A Few Thoughts on Facebook Friends (and some polls)

Digital Citizen 2 Comments

The average Facebook user today has 130 friends. But how many of them would that average user really call a friend? And by friend, I mean just “friend”. I don’t mean anything like “true friend”, “real friend”, “good friend” or the like. Just someone you’d call a friend.

That would be hard to get a consistent answer since different people have different standards for who they call a friend. For some, only the truest of friends get called a friend. For others, anyone who might have followed them on Twitter, or vice-versa, counts as a friend. What we need is some sort of standard definition for “friend” to move this forward.

Aristotle

Interestingly, a good definition for “friend” can be found over 2300 years ago courtesy of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).

According to Aristotle, there are three types of friends, in increasing level of strength and sincerity:

  1. Contacts or those based on usefulness or utility, sometimes known as acquaintance;
  2. Drinking buddies or those based on pleasure (to use the word conservatively); and
  3. Good friends or those based on shared virtues.

If we accept all three of these categories to be friends, as Aristotle called them three types of friends, we then have a pretty broad definition of friend, but one which I would be happy to accept. Question then is if these definitions are still broad enough to cover how most people decide whether or not to add others as friends on Facebook. That would take a lot of resources to not only survey but to also verify. I doubt the folks at Facebook would even be able to do the latter conclusively, though I think they have a pretty good idea along the same lines I do.

From what I have seen and read of people and how they use Facebook, as well as who uses them and how, I would argue that a lot of people’s Facebook friends fall outside of Aristotle’s definition. So one would either need to expand Aristotle’s definition of friends to include these slightest of Facebook friends, or these slightest of Facebook friends aren’t really friends.

At first glance, Aristotle’s contacts category seems broad enough. After all, these slightest of Facebook friends are often people a user would have met only once, if that. They probably serve only as potential usefulness, never mind true utility. That is, they get added cause one never knows when they might be useful, not that they are likely to be useful in some way. Many people have Facebook friends just for the sake of upping their count and feel more people are paying attention to their Facebook activity. Others to avoid some situational awkwardness, like being Facebook friends with someone’s partner just because s/he is the jealous type who wants to keep an eye on their partner’s Facebook activities, when one doesn’t really give a damn if they exist. However, this adding of potentially useful friends can only happen to a point before users would not be able to remember people on their Facebook friends list. That is, if you asked them if so and so were on their Facebook friends list, they wouldn’t be able to tell you with certainty. Or if you asked them the name of certain people who are actually on their Facebook friends list, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about them at all, including how they got on that list in the first place.

I don’t know what the approximate average number of Facebook friends one would need to have before they would start forgetting everything about someone on that list, but I can tell you the situation would be true for some Facebook whales . That’s the term Facebook has for Facebook users with over 1,000 friends. Seriously, one thousand people is a lot of people to remember names and something about them. But if you don’t buy that people can remember details about a thousand mostly generic people, perhaps you’d believe the situation of not being able to remember anything about some Facebook friends would be true for those who have reached Facebook’s friends list limit of 5,000. Yes, there are those, too.

Poor Aristotle must be turning over in his grave at what some people constitute as friends today, though I’m sure he wouldn’t expand his definition of friends but rather state those slightest of Facebook friends are truly friends at all.

So after all that, maybe you’d like to weigh in with some opinions with a comments, like how you’d define a friend or why you keep Facebook friends you might not remember anything about, etc. Or maybe you’d just like to take some polls on Facebook friendship below (or see how others responded). The sample from this blog will be skewed because a lot of people come here for Facebook related activities so they tend to be avid Facebook users, but I’m just curious to see.

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Other Facebook user facts:

  1. Canada has the 4th highest Facebook user rate per capita as of June 2010 with 47.9% of Canadians having a profile. This trails only Iceland (59.6%), Norway and Hong Kong, in that order.
  2. Canada has the highest Facebook user rate per capita among nations with 10 million citizens or more.
  3. There are 16 million Facebook users in Canada.
  4. Quit Facebook Day is May 31. A measly 30,000 quit worldwide of about 465 million users. Most “I Hate Facebook” type groups and pages are actually hosted on Facebook.
  5. Canada signed up 912,000 new users in May 2010 alone.

Other Facebook issue posts on my site:

The Prejudices and Privacy Perils of Facebook Quizzes

How to Get Rid of Your Facebook Past

25 Things For Facebook You Can’t Steal My ID With

25 Things You Gave on Facebook to Help Get Your ID Stolen

Una Guía de Netiqueta Práctica para Facebook

 

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Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 8.6

Can’t We Find a Better Term Than Facebook Whales?

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The people at Facebook call Facebook users with over 1,000 friends Facebook “whales”.

For a hip company in a hip business like social media, that’s about as “un-urban” a term as I thought they could come up with for the urban dictionary of new slang.

“Sub-urban” would be the more appropriate term, as that’s like Latin for “below” or “less than” urban. But Latin’s too old and logical to be hip.

So can’t we come up with a better term?

Flake?

Fake?

Fimp or Frimp? (Friend and Pimp)

Falker? (Friend and Stalker)

Follector or Frollector? (Friend and Collector)

Fliend? (Flake and Friend)

Actually, I’d save fliend for people you add but you don’t really want to. You just add them to avoid awkwardness. An example might be a boss you don’t like but who may have a thing or suspicion for you. Or a partner of someone you know who wants to keep an eye on activity between his/her partner and anyone else who might be a “threat”… or who is just jealous of everyone else in their partner’s life. You get the idea.

Fliend. Yeah. I kind of like it! Someone you don’t particularly like sends you a Friend Request. You have to reluctantly accept it so you say Sure, I’ll be your FLIEND! 🙂

But I digress. Back to the original topic.

Maybe none of those are great, you know, and probably a little too judgmental for Facebook to put out there, but for the people outside of Facebook, can’t we come up with any better idea than Facebook whale?

Maybe there’s a term out there already? After all, the Urban Dictionary has terms like Facebookemon for all sorts of Facebook related activities, habits and people.

Can someone inform me or suggest a term?

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Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 6.4

Guitar and Ukulele Tabs for Goin’ Up Yonder (Walter Hawkins)

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It’s hard to tab gospel music, if you know what gospel music can be like to perform with all its passionate fervour, improvisation and such. This isn’t meant as a tab as much as a starting guide for you to create your own version of this popular gospel. The version below is a relatively quiet version from which I created the guitar and ukulele tabs found below that.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Walter Hawkins

Going Up Yonder, Walter Hawkins Guitar Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Going Up Yonder, Walter Hawkins Guitar Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

Going Up Yonder, Walter Hawkins Ukulele Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Going Up Yonder, Walter Hawkins Ukulele Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

If the letter size tabs (8.5″ x 11″) are too small for your eyes, you can either enlarge to tabloid size (11″ x 17″) using an automatic enlarge feature on many photocopiers, or download the tabloid sized versions for printing. The tabloid size tabs can be inserted into a typical letter sized binder on the 11″ size, and folded almost in half to fit. You just open each tab to use it.

Please click here for guitar and ukulele tabs and chords to other songs on this blog.

I picked the choral version above to tab because it was the most “practical” one to tab. You can document something reasonably similar to that version, aside from all the harmony parts you couldn’t sing simultaneously if you were to do this solo. However, if you’re adventurous, you can add your own touches to this song and make it as different from the version above as the version below… all 10 minutes of it! It is soloed by Tramaine Hawkins.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

It’s generally the same style so you should be able to use pretty much the same chords if you sing it using the notes in the tab PDFs. However, it has a complete different swing and swagger. You could add a reasonably facsimile with your singing and some funky strumming if you give it a try.

Enjoy!

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 9.0

Guitar and Ukulele Tabs for The Water is Wide (Traditional)

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If you ever need to practice or familiarize yourself or someone with melismas (singing of a single syllable while moving between different notes), this song is a lovely example. Listen to the video below of Sarah McLachlan, Jewel and the Indigo Girls at Lilith Fair and see how many words with one syllables they stretch onto more than one note, or just any syllable having the same thing done to it. No need to count precisely. Just get an idea why I say this song is a great example of a song containing melismas, besides it being a lovely song rather than just some bad songwriting where the writer had to use melismas force things to fit into phrases. Here, the tune is simple and allows for “decorations” with melismas. It’s quite a difference!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

In tabbing this song, while I based it on another year’s Lilith Fair recording with the Dixie Chicks instead of the Indigo Girls (that sounded funny), I did not include all the melismas you heard. Unless you can sing like Sarah McLachlan or Jewel or some of them other gals, you’re not going to be able to pull off all those melismas anyway… and you wouldn’t be on this site scouring for music. 🙂

I just put in a few. You can add more if you like. The tune is robust enough to handle it. that’s why it’s been around since the 1600s.

With a tune around since the 1600s, there are also many lyric versions for it. Oddly enough, though, when I went to source some of them because I didn’t think the ones used in the Lilith Fair concerts were all that “cohesive” or “flowing”, I still couldn’t find a set I liked. So I wrote my own. Not completely off the path, but rather similar, with more cohesiveness and flow, in my opinion. You can read more on that on my poetry blog, if you care.

All you need to know is my reworked lyrics were generally meant for me. I’m not going to force it upon anyone, which is why in the PDFs you download of this song, there are also the lyrics used in the Lilith Fair concerts. It’s quite close to most other popular recordings of the song, too.

Furthermore, I’ve put each version in two keys, G and C, because you’re probably going to find one of them challenging pending your voice range. Either that or it won’t sound as good. I am challenged to sing it in C, with all those high notes, but the version an octave lower just sounds terrible. This ain’t Russian bass choral music, you know!

Anyhow, give this beautiful song a try. Give it some patience in working out some melismas. You’ll be glad you did!

Water Is Wide, Traditional Guitar Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Water Is Wide, Traditional Guitar Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

Water Is Wide, Traditional Ukulele Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Water Is Wide, Traditional Ukulele Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

If the letter size tabs (8.5″ x 11″) are too small for your eyes, you can either enlarge to tabloid size (11″ x 17″) using an automatic enlarge feature on many photocopiers, or download the tabloid sized versions for printing. The tabloid size tabs can be inserted into a typical letter sized binder on the 11″ size, and folded almost in half to fit. You just open each tab to use it.

Please click here for guitar and ukulele tabs and chords to other songs on this blog.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 7.1