Are “Friends of Friends” really our Friends?
I grew up in a community where everybody knew everybody, where connections like, “your sister’s best friend is friends with my roommate’s brother”, are commonplace. Everybody was somehow connected, and weirdly enough, these connections seemed to span hundreds of miles from my suburban town in New Jersey to New York City, Boston, Florida, Chicago, even Los Angeles. For this reason, the class discussion that social networks are actually “small worlds” really resonated with me.
Growing up in this environment, where connections were ubiquitous and even expected, I never realized how truly crazy it was. There are people on the other side of the country that I consider my “friends” just because they are the best friends of my childhood friend who now resides there. Professor Kleinberg was quoted saying, “My own notion of what a friend is has evolved […] we are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” (nytimes.com). Just like Prof. Kleinberg, my own notion of a friend has evolved. How is it possible that these strangers are my friends?
Because the connections I forged, be it through Facebook or other social media platforms, have not brought any sort of detriment or negative value to my life, I never really considered ways in which connecting with “friends of friends of friends of friends” could really be a bad thing. However, an article by Tim Jarvis sparked my interest in the negative impact of extended social networks and the subsequent deception and social stresses that they may cause.
It is considered extremely easy and even safe to connect with people on different social media platforms to whom you share numerous mutual friends with. Accompanied by logic like – if Sam from math class and Lucas from science class are both friends with this same stranger, then the stranger must be someone within their extended circle, and thus, I might know them and connecting is not harmful. Jarvis’ quotes Pauline Wiessner, PhD, at the University of Utah, saying, “Electronic relationships make it easy for “friends” to misrepresent themselves,” (oprah.com). This reality was the case with young Megan Meier. Megan was a 13-year-old girl who commit suicide after being cyber bullied by a MySpace profile, Josh Evans, a fake account created by neighbors.
The scariest part about the situation highlighted by young Megan’s tragic death, is that connecting with profiles that have many mutual friends to us is an accepted, everyday practice. Because I am so accustomed to “knowing” people through 6 degrees of separation, a phenomenon encouraged by social media, I never think twice about accepting such friend requests or even extending them myself. Of course, in most cases, the extended social network is nothing but innocent connections between peers who run in similar circles. But, it is important to think twice about it and even reconfirm such connections before accepting them. Faking a profile or deceiving others through the Internet is a prevalent concern, and the continued emphasis on continuing to extend our social networks warrants such action.
Works Cited:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=0
http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Negative-Impact-of-Social-Networking-Websites-at-Work
Bibliography:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html?_r=0