These days it can be very hard to distinguish between your “true friends” (if you lucky enough to have them) and pretenders who would stake you in the back faster than you can say “friend’s forever” (thank you Facebook and twitter). Imagine my surprise when I realised I had over 600 Facebook “friends” whom I barely exchanged a word with 80 percent of them, let alone poke them (pun intended).
Maybe I am just primitive bloke (which I highly doubt) but I miss the time when friends were people you had because you wanted to be associated with them, rather than because of a cute profile picture. I wouldn’t be surprised that half of my social network buddies were creepy middle aged obese men and women with no self-esteem, disguised themselves with handsome and beautiful profile pictures aimed at attracting unsuspecting youths to help them feel good about themselves.
In the modern world were technology plays a pivotal role in our daily lives (hello BBM users), it can also bring us more trouble than actually having a face to face interaction with those we label as our bosom friends rather than sending them a tweet even though they 100 metres away.
One thing I hate about this whole social media phenomenon that has grasped the world is that it has reduced people’s intellectual capacity and has made us so lazy that it’s become a challenge to differentiate between loose and lose for some people (and yes there is a difference). While I am fan of phrases such as WTF, LOL, BRB, FYI, LMFAO to name a few, it becomes a problem when you start incorporating this ‘language’ on your CV’s, cover letters and school work assignments.
Of the many advantages that social media has, it can also be your downfall if you become complacent and insulting. In the US a man has been fired because he took to tweet and ranted about how unfair his boss and going as far as calling her an f*** bitch. His only mistake is that he had befriended his boss the previous day (idiot).
Back to my original point, even though the idea of having numerous friends online is mesmerising, it still does not surpass the human contact we need with them to make sure they still people. Nothing is as irritating as talking to someone you have not seen in a long time while they busy on their Blackberry’s or iPhones (RIP Steve Jobs) updating their statuses every two seconds about the fact that they just ordered a salad. Or they hate the sauce.
Of my high school friends I haven’t seen any of them in a long time but I constantly commute with them via the internet about the latest developments in their lives since we last saw each other. The term friend used to describe people, who tolerated you even in the direst situations, kept your tryst a secret and was there with you when you messed up instead of giving you a hard time about it after.
These days it seems we just throw the word friend to everyone who is digitally connected and looks normal by viewing their profile online. We forget that technology has become so sophisticated that people can manipulate anything to appear ‘normal’ even if they are beyond Michael Jackson weird.
And why we do this I often wonder? Have we become so detached to human contact that we prefer our mobile devices doing the communicating for us, is it cheaper, is technology so rapidly advanced that we have to keep up in every way possible or is it a simple matter of laziness and complacency.
These people that we call our friends, what else do we know about them besides the fact that they have attractive profile pictures and seem to have 1000 friends? What do they do for a living? Are they sane? Aliens? Or worse are they paedophiles lurking to snack on unsuspecting digitally naïve victims? Just because someone posts an interesting status does not mean they sane (whats that about Nonhle Thema). Because of Twitter the girl had a public meltdown right in front of our eyes… literally.
Maybe I do spend a lot of time over analysing things but these days it’s easy to call your fierce rival a friend because you happen to have a friend in common on Facebook. People upload their addresses on their profiles, cellphone numbers and the real stupid ones meet up with people they have never met because they attracted over 100 comments on their latest status update.
I am a Facebook (still getting the hang of Twitter) fanatic too and I am not advising deleting your profiles on the popular sites, rather to be careful of whom accept as Friends and what we load on the inter web. Your ‘friends’ can quickly turn into your worst enemies without as so much as a poke to warn you.
Chat carefully…
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