16th
I like having random friends
on Facebook. I hate it when people complain how they have hundreds of friend requests from people they don’t know. What’s the deal? I know some celebrities who managed to approve 5000 friends (max Facebook number) without complaining. So why should anyone?
For me, it’s a form of support, a form for people to say “We’re here and we think you’re fantastic!” “But they’re not real friends!” Of course, nobody from Facebook are real friends. They don’t add you thinking you can be close and personal friends. Not everyone is such a vain naive idiot, you know.
I consider some Facebook friends closer than others, though we’ve never met. I feel distant with others, though we’ve met IRL. And I seriously hate some of them, at times. But in the end, it just doesn’t matter. So why should having random friends matter?
I occasionally add random people and be added by random people, mostly due to our blogging activities. And I love it. I love the dynamics of Web 2.0, following lives of random strangers and fantastic writers, artists, and essayists alike, be motivated by each other’s works and lives. That’s the true meaning of Web 2.0.
I only reject people when they have no info of who they are, and I delete people when they give me too much app invites or overshare too much immature rants and no useful content at all and we never chat. I don’t care, really. As a good Marxist, I am aware that I have a purely materialistic (informationistic?) view with my friends.
Adding friends is more like the new RSS for me, a way to follow works — writings, photos, art, etc. — rather than people, and often in a way more motivating. Facebook is not a social utility that connects you with friends. Facebook is an individual utility that makes you feel vaguely social without having to actually be one — and increasingly more informatively, content-richly so. And as a proud misanthropic posthumanist, I mean this in a good way.
I still believe that this kind of content-value usage will be the dominant one as things progress.
