Are Friends on Facebook Really Friends?
So, many of you out there have well over 200 friends. I even have 75. Others have over 1000. But, why?
What is the purpose of having more "friends" when you know they are actually people you know little about and may dislike if you met them in person? Online friends are deceptive and liars half the time. The only real friends are those you DO actually know and ACTUALLY call on the phone on a frequent basis. Usually, they are people you work with or family, not some total stranger who lives thousands of miles away and whose picture you see may not even be them.
How many of your 1000 friends would actually help you in time of need with food, money or clothes? We all know it would be those you see and talk with frequently and NOT online. Some celebrities have a public account and a private account, open only to family and others. The term friend today really means an "acquaintance", someone you barely know. I guess FB chose to use "friend" because the spelling was shorter! LOL.
Does having more "friends" make you feel better about your actual lonely life? Does it fill a void? Make you feel more important to someone? The more friends you have, the more nuisance it can be on FB. For, depending on settings, every time someone has some trite thing to say, you get the feed about it. Multiply that by thousands and soon your time on FB is forever.
FB encourages everyone to friend everyone with scores. It is all about revenue to FB. The more friends you have, the more advertisers may use their services, because the "sell" will be seen by more. Advertisers use those with thousands or hundreds of thousands of friends to help promote their product by using "Like".
The weird thing about it all is that, those under 20 or so, think the social online media is the normal way to meet "friends" and how to interact with them. They tend to think that actually talking with them, having them over, is not the normal way. Maybe they need to look up the word friend and acquaintance to know the difference.