Are You My Friend?
Cat in the Stack
I'm sure my aversion to the language of "friends" is also a matter of age. When you are thirteen, friends probably matter as much or more than just about anything else. If you're not a teenager, if you lead a busy and engaged life, collecting more and more and more "friends" (scare quotes intended) does not seem like fun, it seems more like an occupational hazard (i.e. one year, after teaching a larger and popular class of seniors, directing too many dissertations, serving as an officer of a professional association and editor of a journal in the field, I ended up writing wrote well over one hundred letters of recommendation and could have written probably three, four, or five times that many if I'd said "yes" to everyone; all of these were people whom Facebook would call "friends"--students, former students, colleagues, former colleagues, co-panelists at some conference I barely remembered, etc: by the time I reached my one hundredth letter, I vowed to become a hermit. If I had been asked to answer the "yes" or "no" Facebook Friends question, I would not have been inclined to say yes.). In fact, those kinds of [scarequote] "friends" often occupy so much of one's life that there isn't much time left over for the real intimacies of real BFFs. It's one of the ironies of adult sociability. But when I was thirteen would I have been happier with the "friends" label. Hey, it was a popular tv show that went on forever, right? Why am I so nervous about the internet version of friendship? Everyone needs friends, loves friends . . . even FACEBOOK friends. Actually, I don't think so. I don't like the semantics. There has to be a difference between LinkedIn's "contacts" and that annoying Facebook question, "Are you a friend?"
For an excellent discussion of this issue (as well as important thoughts on privacy and futurity---even friends grow up!) check out this long and thoughtful analysis by Professor Ian Bogost, one of my favorite theorists and practitioners (he's also a game designer) of our moment. I've reblogged the first part of it here to give you the flavor but his posting is long and extremely thoughtful and I urge you to read it all. It's worth it!
http://www.bogost.com/blog/a_professors_impressions_of_fa.shtml
This spring, I created an account on Facebook. I'm a web 2.0 cynic (and a cynic in general), so this surprised some of my friends and colleagues. But I was encouraged by so many of them, I wanted to give it a try. For example, Ian McCarthy just wanted an easier way to share pictures with me without having to pester me to go look. BJ Fogg told me that he was thinking about how to use Facebook for teaching (here's the Facebook group on the topic), and encouraged me to get on because my students use Facebook and like it.
So, I've been trying to use Facebook earnestly for the past few months to get a sense of how it works and what I might use it for. I know that there is a lot of mounting interest in Facebook and social networking software in general among university professors and administrators. I spoke at the Georgia Tech President's Retreat last week, and Facebook was a part of more than one of the presentations. Some just want to understand how college-age students use technology. Some want to harness it for their own purposes. I didn't have any preconceived goals for exploiting the service. I tried to keep an open mind and to use the service as naturally as possible -- in my case, primarily as a university professor. Here are some of my reactions so far.
Go to Ian Bogost's blog for the rest of this fascinating and important posting . . .
http://www.bogost.com/blog/a_professors_impressions_of_fa.shtml
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Great post from Ian! I'm going to comment directly on his blog, but I wanted to say a couple of things here:
As a member of Facebook since its infancy, I've noticed that many users don't think much of the term "friend" there. Indeed, some will add anyone they have ever met or even heard of simply to make that "friend" count as high as possible.
I've always found it a bit awkward when someone I barely know sends me a Facebook friend request; it feels strange to turn it down, but it's even stranger when you accept and then encounter that person in real life and they don't even recognize you! Not much authority given to the term "friend" in those situations!