Friends, surely this is a word that means something. On many social networks people must be your frinds if they want to see and share your posts. Facebook for example are insisting that if you wanna share an app with someone that you must be their friend. So here I am playing stupid mini games that have my attention for 15 minutes or 15 hours but to allow someone to quest or play with me or be populated or whatever, you must become their friend.. with a total stranger.
Twitter has so many bots following other bots that it surely must account for most of the bandwidth that could otherwise be used in real ether situations. I regularily get follow requests from what i presume are bots and SEO and marketing ID's. Some of these ID's have thousands of followers and not a single post.
Making friends on the web is very easy, almost to easy. you can search their name , their nick name, their email and their school. All is good when you actually use the tools to communicate with each other. As i mentioned earlier I play mini-games in Facebook, There was one game where you could not progress to the next level until you had (x) amount of friends playing the game. Lots of my frinds are not into games. To get around the obvious lack of desire of 'my' friends to play a game like some sort of simple Dungeons And Dragons sorta thing, the 'app' has a post to the applications wall, where people can JOIN you, but only if you accept their friend request. You know it , I managed to advance by regaling total strangers from all over the world to be in my party (on the proviso that I be "friends" with them).
My FRIEND numbers began to swell. I often gave the prospective friend a quick scan on their page on that social network site. Just a quick look to see if they where into weird shit... like me.
When I stopped playing the game I did kull my list a bit. I kept a few of them that where semi communicative or shared some playing style that was similar to mine. In fact I even became real friends with a few too.
So where does this leave us? I can tell you that I do filter my friend requests and do not press 'accept' as soon as I see them. With alarming regularity get requests from people with no 'also friends with' in common. Frankly I am not that lonely that I must get so many friends as I can to make myself feel confident.
Alarmingly, it is friends I actually know who kind of act weird that makes me think that their account has been compromised buy their little sister. I recently sent a rather non sexual or directed or pointed message to a friend who gave me "her" user name. She was posting past midnight and so I sent the message "go to bed" to that I got a response of "Don't be creepy, wanker" ...
Being neither creepy nor wanking. I just wondered why this average looking young lady would write such a thing. She neither knew me well nor did she write anything contextually true.
Hello BLOCK button.... the short thinking "valley girl" can just just bugger off. After all this aint the valley
But I believe that from my experience with chat rooms and web casts and social networking in many forms since the mid 90's that with the onset of easy chats and cams like chatroulette. people have become morally cheap and rather to easy to slag someone. Attitudes are rampant especially by the insecure and rude. I remember in Comic Chat that you actually had to chat in eloquent stanzas at least if you where not to be flamed as an idiot., Hello IRC. With various servers to connect to you went to a room of your choosing where you might chat with someone for years making a relationship and an understanding. Some rooms where topical and chat about topics was all that was allowed. Whilst others where meeting places intended to be nothing but light easy chat. /me slaps (put name here) with a trout , was an almost ultimate insult.
I recently became friends on facebook with someone whom I used to chat with in the 90's and we agree that people now dont want to know anything as they already know it. Also, chatting is almost a waste of time as everyone lies about who, what where. We realized and agree that everyone's 'acceptance' values have become a lot lower. our morals have become cheaper and our keenness to be told how pretty we are have become to important.
People use less words to express what they mean, and now they have become so nasty and cheap in value that short abusive stanzas have become the norm.
Social networking should bring people together but because of its cheap morals and easy feel it is making reality between real humans further apart.
There are pleanty of reasons why social networking is good but there are many more why they are bad. Just loook about and see how cheap we have become when we are on line. Only your real frinds offer you even a moment of good info or chat. even if it is just to say HI.
Long gone is the mailbox on the street that used to deliver messages from friends abroad and various other informative bits and pieces.
Enter http://www.seppukoo.com/ for facebook users is not only a breech of privacy as they need your log in details and if you have been using facebook for years you gonna have various bits of personal info but it also lets all your users that you have 'necked' yourself. pretty good but only if you don't mind a bit of engrish.
frankly although it is easy to communicate with people these days and the statement "the net is making the world smaller" it is also making people less communicative too.
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