Lasting Impressions / Day 3: I still don't like you / Skeletons / I am confused. Deeply, surely and completely.I won... / If you value your life... / Regarding Birthdays / Eve / Me / Oops? / I waited till my flowers withered. /

:: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 ::

Friends with benefits

There are friends. That used to be all I needed to worry about until the advent of social networks like Friendster and Facebook.

Now there are Facebook friends and there are friends with Facebook Benefits (or FwFB. Bear with me, I'm trying to start a trend here) and there are Facebook... acquaintances. After treading the questionably murky waters of social networks for, well, .... a decade... only today did I finally begin to ponder the sad disparity of affection in the virtual world and the real world.

As delineated above, I have friends, i.e. people whom I have real, physical contact with who know how recently I've cut my hair and wow have you lost weight? if I've keeping up my exercise regime.

I have Facebook friends - some of whom I've not actually met for years but are intimately familiar with the virtual hi-jinks I get up to and the odd off-the-cuff/wall/colour remarks I randomly make on my Facebook wall who comment (sometimes in an unwelcome fashion) faithfully on whatever crazy new idea I have.

Then, we have friends with Facebook Benefits who are close to being affectionately called "stalkers" who, besides meeting up with me in real life, have detailed knowledge of my thoughts and feelings due to the close attention they pay to my status updates.

I also have Facebook acquaintances - people who, for some reason or another, appear on my friends list for no reason other than the fact that we sorta, kinda, maybe know each other....from... ummm.... wasn't it Japanese Studies class we did, oh.... 7 years ago? Despite the fact they sit on my friends list, I have no idea if they care or know what's going on in my life because we don't interact, and any updates they receive are merely those dutifully reported by Facebook for perusal and possible skimming over. I've never understood this part of social networks - i.e. adding people you barely know and don't really care about, but it's not something I want or need to delve into because it has existed forever and will exist forever until the last human on Earth tweets the inevitable "@Ridersoftheapocalypse Screw you!" "We're all going to die!! #worldisreallyendingnojoke" message on their twitter account (machines are self-functioning by this time, natch).

Now, I treasure my FWFBs, I do, because they show an interest in my life. As to whether this interest is healthy.... well, let's say I'd prefer ardent attention cool enough that not every status update I make is commented on. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is a good thing here, because it helps ME keep up-to-date with what's going on with their lives (I try hard to hold back my stalker tendencies, of course).

It's the Facebook friends that puzzle me. Some of them are people that I will banter, joke, tease, jibe and argue with but... have never had a like conversation in real life. Some are people I have not met for years, despite the fact that they probably know when I'm free or not (mentally and emotionally, not just physically), what my mood is like (firmly tongue-in-cheek), how many virtual children I've popped (At last count... 4?) and my latest preference for bubblegum pink as a lipstick colour (Untrue, if you're wondering).

Worrisome? Depressing? Yes, when you consider the trend of real life friends not even paying attention to subtle virtual hints or updates of what someone is thinking or feeling at the moment. Facebook has created a culture of expectations based on the immediacy of information dissemination - we think friends should know what we're up to because *rolls eyes* didn't I say so on my Facebook status like only 2 minutes ago? The trend that real and present friends may not be as informed and that for-all-intents-and-purposes-virtual friends are is a troubling one indeed.

This creates distance between people and friends who do not check up often enough, and yet the need for face-to-face interaction cannot be filled by virtual friends. With the growth of dependence on affirmation from virtual communities, our relationships are slowly coloured by... orange crayons!

...well, not really, but I kind of lost the gist of what I was thinking of initially.

Basically, I feel that people are beginning more and more to live their lives online and are using electronic means to implicitly reveal how they really feel instead of sitting down with another person in a real life setting and telling them. And in tandem, we're also becoming less adept at communication face-to-face because we feel uncomfortable being unable to edit or take back what we've already said, or instead become overly quippy as if we were being observed by the world and needed to have throwaway sound bites all the time.

Alright. I've well and truly lost steam for this topic. Should've finished it on the day I started it, but oh well. These things happen!

Labels: Philosophy, Random

:: And that's all she wrote 10:34 AM [+] ::
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