Growing popularity July 31, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , trackbackSomehow or another, I now have 43 friends on Facebook. Now, I’m not really a billy-no-mates, but I would struggle to think of twenty people to invite to a party and I would really struggle if they all showed up and tried to fit into the shoebox I laughingly refer to as my “flat”. I only own 10 glasses, including the one I happened to have half full in my hand at closing time at the Marquis of Cornwallis. ahem. I digress.
So, 43 friends. And most of them are or at some stage have been genuinely friends in the ‘would have you round for dinner if you’d risk my cooking’ sense of the term. Certainly all of them are people I’d be very happy to meet for a drink or a Sunday lunch – I don’t make or accept an invitation if I don’t know them at least that well. There’s an ex-schoolmate , my cousin’s wife, a current colleague and a couple of former ones, some people I was at University with, others I know through my sister, two from my Spanish course in San Sebastian, and some from a couple of London-based groups. People keep appearing.
Many are people I haven’t heard from in a while, and am not in regular contact with.
Perhaps the oddest is someone I’ve known since I was about 14. We were close friends in my late teens and early twenties, but gradually drifted apart and have had little contact in the last 15 years, just the occasional email. Except that we’re connected on facebook, linkedin, deli.icio.us and even flickr. I wonder if it is really right to call that person a ‘friend’? I think it is, because we were friends once and it was only laziness and the tyranny of distance that means we drifted. In this connected age, old friendships don’t disappear completely, they just fade into these filigrees of the web that still link us.
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So it sounds like you would recommend the whole Facebook experience? I’ve toyed with the idea of signing up for an account a few times, only to keep putting it off. There seem to be enough people on there scraping together every last chance acquiantance from their lives that it detracts from wanting to use it.
However, your comments have made me rethink. I’d likewise find it tough to invite 20 friends to a party, at least at any one time, but there are plenty over the years that have gradually disappeared into obscurity. And in this digital age, there really isn’t any excuse for that!
Much as I’d love to be your friend number 44, I’m relieved that you haven’t sent an invitation to join Facebook to everyone in your contact list. You cousin’s wife has not been so restrained –
I’ve had two invitations from her. I’ve been reading about Facebook in this week’s “Listener” where Russell Brown tells the story of someone whose friends assumed her relationship had broken up, because she’d unchecked the relationship box on her Facebook site in an attempt to keep some information private. Russell suggests that the privacy controls are so finely detailed that they confuse users, but he does say that Facebook is “clean, ingenious and stacked with fine calibrations for privacy and engagement”. However, I think that regular blogging is quite enough computer addiction for me at present.