Skip to main content

I'm not anti-social...but am I anti....you?

I heard an interesting story on NPR during my evening commute.  The reporter posits:
"Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are helping people keep in touch with friends and family. But just how social are those networks? Are Internet communities simply "real-world" cliques moved online?"


Quite honestly, I never pondered that Facebook was anything more than a digital clique.  Looking at my own cadre of friends on Facebook, I saw some interesting patterns.  I have 653 friends.  [Yes.  I know.  Those of you with more friends are thinking, "Oh how sad." and those of you with fewer friends are just jealous. It's all relative.]  For point of information, the average Facebook user has about 125 friends.  I appear to be ahead of the curve. 

After my dear husband (453 mutual friends), the person with whom I share the most mutual friends is a girl that went to my high school. We have 53 mutual friends. Interestingly, we were not the best of friends back in high school.  I was too nerdy for her. Either I've become much hipper after all these years or she's mellowed with age.   

The NPR story maintains that Facebook's software is designed so that our "Top News" shows items that we are more likely to agree with or comment on so we will tend to see news from our friends who are most like us.  If we don't comment on it or click on it,  Facebook, in turn, pushes the information (and future information from the same friend) off of our radar.  I suppose there is some truth to this.  As I look over my list of friends, I am amazed at how many of them show up so rarely in my News Feed.  Maybe they're just not as addicted to Facebook as I am.  

I do disagree with the diversity issue, though. I have friends who are straight, gay, single,  married, and divorced. I have friends in their teens and friends in their 60s.  My news feed is frequently filled with posts by those more liberal than me (yes, it's possible) as well as those so conservative they make Dick Cheney look like a tree-hugger. I must admit, though, that my list of friends is very....oh....how shall we say...white.  I'll have to work on that. 

  
If the issue is diversity, it seems that Twitter might be the answer.  According to the article, Twitter's public format creates a more diverse forum than the private profiles of Facebook, leading to more frank and honest discussions with a greater variety of strangers brought together by common causes as varied as political issues, TV shows, and favorite shopping venues.  I have yet to jump on the Twitter bandwagon but maybe this was the information I needed to push me over the edge. 

I don't want to be perceived as anti-social. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. FaiqaFebruary 3, 2011 at 9:58 PM

    So, we went to high school together and have 53 mutual friends... clearly, I've mellowed with age. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AvitableFebruary 16, 2011 at 11:07 AM

    Yeah, that one friend was a total bitch. :)

    How do you figure out who you share the most mutual friends with?

    ReplyDelete
  3. RachelFebruary 16, 2011 at 4:41 PM

    @Avitable: I used one of the Facebook apps that gives you stats about your profile. One was called Social Analyzer and the other was Friend Charts and Statistics.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This
Post a Comment
Read more

The Stages of Grief: COVID Edition

It's 2020. It's almost Christmas. We're still in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, we are experiencing what appears to be an incredible surge that is exerting tremendous pressure on our healthcare and social service system. The headlines are clear: we're not done with this madness and December 31, 2020 will not magically be the "end of it".  Earlier in the year, our family thought about whether we might be able to travel at this time. We thought that maybe the curve would be flat enough that we could take a few days away from home during the Christmas holidays. We realized that the pandemic would still be happening, but with the right protections and with prolific mask usage, we could get a much-needed change of scenery. During what is now (clearly) a delusional thought process, we booked a stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the week of December 19th. Spoiler alert: we canceled the trip almost two weeks ago.  Canceling this trip was not a tragedy. In fact, I
1 comment
Read more

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into
2 comments
Read more