In today’s world the word friends has taken on a new
meaning. Thanks to social networking sites such as Facebook, the word friends is nearly impossible to
interpret.
The term friend, in my opinion on social networking sites
indicates acquaintances and not friends anymore. The people who are your
friends on Facebook come from different parts of your life. They can be people
you met at a party or family members. Facebook has changed the way the term
friend is used. Below is a a graph from the pew research center that can better
explain this phenomenon:
From this graph we can see that 7% of peoples friends are
people they never met before. This tells us a lot about the users of social networking
sites. The word friend is evolving. If 7% of Facebook friends have never met
what do we call this? These people are complete strangers and aren’t friends in
any way.
This is my main issue with “friending” as a whole. Most of people’s
friends on Facebook aren’t actually friends. How many friends somebody has on Facebook
isn’t an indicator of very much. Social networking sites are making it
increasingly harder to distinguish between friends and acquaintances.
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