I have been thinking about my Social Networking use recently - having purchased a new Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 and begun to use the Timescape app, which displays all your notificiations (Twitter, Facebook, missed calls, SMS etc), I've noticed that I have a large amount of friends on Facebook I hardly know such as work colleagues and old school friends, and was thinking do I really want to see messages posted from them on my message timeline as the message is probably not relevant to me.
Perhaps the time has come to look at my friend list and prune it, after all if I posted a message to Facebook in the future (I don't post at the moment, as I'm not sure I would want everyone on my friend list to know what I have been upto or am currently doing). Makes me wonder if people who have 500+ friends on Facebook really know everyone in their friend list, or are they just trying to get a big a list as possible.
Social networking is great in some respects as you get to know what your friends are up to, especially if you have been really busy and not had time to catch up with them, but really I suppose nothing beats catching up with a friend either face to face or via the phone. Perhaps though social networking is no so great in other ways as it takes out the personal contact between friends.
1 comment:
I remember hearing (although I don't remember where!) that the human brain is actually only capable of maintaining meaningful connections with around 150 or so people. I think this relates to our capacity for short term memory, empathy, etc... and I suspect this varies from person to person. This is something to do with the largest communities that emerged before modern towns and cities.
Human society has become far more complex and proliferated in the last 10,000 years, and things like Facebook and Twitter function as a kind of supplement to the real and immediate personal connections, and as a memex for those things we couldn't hope to remember under normal circumstances!
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