Facebook friendships vs. real-life friendships: Who do we share our info with?
>>Print ViewPublication Date: 11/20/2009
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I love Facebook because it allows me to connect with friends, acquaintances and classmates, but while it supports a social network it also creates new social questions.
I’m not great with names but I am amazing with faces. I rarely forget at face, which is good and bad. It’s good for movie trivia and identifying a criminal in a lineup. It’s bad for walking to class and encountering hundreds of students. Some people I recognize but I can’t place the face with a name. If I loved math then I would try and calculate the probability of how many times a day I might see one of my hundreds of Facebook “friends.”
When I first came to Purdue, this wonderfully addictive site had just been opened up to several universities across the country. Acquiring “friends” was like a social test: You could determine a person’s Facebook worth by how many friends they had. It was more valuable to have someone add you as a friend than the other way around.
I quickly got tired of adding people because a Facebook “friend” is not the same as a traditional friend or even an acquaintance. People who I met only once three years ago are still floating around on a friend list. Facebook is kind of like the clutter drawer for friends. Everyone gets thrown into the mix and the people you see most often, your close friends, stay at the top, while everyone else slowly filters to the bottom. This Facebook social enigma becomes more obvious when walking to class.
You know when you pass someone on the sidewalk and you hold eye contact a little too long? In those couple extra seconds you are to trying to figure out how you know the person only a few feet away from you. It’s like when you’re filling out the crossword puzzle. You know the three letter word for hot tub; it’s somewhere in the back of your mind, you just can’t place it. You wonder, should I say hi? Smile? Or avert my eyes quickly? If you hold eye contact too long, then quickly look away – without any form of acknowledgment – then you’ve given the person the ultimate snub.
“Sorry, I know you, but you’re not familiar enough for even the slightest of greetings, such as a nod or a brief smile.”
Then the first chance you get, you frantically search through your hundreds of Facebook friends trying to place the face with a name. Was the person on the sidewalk a fellow student from class? Were they a long-lost Boiler Gold Rush acquaintance? Or was the person on the street someone you worked with at that crappy restaurant two summers ago?
And then, there they are. It is the girl that lived in the same residence hall as you freshman year. You met on the elevator and shared some brief conversations. You examine this girl’s Facebook profile, wondering what she has been up to in the last few years and then wonder if it would be acceptable to remove her as a friend.
If a person can’t acknowledge you in passing then should they really be a Facebook “friend?” But if you remove them from your list of people isn’t that kind of cruel? You are cutting that person off from stalking your every status update, relationship change and photo album.
If only Facebook had some sort of acquaintance application. It would sort your friends based on the last time you looked at their profile, photo, wall, etc. Then you could file people away into the acquaintance friend list. It’s a way of communicating: “I know you but I don’t really KNOW you. Now, you can only stalk my status updates.”
Sara Conn is a senior in the colleges of Agriculture and Liberal Arts and may be reached at opinions@purdueexponent.org.