I have been asking this question myself over the last few days and had quite an interesting discussion with a true friend yesterday about it.
Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Live Journal and others have given us these great tools to keep in touch with people – often long lost friends from school and others who are on other sides of the planet. However, as all of these sites proudly boast lists of friends and in particular the number of friends that each person has a silent competition has formed for who can amass the greatest number of social network friends amongst their peers. Or this competition existed at least until about early 2009 when the opposite competition became the game, that is to remove or defriend as many people on your contact list as possible. I know people who have removed over 500 people.
All of this adding and removing of friends in the virtual environment appears to have weakened the true meaning of friendship in real life. Now instead of building relationships and friendships with people through social interaction and communication we are typically bumping into people and then adding them as a friend on a social networking site and getting to know them that way. This is all very good if you are some sort of paedophile but for most normal people it is very unsatisfying. This is probably a primary reason why once the initial fad of adding as many random people as possible had worn off as the reality of having a whole lot of strangers knowing your intimate details and stalking your photos became a very good reason to participate in defriending as many people as possible.
But from my own experience this natural selection process of stabilising the behaviour of most people in online social networking has also crossed into the real world and now people who are considered close, good, trusted and loyal friends are participating in the behaviour of defriending true real life friends just because they can, completely not aware of the physiological or emotional difference that comes with it.
I have just gone through, and I guess that because I am writing this, I am still going through the process of someone trying to do this exact process to me, the only thing is it is a whole lot harder to do in real life than a virtual environment. Until early December my best friend was someone I had known for six years and over the past few years had become someone whom I have shared a number of good life experiences with – tramping, skiing, and the like.
However, in early December their new partner (whom I have never met) decided that they did not like me because of my sex and the color of my skin – yes racism is alive and well in New Zealand and it is not your stereotypical situation either. Because of this my [former] best friend decided to defriend me in real life – that is to completely block me in the virtual world from social networking, instant messaging, email and the like. But also in the real world including (and I am not making this up) having someone who I do not know try to lay a complaint that I was harassing them – a brilliant attempt at character fraud and defamation (too bad the person handling the complaint saw straight through it). So far I have not responded to the bait for a good old fashioned grudge war – I guess this blog may be the initial punch.
The thing that really gets me about this whole situation though is how silly it is. But on a higher level just how much the concepts of friendship have been altered and blurred through the use of the online world. Maybe the defining moment of the last decade is not terrorism but how social networking has weakened the true meaning of friendship.
