Curtis Silver writes
his article on what he believes to be a sort of disarray among social media
friendships. In his post, he discusses the variations in definitions of friend. A philosophical definition may mention
the affection and caring attitudes among friendships, that which seems to be
the definition Silver mostly utilizes to support his argument.
For instance, I've
had many instances where I somehow add or get added by a Facebook user that I may have heard of, have
mutual friends with, or simply seen from afar at an event. After that, their
stories, photos, and statuses appear on my feed and allow me to keep up with
what this x-person is doing. Then comes the time when we cross paths in person
and we do this thing where we pretend neither of us have ever known a single
fact about the other. This is exactly what Silver believes to be the issue in
social media.
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| (Source: churchmag) |
Even though I agree
with most of Silver's arguments, I find it very hard to follow his claim of
social media having facilitated and in a way having released the tension of
meeting people and/or being around strangers. Although, he does emphasize that this sense of comfort
should not exist because "anyone we
don't know on a personal level is nothing more than a stranger," I still
disagree that social media has actually reduced the awkwardness with strangers.
In a way, it just switched it from, "I don't know you so I have nothing to
talk about" to "I know a lot about
you, but I know that through creepy, online means, so I'm just going to pretend
I don't know you or anything about you at all." Either way, some social
encounters are awkward and social media has definitely altered them, that being
for better or for worse.
To me, it is not
valid to think of virtual connections as supplements to actual face to face
connections. To effectively support his argument, Silver presents Dunbar'sNumber Theory that states one can only maintain 150 "friends." One
may have over 800 friends, but of those a small section will actually share an
intimate relationship with the user. I thought it was particularly interesting
to bring up Facebook's "subscription" and "acquaintances"
features. As a way to minimize this quagmire,
the social media platform offered users a way to organize their friends and to
put focus on the people they were actually friends
with. The outcome of this was rather unexpected, in that people's desire
to belong and appear more popular prevailed over their messy, irrelevant news feeds.
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| (Source: brandonwithrow) |
Before establishing
a stringent claim on the inferiority of online relationships, one should
consider times and platforms that do indeed benefit and lead users'
relationships into a more meaningful path. For instance, the other day my close
friend started venting about how our friend we graduated high school with a few
years ago unfollowed her on Twitter. It wasn't the deduction on her Followers
number she was concerned about, but she saw it as a sort of "break
up." This user who goes to school on the East side will no longer get to
see what my friend is ever up to or has to say or share. With this said,
Twitter and social platforms that consist of users sharing about their lives
and activities give long-distance friendships a chance to keep contact.
Realistically, with people's busy lives, it gets too complicated coordinating a
time to have a good talk on the phone, sending letters is not time efficient,
etc.
Although my friend's
unfollowing example was doing the opposite of staying close, my friend brought
up the point that it is only this way that our generation has been able to keep
in contact with those friends and family that have move far away. Now when my
friend from NYU comes home, we don't have that awkward, "how's school?
What's your major again?!" repetitive conversation. With social media,
it's more along the lines of, "hey I saw you went to that __ event, my
friend __ also went, it looked fun, how was it?"
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| (Source: travelnews.lv) |
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