post a message and it could be consumed by more than one individual. Now that completely changed our approach to communication and started a new era which has evolved to Facebook, Google+, Orkut and many more.
So essentially the importance of remembering things shifted over to responding them when you are notified. I am sure you don't necessarily post a birthday message on each of your friends' wall on their birthdays - you only say happy birthday to those you feel closer and likewise they do the same thing.
Thanks for this great comment. This is very true: "the importance of remembering things shifted over to responding them when you are notified" and this is what I object actually. A friend, a real one, should not be notified to remember you in one of your happiest(or worst) days. And Facebook birthday messages show that the notified messages are worthless. There is no intimacy at all when one of your "friends" who you didn't see for 20 years and talked 2 times in primary school wishes you a happy birthday:)
ReplyDelete