Bob Dylan
May 24th 2011 will be the 70th birthday of legendary music icon Bob Dylan, and Rolling Stone magazine has an incredible tribute to him. They had lots of famous musicians share their favourite Dylan songs as one feature, among lots of other great features. From this, I got the idea for people to pay their own tribute to Bob while sharing with others your love for Bob and his music using social media.
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).
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.
Remove 5 Facebook Friends Challenge
Which Facebook Friends Should I Remove?
“Study” on Facebook Narcissism and Insecurity not REAL Research
How to Cancel or Retract Friend Requests on Facebook… and Why?
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
A Practical Facebook Etiquette (Netiquette) Guide
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 8.6
NEW!
Sample avatar of Audrey Hepburn (actual size)
This is an old skool style Facebook tagging meme where it’s just pictures you tag and attribute whatever to them you choose to, not a new style version where there’s a more direct message. However, I just realized that just about everything that’s been created has been for the younger generation. While it’s true the younger generations do dominate the Internet usage, and Facebook, that was no reason to not create something for our elders.
Here’s how to get the picture:
Please click here for a complete list of over 100 Facebook picture tagging memes on this site with which you can use for fun with your friends.
I read somewhere that the elders were the largest growing age demographic of Internet users, in part because it was an effective way to keep up with their grandchildren and/or children. Intuitively accurate, if you ask me, as there’s a lot of motivation to be found in being involved in the lives of grandchildren, especially if you have a lot of time on your hands. Still, the elder demographic fall behind the averages. Check out the Forrester Research’s Groundswell Blog Social Technographics profiles to confirm. Pick the 55+ age category for any country and see how the blue bars tend to fall short of the thin white vertical line average for every participating category of Internet users.
Apr 14 update: CNN confirmed what I said above in its All in the Facebook family story on Apr 13.
Those Social Technographics further revealed the 55+ users to be very unlikely to be Joiners or users who maintain social networking profiles, i.e. Facebook users. But as said above, that was no reason to avoid creating something for them. So here is a collection of classic movie stars from the silver screen, when the silver screen still looked silver. They are beautiful portraits which I personally see no reason why the younger generation couldn’t use themselves and learn something of our treasured past. Heck, they sure look better to me than a lot of the movie star picture these days!
Video notice courtesy of the lifelessons4u blog.
Special credits goes to Dr Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans site for many of the portraits used in the Facebook tagging picture above. Beautiful galleries and lots of great info!
By the way, what’s the big deal with Bette Davis’ eyes, like mentioned in Kim Carnes’ song? [ Lyrics ]
Have you seen Lauren Bacall’s eyes? Them’s first degree murder!
Lauren is not in the Facebook tagging meme because she is still living. Yeah, those eyes will even keep Death away!
Digital Citizen 