{"id":3981,"date":"2014-06-22T18:04:19","date_gmt":"2014-06-22T23:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/?p=3981"},"modified":"2014-06-22T18:04:19","modified_gmt":"2014-06-22T23:04:19","slug":"facebook-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/general\/facebook-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook \u201cFriends\u201d."},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps because we harbor fears of being different there is something deeply gratifying in finding someone whose thoughts align with our own. I recently found someone like that, an author using the name P J Fox. For this I thank David Grigger<\/a>, who happened to mention @PJFoxWrites<\/a> on Twitter. Among the many interesting posts on her blog is one about Facebook Friendships, you should pop over and read it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since friendship is important to me I have written about it before<\/a>, indeed I’ve even written a poem about what friendship<\/a> means to me, which I\u2019m fairly sure is different to what friendship means to you.<\/p>\n

Friendship is so much more than an alert out of nowhere that someone now “likes you”, or likes what you\u2019ve just said. Yet that seems to be what social media sites such as Facebook attempt to reduce this rare and special thing called friendship to.<\/p>\n

I can see that Facebook works for certain people. For example, my wife uses it to keep in touch with some of her family and a few of her friends. Note my choice of words, \u201csome of her family and a few of her friends\u201d \u2013 she specifically doesn\u2019t accept friend requests from anyone who happens along. What my wife doesn’t use Facebook for is a marketing platform to reach a wide audience of people who, as easily as a mouse-click, can like her or the things she has to say.<\/p>\n

Friendship is so much more than allegedly agreeing with a single random thought. Friendship is so much more than the explicit expectation you will reciprocate for \u201clikes\u201d from someone you don\u2019t know and will probably never meet by \u201cliking\u201d something they have to say in return for them liking something you said. Friendship doesn\u2019t happen in a mouse-click, it just doesn\u2019t. Friendship takes something the social media effectively steals from us, while simultaneously fooling us into think it is granting us. Friendship takes time.<\/p>\n

An attraction of social media, and I think this extends to most of social media platforms, not just Facebook, is that it tricks us into thinking, \u201cI can say something personal to all my friends at the same time!\u201d Obviously, this is an enormous time saving. Just think how much time it would take to call each of our friends and say the line we can so easily post to social media.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of fundamental problems with this premise.<\/p>\n

First, an issue that ardent users of social media seem to have completely forgotten\u2026 Something you shout to the world is in no way \u201cpersonal\u201d.<\/p>\n

Equally important, if you were to actually call each of your friends and tell them exactly the same thing\u2026 Well you would be extremely insincere, indeed if two of your friends discovered you\u2019d told them precisely what you\u2019d already told all your other friends they might even consider you to be shallow. Would they be wrong?<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to the most essential element of friendship. Friendship is personal.<\/p>\n

There simply isn\u2019t a quick and easy path to friendship. Friendship takes time, energy, synergy, and commitment to build. Friendship is one-on-one \u2013 it is not one on many. Even in the smallest group of close friends, there are people who simply would not associate with each other if it weren\u2019t for their real friends in the group.<\/p>\n

And that is OKAY!<\/p>\n

We are all individuals, we are all unique, and we should all accept that friendship is something incredibly special that we invariably share with a single, unique individual. Every friendship we have is as unique as the person with whom we share it.<\/p>\n

If, as so many of us are, you\u2019re entwined in social media don\u2019t mistake what can barely be termed an acquaintance for a friend. There is an enormous difference between the deeply satisfying joy and contentment actual conversation with your true friends brings, and the momentary, yet horribly addictive little surge of pleasure an alert informing you someone has \u201cinteracted\u201d with you on social media brings.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that leads us to another significant difference between social media acquaintanceships, and real friendships.<\/p>\n

The stimulus of social media is addictive. All those innumerable little alerts social media constantly feeds our appetite for interaction mislead us into thinking people we will never know actually care about us. Not only do they not care, but us expecting someone we\u2019ve never had a one-on-one conversation with to care is unrealistic in the extreme.<\/p>\n

Juxtaposed to social media\u2019s addictive little \u201csomeone cares\u201d alerts, along with its urgent requirement for a response in order to show we care back, is real friendship. Real friendship is not addictive. Real friendship places no demands on you in its regard. Real friendship is not established in a single mouse-click, and it is not so easily broken as with another. Once real friendship is established, time\u2019s passage ceases to matter. Literally years can pass between conversations with your real friends, yet you can pick up precisely where you left off so many years ago.<\/p>\n

How much time can pass between \u201cinteractions\u201d in social media? Hours? Days is pushing it. And as for weeks\u2026 well the prevailing wind of social media has completely changed by then, and \u201cSorry mate, but who are you again, and more important, what can you do for me?\u201d will likely be the response you get.<\/p>\n

Now please don’t think I’m saying true friendships cannot form on social media. I am not.\u00a0 However I am saying that regardless of where friendships form they require the same stimulus to growth and development.\u00a0 Personal interaction, commitment, understanding, and most especially time.<\/p>\n

How many true friends do you actually have, versus how many acquaintances you have on social media?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re on social media at all, I know the second number is greater than the first. Often vastly greater.<\/p>\n

Now allow me to pose a question. Which number is more important to you? If you answer honestly, after anything more than superficial consideration of the question, you might learn something about yourself.<\/p>\n

I know I have, and furthermore I don’t think I particularly like what I just learnt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps because we harbor fears of being different there is something deeply gratifying in finding someone whose thoughts align with our own. I recently found someone like that, an author using the name P J Fox. For this I thank David Grigger, who happened to mention @PJFoxWrites on Twitter. Among the many interesting posts on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[146,167,168,390],"class_list":["post-3981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-facebook","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}