6/3/11

About Friends

The bad news is  that the cliché “ any friend of yours is a friend of mine” is in danger of losing its cliché status. The even worse news is that it has become the motto of the Facebook social network. If you have a Facebook page, you are besieged with ways to find and add friends. The easiest way of course is to make a friend out of someone who is your friend's friend - any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Not only do you get a new friend , you get a photo, bio and countless comments about things you would rather not know. Gossip finds its way into many comments which is perfectly acceptable. After all, what’s a little gossip among friends. Pre-Facebook, if you dared to consider anyone a friend because he or she was the friend of a friend and you later found out that the new friend was obnoxious, you were faced with the difficult choice of telling that new friend to go and pound salt. Not a problem with Facebook. With a click of the mouse you can unfriend any friend and that friend will never darken your door or better yet your screen again. In fact that friend will not even be told he or she has been unfriended. If you are unfriended and somehow find out, you can always rationalize that with friends like that , you don’t need a friend.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I tried FACEBOOK for awhile, Tony. I just one day signed off and said: "I don't get it, so why am I wasting my time reading 'friends' comments about a new cow she introduced to her fictional farm? When there are sites on the Internet like OPEN CULTURE, why am I wasting time on FACEBOOK? I didn't de-friend anyone, I just said 'goodbye' to all of them and wished them luck. Keep writing. Your STUFF is good. Chas