It's amazing how not seeing someone face to face suddenly blurs the lines on how people communicate to each other. Here are some common things I see on Facebook:
Bagging out other people's statuses.
Statuses like "Stop putting pics of yourself up if you're so ugly."
Statuses like "So many attention seeking bitches putting so many pics of themselves up. Get over yourselves".
Statuses like "go tell your problems to a shrink, not Facebook."
This is just an example of a few. Now, here is the problem I have with this. The word is Facebook 'FRIEND', so why do we treat others on Facebook as though they are not our friend? In the first life if our friend said something to us (ie, a status) we would not sit there and bag them out, and subsequently we would not allow them to bag us out if we did tell them something. In the first life we would not tell our friends that they are hideous, ugly, and tell them off for having pictures of themselves. In the first life we would not get angry at our friends if they needed to find ways to get attention. Well, at least, I wouldn't. I would wonder what is going on in my friends life that is leading them to do things in order to get attention. In the first world we would not tell our friends off for expressing their problems to their other friends. And, if you are a real friend, you should have no problem with your friend talking to you about some issues, I mean, isn't that partly what friends are for?
So here lies the issue. Do we have too many Facebook friends? Just adding people we don't really care about? And, then if we do, does that give us an excuse to put down others? I was thinking about this due to a student I teach telling me about someone bagging them out on Facebook. I replied with, "well if they are bagging you out they are not really your friend, so why are they on your Facebook?" It seems when we add someone to our facebook we make a different definition of the word friend. That it totally changes the meaning to it, and allows for different treatment and regulations of a friendship. The way I see it is simple - if you treat them in a way that you wouldn't treat a friend, then they shouldn't be on your Facebook. If they treat you the way you wouldn't expect a friend to treat you, then they shouldn't be on your Facebook. Using this criteria when adding people to your page could save a lot of bullying, put downs, and just negative behaviour.
Peace out!
I guess people keep adding friends, or keep accepting friend requests simply because they follow their own wishful thinking, some kind of: "oh, this one might be the one that I don't have in real life" or "oh, he/she's so my type". another possibility is simply naivity, thinking that the only way to be validated is to have as many people around you as possible no matter how vague it is. on the contrary, a broader possibility of ideal, religious, scientific exchanges accros the globe should be included in. however, my favorite theory would be: we are simply confused.
ReplyDeleteif you see my profile on FB, you'll notice that I don't have any single friend, but I avoid being judgmental to facebookers with those 500 friends on their profiles. as much as no one have a clue of what we exist for, no one knows as well why we are caught up in a social mechanism as if it is as it is life. existence is no simple thing to live, nor to understand.
So very true, but I suppose as humans we spend our time trying to understand. I wish we could all avoid the judgement, and try to know why people act how they do. While existence is not something to understand (unless we can have a concrete proven reasoning this can never really happen I believe), other people is something we should understand.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting. :)Can I ask, why do you have a profile if you have no friends?