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A whole new world of friendship and a fresh kind of fatigue
THERE was a time when you knew who your friends were. You went out for a drink with them on a Friday night, you went to a concert together and the organised among us would send them a card on their birthday.
However, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have not only revolutionised how we talk to each other, they've changed the way we build friendships. The rise of the internet has meant that millions of people all over the world now have friends they've never met before. Some people have used these online sites to collect friends like others might collect badges, or coins. But earlier this year it seemed the social networking bubble could be about to burst after the number of British Facebook users dropped from 8.9 million to 8.5 million, leading to suggestions that "Facebook fatigue" was creeping in.
It's not uncommon for online users to have thousands of "friends", but do they actually need them and are they really friends? In the virtual world of social networking, it can be an everyday occurrence for someone to receive a request to "be my friend" from a complete stranger. Yet if you were walking down the street and someone came up to you and asked the same question, you would probably smile politely and
look around for the nearest policeman. In October, research done for the National Lottery concluded that friendships were key to our happiness, with 10 close friends being enough to make most people happy.
Alison Tinsley, life coach and director of Lavish Lifestyle Consulting, based in Yorkshire, says it's more about quality, than quantity. "If you have hundreds of friends online then you can't have meaningful relationships with all of them, it's impossible. But we all have different kinds of friends and sites like Facebook and Friends Reunited allow people to stay in touch via email and they can help you find old friends who you've lost touch with."
Internet psychologist Graham Jones believes that the meaning of friendship has changed. "Younger people who use social networking sites online tend to define the word 'friend' much more loosely than someone who is older. For someone of, say, my generation a friend is regarded as someone you know, but someone who has a Facebook page may have hundreds, or even thousands of friends," he says.
"The evidence is that those people who have two or three thousand friends on Facebook do stay in touch with those people." You might wonder how on earth they find the time, but Jones believes online communities are replacing real communities that have become increasingly fragmented.
"In the past, if someone lived in a village they would know everyone who lived there which might mean two, or three hundred people. But now families and friends live all over the place and social networking sites are providing the opportunity for people to build their own communities online."
And he doesn't believe that social networking sites are on the wane. "Most people still don't use them so they definitely haven't reached saturation point yet. What you might see is people moving from Facebook and going to MySpace or trying out one of the other sites, but they haven't given up on the concept of social networking online."
Neither does he agree with the argument that social networking simply encourages people to be more insular. "People are forming friendships now in countries they previously didn't even know existed. And those people who are part of online communities are usually just as outgoing in the real world. Ifyou're a loner who's a bit anti-social, then you're unlikely to contact people in the online community.
"But what these sites have done is provide an opportunity to people who are perhaps a bit shy, maybe they don't like their bodies, or there's some other barrier which isn't there when they talk online," says Jones.
"We have been talking about the idea of a global village for a while now, but it's the internet that has provided everybody with the opportunity to contact anyone in the world, which is a bigger step forward than global air travel. In a hundred years' time, historians will look back at the internet over the last five years as one of the most significant phases in human development ever."
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Saturday 04 February 2012
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