Facebook just topped 400 million active users becoming the 3rd largest country in the world. Half of these users access Facebook at least once a day. Teens and young adults spend anywhere from 1 to 5 hours daily on Facebook which is probably an underestimate since this does not include time that more than 100 million of these FB users access the site via iPhone and BlackBerry apps [and these mobile users are twice as active as those who only access FB on a computer]. Add to that the data from the Nielsen folks showing that the average teen sends and receives 3,146 texts per month and preteens clock in at more than 1,200 texts per month, plus data showing that members of the Net Generation and iGeneration still send and receive e-mails, Skype, IM and chat, and so on and you have an ever-expanding, socially immersed generation of e-communicators.
What does it mean when much of someone's social sphere involves electronic connections rather than face-to-face connections?
To listen to some very bright commentators on modern culture, this is a harbinger of doom. It portends a generation (or mini-generations as we are finding in our research with thousands of children, preteens, teens, and young adults) of people who will not be able to hold a face-to-face conversation and not be able to judge someone's communication based on nonverbal cues. How will they be able to have "real friends"? How will they be able to complete a job interview? And if they do get past that job, how will they be able to "converse" and work with business colleagues? How will they be able to develop meaningful love relationships if all they know is pressing keys and sending messages, often replete with shortcuts and grammatical nonsense? And, most important, will we be losing the skill of talking to one another as each successive mini-generation becomes more rooted in electronic connection?
Facebookers have an average of 130 friends with teens and young adults topping out much higher according to most researchers. To some, this is mind boggling. How can one maintain friendship with this many people? If even one hour a month is expended connecting to each friend, this means upwards of 4 hours a day must be allocated to friends alone. In 2009 the Oxford Dictionary announced that "unfriend" was its new added word of the year.
unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a ‘friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.
On FB users have to "confirm" or "ignore" someone's request to be their friend. At the click of the mouse, you can add someone to your expanding friends list and become an active part of their lives. You can find out what they had for breakfast and what they did for fun last night. In fact, you can find out more minutiae about someone's life than you might ever want to know. If a "friend's" FB musings are getting too much to handle, simply click "hide" and you no longer have to see their posts. To make it even more attractive, they have no idea that you have hidden them and are not following their daily successes, challenges, and angst.
[sorry but I just took a FB break to learn that my 22-year-old son is sweltering in New Jersey and won't cook dinner tonight and that my friend's 2-year-old son locked her husband out of the house or that my other son posted a dozen photos of his new vegetable garden, or that one of my daughters is now friends with several new people or .... And this is only in the past few hours! Oh wait, now my other daughter just texted me so that we can make plans to celebrate her 20th birthday next week. Gotta text her back since she won't answer the phone if I call. I guess I could FB her. Hmmmm.]
I tend to be an optimist about the world and particularly about the electronic world. I see positives where others see often see dysfunctional or even scary things [please, no more reruns of Dateline's To Catch a Predator. Even I am starting to believe that there are hundreds of thousands of sexual predators stalking my children and I know the research showing that this is simply not true at all]. I see this new form of friending (and unfriending) as an indication that our younger generations are figuring out ways to expand and strengthen their world connections. I see that reading about my son's every daily move might become cumbersome sometimes but he is more than 3,000 miles away and I feel more connected than ever. I keep all of my daughter's texts so that I can scroll back and remind myself of past connections and conversations. I see my friends being able to contact me and ask me a question or share some information (or just "chat") at any time of the day and I can respond when I have time. I think that all in all it is a win-win for everyone.
But others disagree. They say that you can't have a true friend if you do not spend time together and share and help each other. According to my dictionary, a friend is variously defined as:
- A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.
- A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
- Someone with whom you share mutual knowledge, esteem, affection, and respect, along with a degree of rendering service to in times of need or crisis.
- Desiring what is best for the other person.
- Being able to express sympathy and empathy and being honest with each other.
It's funny, but I couldn't find a definition that espoused anything about "face-to-face" connections being a requirement for friendship. I don't see anything in the definitions that precludes having an electronic friendship. In fact, I don't see anything that stipulates that you have to have met the person live in the real world rather than knowing them in the virtual world.
I do have many people in my life who I have not yet met in the flesh. Are they friends? Well, I know that I can count on them if I am in need of support. I know that I like them a lot and trust them with my secrets. I most certainly feel as though I have knowledge about them and they know a whole lot about me and that I am honest with them and believe them to be honest with me. But we have never met. Friends? Most certainly! But can I conceive of having 130 of these friends? Well, probably not because I have enough to do in my life that I don't think that I can find enough time to share, trust, and know all about all of these people. But they can be acquaintances. Good ones, too, since I can find out all about their lives and even "meet" their friends.
I will confess that I do have a small part of the 60-year-old me that feels that friends have to be real, not virtual. But having said that, I am a match.com success and my partner was a virtual friend for nearly a month before we met. And that month made it so much easier to begin to share, trust and respect each other before we went "live." My son just began a relationship and within a week of going from online (for quite some time) to the real world, they had both posted that they were in a relationship with each other on FB. That denotes commitment. But that was weeks of talking online hours each day and only a week of seeing each other a few hours a day live.
The bottom line is that the world is changing rapidly due to technology. For the younger generations, days are consumed with connection and that is good. They are chatting with people, documenting their lives, and holding private conversations (albeit technologically) with so many people. They are talking, sharing, loving, and trusting and this is what relationships are about. As much as it seems odd, I see that today's teens and young adults are telling us that we have to escape our rigid definitions of relationships and allow our busy lives to include friends who are not standing in front of us at the moment, or may never stand there in the real world. Most certainly we need real world friends that we can see, touch, smell, and observe but I think that that requirement is going to continue to diminish as young children grow up immersed in a virtual social world with so many ways to connect. The proof will involve watching down the road and seeing if children, teens and young adults are able to be emotionally secure and healthy which should tell us that their virtual world and virtual relationships are nourishing and fulfilling.
We have to remember that this is all new. Facebook is only 6 years old and three years ago teens were only sending and receiving 10 texts a day compared to 10 per waking nonschool hour. These tools are all new, emerging, and finding a niche in our lives. We can only wonder at what will come next. But, I bet that it will have to do with connecting and maintaining relationships and that it will be embraced by teens and young adults.
