Are you my friend, or social friend or … ?

Or

How social networking redefines the meaning of friendships.

Has Facebook spoiled the word ‘friend’ for us once and for all?

To me the word ‘friend’ means quite a lot. I only can call a friend someone who is close to me, someone I know very well, someone I trust and have a relationship with. I don’t call all the people I know friends. Even those people that I hag out with every once in a while I can’t call friends, I’d rather call them acquaintances.

Even dictionaries define the word ‘friend’ as someone close and special.

Merriam-Webseter: one attached to another by affection or esteem.

Oxford: ‘One joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy.’

Cambridge: a person who you know well and who you like a lot, but who is usually not a member of your family.

But now I have some people I hardly know or communicate with, let along have a relationship with as my “friends” of Facebook. Actually, I have a problem with Facebook calling those social connections ‘friends’. I think they should be called something else, but what do I know.

I did some research online and found a very interesting website, called the Ideasproject.

Up front let me disclose that it is operated by Nokia, a world leader in mobile technology. But at it’s core, the Ideasproject is nothing more than an open platform for thinkers in the sphere of communications technology to exchange ideas and opinions. I don’t really have a problem with the project’s affiliation to Nokia. I actually find it quite smart of Nokia to use this medium to tap into the brain power of individuals, passionate about communications technology, but it is not the point of this post.

So the initiative that caught my attention on that website, very relevant to the topic of my discussion, is this – an open forum asking visitors to chip in and answer one question:

“In the era of the social data revolution, what is a ‘friend’ to you?”

Interestingly, the responses were overwhelmingly similar is differentiating real-life friendships and social networking ones.

Here are some of them:

“he era of the social data revolution ought not to change our understanding of what a friend is, or of what a relationship is. A friend give love and support, in return for same. A Facebook friend is a dramatically different use of the word friend, and a best a metaphor referring only obliquely to friends as I described above.” By Noah Burbank

“In the traditional sense, a 'friend' according to me is someone whom I can completely rely on no matter what the situation is. But now with the advent of the social era, its hard to say the same about all the 500 odd people in my list. So the term 'friend' should probably be changed to the term 'social friend' - so as to not dilute the original meaning.” By Sandeep Sripada

“In the era of the social data revolution, I think the term "friend" was hijacked by Facebook to basically mean acquaintance- anybody I've had contact with in real life that I might possibly want to see again in the future, serendipitously or on purpose. Can correlate to any number of things: similar interests, activity partners, colleagues, industry contacts, family, etc. I think "friend" has mashed up a number of meanings in the modern era and has far too broad of a scope- I'm glad twitter uses "follow/following" and linkedin uses "connected." By Jeremy Carr

So of course defining the meaning of friendships is very personal to each of us. I’ll stick to calling friends only my real friends. I’m happy to have all of my connections on the social networking sites, but not all of them are my friends.