technoculture314-09

Despite my overtly anti-Facebook stance, all of my friends bar one have a Facebook profile. I'm not judgemental about this, Facebook may fail to meet my needs but I have no doubt many people get a lot out of its format. However, over time I have noticed a peculiar trend among my pro-Facebook friends: in spite of the fact that they feel very low levels of connection to the vast majority of the people they connect with via Facebook, they feel deeply slighted when one of their bottom feeder friends removes them as a friend. The thought process behind this double standard has captured my attention of late. Why do people who know full well that neither party takes the relationship seriously care when the other party removes them from their SNS group? From what I have seen the answer seems relatively straightforward. Facebook's style of social network seems to be at the more egocentric end of the SNS spectrum with profilers generally displaying more pictures of themselves as well as divulging more information about their personal life. The lower level friendships formed on the site appear to perform two functions: firstly they provide quick, casual conversation intermittently, and secondly they beef up the number of friends a profiler has which in turn nourishes the egocentricity of the profiler. Of the two functions, when lost, I think it is the slight to the ego status caused by being removed as a friend which causes the deepest wound since the relationship itself was never of great importance to begin with. This is not difficult to understand, nor is it something to be frowned upon since it is a natural to desire popularity. But I can't help but wonder if people aren't becoming a bit too sensitive as a result of social networking status and profile preening. Perhaps we are becoming so caught up in the superficial details of SNS that we are losing sight of the most important function they are meant to fulfill which is keeping people connected.