Three Wise Men

A few days ago I decided to start a little experiment with social networks. I was planning to add 100 friends to my Facebook account. In the end it turned out that I was half successful. I managed to send a friend request to 50 people then Facebook started telling me that I am doing something very bad and they will suspend my account if I continue to do so. So I stopped, 50 is still better than nothing, right?

I was choosing people pseudo randomly from various facebook groups and fan pages. After I added only one quarter of planned people, 25, the responses started to pour in. I don’t have any idea if accounts I added were active or not and when they were last time used. I was merely guessing.

Results are somewhat surprising.

Out of 50 people, more than 10 confirmed my request in the next few hours. In 24 hours I had 18 confirmed requests and the number of confirmation is 21 at the moment. I got two facebook messages asking me who am I. One was in english the other one was in something that could read as dutch or perheps something swedish or danish or icelandic, didn’t really bothered to check. Both of those requests failed.

There were five people that accepted my request and then removed me, probably just to check my account details.

From all the people that accepted my request there were 17 women and 4 men. I got only a couple of greeting messages from two people and I chatted on facebook chat with one of my new friends. Otherwise I had no contact with other people. Maybe I should make a fake female persona and repeat the same thing with it. I am curious what the results would be. Would more men accepted me as a friend and how many people would consider me as a bot and spam?

It was quite funny and interesting to see how almost half of the people accepted me as their friend, no matter that we had absolutely no contact before and that I was miles and miles away from them. Which raises a question about so called virtual friendships, how people classify their acquaintances on the internet and how much are we used to the word friend and what is the meaning if it.

A lot of people believe that social networks, internet and all the technology are driving people apart. Separating them in an isolation and alienating them. One part of me agrees. I don’t have to go out and see people just to ask how they are and what is going on in their lives. Fifteen years ago when internet was much more uncommon I would simply call people on the telephone and it wasn’t anything wrong with it. Nowadays I could just check their status on the Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Suddenly I am being alien, but in fact nothing has really changed just the means of relaying the message are different. Does this really make me more alien?

Are my facebook friends really my friends? With me, mostly yes. Apart from this experiment now, people on my friends list are people I know in person and I talk to them in person quite often. Of course not all of them, since few of them are long lost classmates that I had no contact with ever since I finished high school and some of them are people who read my blog and they added me as their friend because of that.

I am almost sure that there would be much less fuss about this virtual friendships if Facebook changed the term friend into contact. Then our parents and in some cases grand parents too, maybe I should just say older generations, wouldn’t have that much to talk about. “How can you have friends on the internet? You never met them! That’s preposterous!” Now you would have contacts. Now older geeks would actually be happy and filled with joy and a tear of nostalgia would show up in the corner of their eyes. You would simply tell them that your Facebook contacts or friends are just like their QSL cards.

A little bit explaining for all those that have no idea what a QSL card is. Back then when our parents were still young and internet didn’t exist yet, people also used to talk with other people around the world. They did, seriously. It was mostly in morse code and the messages were rather short and cryptic¹ and after they made a contact with someonem they would exchange mail addresses² and send QSL cards to each other. QSL card was a written confirmation of radie contact. After you got QSL card in your mail, you were able to go and brag about your contact on the other side of the world.

Amateur radio was facebook of older generations. It wasn’t that popular since it wasn’t so available, but it served for similar purpose. True, you couldn’t send virtual teddy bears and sheep to other users but I consider that as a feature.

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