You've Got A Friend

Originally posted at blog.zooloo.com

You’ve Got A Friend… or 600.
Posted by: Rod on the Blog
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In today’s social networking world, the popularity of forums like Facebook have produced a rash of active participants who often list 500-600 “friends.” I read a study about a year ago stating that the “average” number of friends was 164. Wow, really?

Carole King made music history in the 70’s when she convinced forlorn lovers that “they had a friend.” Now you can boost your emotional barometer by sharing your innermost personal thoughts (not to mention pictures, and likes/dislikes, “25 things about you”, etc., etc.) with 600 of your “closest” friends. It makes me wonder what’s really going on here. Matthew Hutson writes in Brainstorm, “If you have too few “friends” on Facebook, people might think you’re a loser. Too many and people might think you’re a social slut. Is there an optimal number?” My thought is no, it’s how you define “friends” and use the forums.

If you work in a large company for instance, you may have associates and acquaintances in your own office, several other offices both in the U.S. or around the world. Lots of people you “know” and may want to stay in touch with, but how close a friend is each person really? Faced with a choice of letting someone into your circle of friends versus excluding them, my sense is we opt for inclusion; we look to have more friends and to be able to track more social activity across a bigger and more diverse network. It’s easy and you don’t have to be cool to make it happen. The problems start when you make decisions about what you are willing to share with this ever growing circle of friends.

Researchers at UC San Diego, James Fowler, Christopher Dawes and Nicholas Christakis hypothesize that, “Individuals with too many friends may appear to be focusing too much on Facebook, friending out of desperation rather than popularity, spending a great deal of time on their computers ostensibly trying to make connections in a computer-mediated environment where they feel more comfortable than in face-to-face social interaction.”

So, an interesting phenomenon is upon us. The whole social networking explosion, in a sense, provides a forum for people who, in reality, might not be very social at all in a face-to-face interactivity situation. They accumulate hundreds of “friends” online, but they can’t possibly imagine how their posts and comments will be perceived and interpreted by those hundred of diverse friends residing across multiple degrees of separation. An attempt to update or provide “inside humor” to a smaller group of actual close friends is broadcast to hundreds, where its true meaning may be lost or grossly misinterpreted, due to a lack of shared knowledge of customs and mores. And personal relationships are particularly at risk, for example, when the overly-zealous post information their fraternity brothers may find hilarious but their spouse deems appalling. Let the games begin!
Tags: brainstorm, carole king, Christopher Dawes, facebook, facebook applications, Facebook friends, James Fowler, matthew huston, Nicholas Christakis, Ready To ZooLoo?, smores, Social Media, social media slut, social networking, social slut, UC San Diego, zooloo, zooloo.com