Blog #6

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/fashion/30FACEBOOK.html?_r=1

I came accross this article last night and thought it might be the perfect topic for my next blog post.  The article is entitled "Are 5,001 Facebook Friends Too Many?"  There is a huge difference between friends and "facebook friends."  One dictionary definition of the word friend is: "A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard."  It is common for people to have one hundred friends on Facebook and only regularly converse on the website with maybe twenty.  Out of those twenty, one might only talk to about ten off of the internet.  Out of even those ten, you probably only actually hang out with about three or four on a regular basis.  Why?  Why do we have so many "friends" on Facebook, but can't bring ourselves to regularly ask a new person to join us for lunch?  To keep with my first example, if someone has one hundred Facebook friends, at least ten of them probably only got accepted because of the number of "friends" they had in common.  Out of those hundred, a person probably doesn't personally know about fifteen-twenty of them.  What makes us feel so much safer and confident over the internet? What makes a person so much more willing to share their personal information with strangers over the internet, yet get weirded out if they feel like somone is eavesdropping on a conversation they're having with a friend in class?  What truly constitutes a friend these days?  These are just questions to think about and take into consideration next time they both add a friend on Facebook or Myspace and not ask how the person next to them in class is doing.