The recent lecture on social media lecture really got me thinking about my nature of my Facebook friends. Sure, a majority of them I know personally in real life. But the Dunbar number left me contemplating how many people I'm really close with. A sign of the times: nearly everyone I know is on Facebook; my family, friends, longlost childhood friends, everyone bar my doctor and employer (for obvious reasons). This prompted me to 'take stock' of my Facebook connections and attempt to quantify and evaluate these connections. Here's what I came up with.
-517 Friends in Total
-Approximately 400 of these are 'real' friends from university/school/work
-70 are friends of friends or what would be considered 'acquaintances'
-20 of them are family members
-13 of these are randoms I have never met before
Of these 13 randoms, I only talk to one of them on a regular basis, a guy from Cairo who added me randomly and who I talk to about anything and everything. Periodically, I try to do 'friend purges'. That is, I try to expel any connections on Facebook that are not representative of a connection that exists in real life (bar the 13 'randoms').
So, any overwhelming majority of my online connections are representative of real life connections. But does that make these connections any more legitimate than say, pen pals? Before the internet, having pen lals was a popular method of having a friendship with someone despite geographical distance. Is communicating with a random Facebooker (i.e. 'no mutual friends' type deal) the new 'pen pal'? This, too, got me thinking about a dystopian future, about an oppressive State where people could not leave their houses and the only meaningful relationships that did exist were facilitated through an online medium. Surely this won't happen, but a scary thought nonetheless! What do you guys think?
-517 Friends in Total
-Approximately 400 of these are 'real' friends from university/school/work
-70 are friends of friends or what would be considered 'acquaintances'
-20 of them are family members
-13 of these are randoms I have never met before
Of these 13 randoms, I only talk to one of them on a regular basis, a guy from Cairo who added me randomly and who I talk to about anything and everything. Periodically, I try to do 'friend purges'. That is, I try to expel any connections on Facebook that are not representative of a connection that exists in real life (bar the 13 'randoms').
So, any overwhelming majority of my online connections are representative of real life connections. But does that make these connections any more legitimate than say, pen pals? Before the internet, having pen lals was a popular method of having a friendship with someone despite geographical distance. Is communicating with a random Facebooker (i.e. 'no mutual friends' type deal) the new 'pen pal'? This, too, got me thinking about a dystopian future, about an oppressive State where people could not leave their houses and the only meaningful relationships that did exist were facilitated through an online medium. Surely this won't happen, but a scary thought nonetheless! What do you guys think?
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