Funny, I’ve never been very friendly on Facebook. I guess I never got it. I always took the word “friend” seriously, and always scratched my head when someone who I had never heard of asked me to “friend” them without even attempting to explain why I should. So I don’t have a huge number of Facebook “friends.” I don’t think I’m missing that much.
33 thoughts on “Being Less “Friendly” On Facebook”
Comments are closed.
I’ve never had a facebook account, and never will. I just can’t see a reason (and plenty not to) to be broadcasting my life on the internet. Also, there’s the invasive tracking Facebook does, privacy issues, etc. So, my choice is not to use them. I have no problem if other people want to use them, but it’s not for me. I’m the same with other invasive “social networking” sites, such as google+: no way, not for me.
I’m glad to see people are starting to get a bit more proactive about privacy, though. 🙂
I agree totally.
Last year I met a young girl who told me with great solemnity that if you did not have a face book account you did not exist. She did not understand why the concept so happy.
Unfortunately I fear that the world is moving is such a direction that owning a smart phone (which I also do not have) and being a member of a social network may become unavoidable.
Rand, I frankly don’t see the need to friend you on facebook when pretty much anything we would find of mutual interest gets hashed-out on this board. Friending you would be largely an exercise in redundancy and just add noise to our respective newsstreams.
I largely use facebook to keep track of old school and army friends I have lmimited options in keeping tabs on any other way and a few mutual friends of some of my good friends and a few industry professionals I wish to keep up with.
Facebook I can use, twitter is what puzzles me. So much ado about so little.
“We’re getting less friendly on Facebook” is the kind of headline they used to make fun of USA Today for.
Also: One useful friend to make on Facebook is Virginia Postrel.
I have the same issue with “friends” and Facebook. I even had a former colleague “friend” me, who later became a problem at work and I had to “defriend” them which caused all sorts of problems.
I do like what Google+ seems to be advertising (note, I haven’t tried it and probably won’t). You set your groups to whom messages go in or out. For what you do, Rand, it seems better. You could keep an inner circle of associates, a circle of fellow bloggers, then have a group for those who follow your comments. You can label appropriately.
Yea, I’ve been unfriended by a few women and there is always this, “Ugh I’m gonna unfriend you!” message right before they do it. I’m like, “OH NO! Please don’t UNFRIEND me! Whatever….”
“- Men are more likely to post something they later regret. Fifteen percent of male respondents said they posted something regrettable, compared with 8 percent of female respondents.”
In my experience, this is less indicative of how many regrettable things are posted by each sex than by how oblivious each sex is to what may be regrettable….
MfK,
I found that same thought hit me too. But then again, I also heard the other day that 67% of women had ‘unfriended’ someone, compared to just over 50% of men.
Personally, I’ve never friended, unfriended nor been friended or defriended. I don’t have a Facebook page. That whole thing rings about like ‘web pages’ once did for me. It’s a big fat WHY. (I’ve never had a ‘web page’ either BTW) I never ‘got’ the web page thing. But many people did, I guess.
I used to work with a woman who complained about how hard it was to keep up ALL the web pages for her, her family, each of her 3 pre-school kids and her CATS!!!
And that’s how I see Facebook, about as useful for people as it is for cats.
Blogs I get as there is interaction. Some good, some bad. None (unusually) personal as a rule. Facebook, I don’t get. Twitter is worse still.
Why should I care about your breakfast bagel when we live 951 miles apart? Or worse still. Why do I want to know WHEN the breakfast bagel…much like Elvis, left the building at 11:09 AM, the day AFTER the original post?
I feel that the “friend” label is propaganda by social media to get lonely people to use them.
Rand, you might “get” FB more if you were an attention-whoring twenty-something.
Titus,
that WOULD explain the “ME, ME, ME” twenty-somethings. It’s the closest they can come to BEING Paris Hilton or whomever the male equiv. is this MINUTE. But I just realized that THE cogent idea here may, in fact, be the draw and answer to this phenomenon.
Akatsukami has it. The social media salesmen / psychologists have tapped into the fact, for me anyway, that these people don’t have any real face to face friends. You can’t make ‘friends’ if every day, every event, every minute of your life is about “ME, ME, ME”, you don’t have what people used to call ‘friends’.
I have always been a solitary sort. I never made a bunch of friends. When I was younger, even mid 20’s, I thought something was wrong with ME. Then I realized I just don’t have much in common with most people.
I have strange and curiously ‘stacked’ interests that don’t exactly put me in a ‘group’ to MAKE a bunch of friends, like most of the people I hear use the word. On the other hand, the few friends I have, I have had for many, many years. My best, closest friend I’ve known for almost 40 years. I can go 8 or 9 months and not see him.
But I have a key to the house, so I think nothing of heading down there, unannounced, and walk in. Nothing changes in HIS life while I’m there. He just sets another place for meals. I was there overnight one time waiting. I realized when his motor home was gone, he was at the beach. He knew ‘about’ when I was coming, but another friends called and invited him to go deep sea fishing. So he went.
I wasn’t hurt that I was there for 18 hrs with his teen son, while he was fishing. He wasn’t hurt that I ate his food, nor that I was in his house alone most of that time, with his art, guns, TVs, etc.
My next best friend is a guy I was stationed with in San Diego. Just because of life, we didn’t see each other for 17 years. But we did talk a few times a year. Once we skipped 3 years when his kids were in HS.
But in both those cases, there’s a connection, a caring, a protection of each other, and our subsequent families, (or new families as ex-wives moved on for one of them) that started almost immediately and continues to this day.
I don’t see that in my sons and their ‘friends’, nor their wives friends. I don’t see that in most of the people under 40 that I meet. The only ones I see who DO have friends are military people (with the exception of my older son??? and no, I don’t get it). There is that shared experience and protection thinking going on with them. You can’t exist on “ME, ME, ME” in that environment.
Yeah, Akatsukami got it right on this issue. But so do the social media salesmen. And their psychologists, trained and natural.
I have always been a solitary sort. I never made a bunch of friends. When I was younger, even mid 20′s, I thought something was wrong with ME. Then I realized I just don’t have much in common with most people.
I frequently note that I like airplanes more than most people. That sentence can be read two ways and truth be told, both are accurate.
“Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles.”
Tell me something about human nature I don’t know.
AKH,
it’s not that they ‘restrict’ their real profile, as much as it is that they want us to take pictures of their ‘good side’. Which sucks when many people, male or female don’t have one!
What MPuckett said. I use FB for keeping up with people who were actual friends before I got a FB account, now that I’ve moved several states away from them.
The social media have changed the meaning of the word “friend”, so it no longer has the personal component. A generation is growing up thinking friendship is just communicating on the internet. Even “aquaintance” is too strong a word for it.
Titus–good one! I nearly snorted my drink, thanks. 😉
I didn’t read this before I commented above. But I agreed, above.
I was visiting my older son in RI 4 or 5 years ago. While I was up there, my younger son called to say his younger son was missing. The little one had gone to a local park with HIS best friend from upstairs in their apt building, all chaperoned by his friends mom and step-dad.
When he called us, the Atlanta police were ‘waiting’ a few hours to issue a Amber Alert. All in all he got back, everything was OK, the idiot parents from upstairs ran into friends and went home with them, and didn’t think it was a big deal to come back at 3:30 in the morning. That’s the set-up.
While we were spinning out of control in RI, my goofy daughter-in-law up there, gets on her WoW Acct and messages all her battle buddies about this. One of whom, in AUCKLAND, wants to know what he can do to help!?
.
.
“…but THESE are my ‘friends’, I’ll lose my mind without them for support…I’m so worried that I just NEED them for ME right now…”
.
.
All said TO her husband, with all three of her kids sitting there. (I never understood why they were up at midnight, but they aren’t my kids to raise) (yet) I reported here, when that happened that she melted down that next day after my son C-U-T her off from the internet because she was so addicted to that &#$%ing game.
I said THEN and on TtM, that she really thought those people were her ‘friends’. But to my mind, if you’re not willing to spend a week in a lifeboat or hotel room during a rainy vacation with that person, they’re NOT a friend.
As someone else said, ‘acquaintance’ is too strong to. If you’ve never seen them, you are not ‘acquainted’.
What MPuckett said. I use FB for keeping up with people who were actual friends before I got a FB account, now that I’ve moved several states away from them.
Exactly. I never friend, nor accept friend requests, from people that I don’t already consider as friends. I use facebook to keep up with friends and things that I would not otherwise have time to do, like my home town in Alabama. I can even keep up with the events there as we have a group composed of people that I grew up with. I get to read what is up in their lives and their world as well as with other folks that I know around the world.
I don’t use facebook for politics. I do read some interesting news stories that my friends actually post, but again I don’t friend ANYONE that I don’t already know and have a relationship with. I have had friend requests from people that I can’t stand or I even had one from a moron of an ex boss that fired me from a job in 1978. What the hell did he think I was going to do with that friend request?
Overall I like my facebook experience and it does keep me in touch with family and friends that I otherwise would not have the time to do, including some that I have not communicated with in 35 years. Yes they are still friends after even that long of a parting from my home town.
I honestly hadn’t considered the ‘screwing with people I don’t like’ angle. HMMMmmm…?
No, I’m still NOT interested. If I see them, THEN I’ll screw with them. Why stop that now, just because of FB’s existence.
I found that same thought hit me too. But then again, I also heard the other day that 67% of women had ‘unfriended’ someone, compared to just over 50% of men.
That is interesting. I have only had to warn one person and that was because he was a friend of mine from my home town and he incessantly sent me requests for games and other crap. As soon as I did, he stopped. There is one other person that occasionally posts what I consider inapprorpriate things but not enough yet for me to deal with him.
The bottom line for me is that if you use FB to keep in touch with people you already know and who are friends (I just checked and I have over 100 friend requests from people that I don’t know and will never answer them) then FB can be a very heartwarming experience.
DW,
I get e-mailed requests from people I know wanting me to friend them. Twice, when I give them my standard answer of, “…I can’t do that, I don’t have a FB acct / page…” (I’m not even sure which is right)
When they got my return e-mail, I had them say to me, “…well you HAVE to get one!!!”
I just ignore level of stupidity. Well not completely. One of them is a lady we’ve known since HS, she used to work for me at Dominoes too. Her kids and ours were better friends than we were. She’s a screaming liberal. So I told her I’d get a FB page (?) if she’d let me buy her a gun to keep for her safety.
Hey it was a fair thing to tell her, “…well you HAVE to get one!!!” You should SEE where she lives!!!!
She didn’t take the shot gun, I don’t do FB
Hey, each to their own. I just gave my reasons for liking it.
I even had one from a moron of an ex boss that fired me from a job in 1978. What the hell did he think I was going to do with that friend request?
I would have friended him just to play with him for a while like a cat plays with a mouse. For simple amusement at his expense.
Life is too short to waste time on things like that for me.
I just remembered, there is ‘South Park’ episode about Facebook that rips on all these things we’re talking about here. For a lot of people it is just a competition to see who can have the most “friends”.
I have no time nor use for Facebook. If you use it, enjoy. Just keep in mind something: If the service is free, then you’re the product. Way too many people put way too much personal information onto social media outlets like Facebook. The company then sells that information to advertisers and who knows else. If that doesn’t bother you, fine. Maybe it’s just my military background and “need to know” mindset that’s holding me back.
No Larry, you have it right. FB mines all the info for their advertisers. That’s the reason I have almost no information on my profile. What I don’t post, they can’t sell.
I dropped out of FB several weeks ago largely out of annoyance with FB’s antics. I miss being in touch with our friends up north, and I wanted to get in touch with some of my high school friends. Unfortunately, for professional reasons, I can’t be friends with the man who is the “gatekeeper” for my class. He has a fairly serious criminal record, and I won’t take the chance on a potential employer skimming thru my account and seeing this man. If I defriended him, I would lose access to the other memebers of my class. All in all, at this time, FB is not worth it for me.
I think part of it might be people seeing FB as “just social stuff” and an equivalent to blogging.
In other words, many people who might have Friended you to see your thoughts on Space on FB could now Subscribe (if you wanted to use FB for that at all), and get the same deal, without the idea of “friends”.
(Don: How could that work? Why can’t you just get in touch with your other friends without him? Facebook has no “gatekeeper” function for individuals, and they’d all exist as individuals even if there is a “group” for your high school and year and he’s somehow the administrator.
But then again, you must have a hell of a profession where you can’t be FB-friends [which even high school kids realize doesn’t mean friendship] with someone with a criminal record because employers are that paranoid and/or stupid.
Personally I wouldn’t want to work for an employer that made decisions like that, but, well, industries differ, and if yours is suffused with people like that, you gotta do what you gotta do…)
Not being on FB, I don’t know but I do know that some of us work at jobs that require a high security clearance. There are a lot of things we can’t do at all and somethings that require jumping through hoops.* A security clearance is a requirement for my job (and I like my job).
*For example, foreign travel. My wife and I like to travel but every time I leave the country, I have to get approval, even when going to friendly countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Then when I return, I have to complete more paperwork.
And back on the big topic up-thread, who cares?
“I’m” being “sold” to advertisers? Oh noes!
Yeah. My non-identifying demographics and some keywords from my posts and what I tell them I “Like” are packaged up and bid on.
Big deal.
I don’t even understand why I’m supposed to care about that, honestly.
Hell, it occasionally gets me information about a novel product or service I might be interested in, which is about a million times better than ads I don’t care about.
That’s an almost-zero price to pay for an immense amount of convenient socialization.
(Mr. Wingo understands that one: The bottom line for me is that if you use FB to keep in touch with people you already know and who are friends then FB can be a very heartwarming experience.
That is the entire point, right there, for most everyone I know.)
Try having your identity stolen and see if your attitude remains “who cares?”
Last year, I found out that someone used by name and SSN to obtain utility services in Waterbury, CN. I’ve never been there (I think I might’ve visited CN in 1978). I have no idea how they got my info but I went through weeks of filing police reports, blocking my credit bureau reports, getting hassled by debt collectors, and the works. The more info about you there is out there, the easier it is for someone to screw you over.
After checking with the credit bureaus, the FTC and the IRS, I found the only thing they did in my name was take out those two utility accounts and rip off the companies for about $1100. They didn’t use my identity to open any credit card or bank accounts or work illegally. The police say that many identity thieves do quick hit and run jobs like that to reduce their chances of getting caught. Personally, I hope whoever did it died a painful death.
I have unfriended no one. I have friended, wait for it… no one. Just being on the intarwebs is as friended as I get. Facebook? If I bury my face in my kindle with something from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, does that count? MySpace? feh, I know what my space is and you encroach upon without invitation at your peril. Dang kids, get offa my lawn!
What MPuckett said. I use FB for keeping up with people who were actual friends before I got a FB account, now that I’ve moved several states away from them.
Actually, I created a FB account simply to keep track of my childrens friends. They are older now, and such oversight is unnecessary. In the interim, other people I know have friended me. I’ve accepted some, particularly family. I used in routinely for a couple of months a few years ago. Now I check it about once a quarter.