“—-Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
“—-Find your friends on Facebook and sign up to connect with them, see their full profiles, share photos and more.”
When Facebook advertises these two statements at their homepage, they assume that you need to connect and share with people in your life, and you are interested in seeing your friends’ photos, full profiles, and stories on Facebook. The halting questions are: who are going to be your friends on Facebook? Are all people you choose to be on your Facebook your friend?”
About two weeks ago, BBC headlined a piece of news: a young girl, called Kim,was fired on the second day after she described her office job on her Facebook “My day of work is really dull, I am really BORED.” If the people who she chose to share this personal feeling are her friends, how could a friend betray her and got her fired? Certainly, the girl over-trusted the sincerity of her ‘friends” on the Facebook.Who is qualified to be your friend on Facebook? A quick glimpse of the word “friend” in a dictionary gave me five layers of explanations:
• a person you know well and regard with affection and trust; “he was my best friend at the university”
• ally: an associate who provides cooperation or assistance; “he’s a good ally in fight”
• acquaintance: a person with whom you are acquainted; “I have trouble remembering the names of all my acquaintances”; “we are friends of the family”
• supporter: a person who backs a politician or a team etc.; “all their supporters came out for the game”; “they are friends of the library”
• a member of the Religious Society of Friends founded by George Fox (the Friends have never called themselves Quakers)”
The first explanation of ‘friend” makes perfect sense. You best friends are certainly invited to on your Facebook. You trust them so much and can’t wait to take advantages of this exciting technology to stay tuned with their most recent stories and photos. How about your family members? You will certainly call them friend in offline interaction. You trust them and you love them. Are you going to add them as your Facebook friends? The Washington Post in last December related a story about a high school junior thought really hard to decide whether to accept or ignore his parents as his Facebook friends. Why this high school student was not so sure to accept his parent as a Facebook friend? He has a smart concern that too much information on Facebook could upset the friendship between a father and a son.
“Birds of a feather will flock together.” This may be the exact reason for you to invite a friend to your Facebook. On your Facebook network, you could have individuals just like you who care about foreign policies, education, military, cooking, pets, fashions, computers, software, and digital photos. They are on your Facebook because you have a great recreational or thought-provoking time with them. They are your information supporters. Are you going to call them “friends”? Sure as in physical world, just beware that the ‘friends” here are more focused on the mutual enjoyment of the time spent together than on the personal attachment. On Facebook, affinity does not necessarily grow among the birds of a feather.
Most of the time, the ‘friends” on your Facebook are your colleagues, high-school classmates, or just a friend of a friend that you met in a social club the other day. You share the common social interaction space and communities with them. You want to be closely connected with them because you don’t want to be late or out-dated in obtaining news about your work. You want to be connected with them because they are part of your old-day memory and you miss them. You want to be connected with them because you want to maintain the rapports already built between them. Are they your friends? Of course, they are extremely important and they define who you are now. But are you ready share your personal happiness and grieve about your money, life, and work with them like Kim did? I bet you would like to have a second thought.
Back to the Facebook’s warm-hearted invitation: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, I would like to cool it down a little bit.