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Online loneliness … Facebook

I was reading an article on “le point”. No I don’t have a link for that. I read it on paper. Yeah, p-a-p-e-r. I couldn’t tag it or save it on my social bookmarking websites to share it with friends. On internet, the meaning of “friends” is kind of fuzzy. It just means that you have a mutual (sometimes unidirectional) relationship that enables you some access rights to their profile.
You can see what they’ve done or you can recommend specific actions.

On digg for example, I never had any kind of relationship or common point with my “friends”, they just accepted a random “be my friend request”, and receive my “shouts”, when I want to say something to my community. Mostly when I request people to vote for what I submitted.

On facebook, we have, most of the times, real-life friends. On linkedin, there are more business relationships.

Looking at my social graph (showing how my network is interconnected),

It is always strange to see how your acquaintances are linked together creating different universes that you connect. I have high school friends, work friends, kung fu friends…

Okay, back to that “le point” article. It was describing the process people were experiencing after suscribing to facebook. It was mostly like…
1) “I can’t believe this guy is also on facebook, what a nerd!”
2) “Wow, time has been nice to her. Let’s add her to friends”
3) “People will think I suck if I don’t get more friends”
4) “Let’s compare our penis length with the Mine is bigger than yours app
5) “Whoa I got 500 friends… and this one just got married! Who is he by the way?”

And during all that time you were on facebook at least hour per day on average and increasing, following other people’s lives. You feel weird when your ex-girlfriend picture gets tagged and you see that she’s with a new boyfriend (who’s actually a friend of a friend).
You just wander on the web of profiles hoping that you’ll see another face you can add to your friends. You meet people and immediately ask them if they have a facebook profile. People find you boring.

One day, your inbox is full of advertizing.
You open your friends’list, and you just have a strange feeling when you realize that there is noone there you know.

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6 Comments to "Online loneliness … Facebook"

  1. Franz's Gravatar Franz
    November 18, 2007 - 8:47 pm | Permalink

    as spread out as always. You made a new layout for your blog, that’s quiet nice. Can you put a radio, like a deezer one (www.deezer.com) with your playlist so that we can hear what you’re listening.

  2. Franz's Gravatar Franz
    November 18, 2007 - 8:51 pm | Permalink

    By the way you should advertise a bit your blog. I think that would be fun to have more comment here.

  3. Vinh's Gravatar Vinh
    November 18, 2007 - 9:00 pm | Permalink

    Yeah right, I get a good traffic, but poor commenting rate. I guess I should be like more outrageous in my comments.
    But some of my readers told me they were quite disappointed they did not get their T-shirt.
    I am still working on that.

  4. n3o's Gravatar n3o
    November 19, 2007 - 6:44 am | Permalink

    I’m not sure that a radio would add something to this blog.

    The point of view on Facebook is quite correct, but only if you have not any real life friend in your Facebook list…

  5. François's Gravatar François
    November 19, 2007 - 3:30 pm | Permalink

    About the radio, when something is useless it’s inevitably essential.

  6. den's Gravatar den
    July 13, 2009 - 6:05 am | Permalink

    i can sooo relate. I looked at my minifeed and thought "who are these people doing crazy stuff" and i relaised oh they're "my friends" and when i log on to facebook chat, i rarely see any real friends

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