I Have 300 Friends At Facebook, But Why Am I Lonely?

A few weeks ago, I invited someone to my Multiply account.  And got declined.  For people of more resilient, sterner stuff, this may not mean much.  For all I know, he’s been meaning to add me; there are just lots of other things to do.  Surprisingly, this has made me infinitely sad because clicking that accept button couldn’t have taken more than 5 seconds of his precious time.

How Friendly is Friendly?

And to think social networking sites are supposed to make it easy to have automatic friends.  The awkward, potentially hazardous introductions we do in real life have now been replaced by the simple click a button.  This seemingly harmless simplicity is what makes online rejections all the more devastating.  It gets you launching existentialist questions upon yourself:

Who am I?  Am I the number of my friends at [insert social networking site]?  What is the ideal number of friends anyway?  Why do I have this number of friends?  When will the number of online friends I have justify the life I’m leading right now?  And so on and so forth.

When you stumble on someone with 788 friends in Friendster, you gotta admit there’s a certain pride to be had for such successful accumulation of friends.  It’s a splendid showcase, because simultaneous factors of excess free time, wealth, hand and eye coordination, charisma, patience, and persuasiveness must be at work here.

You’ve probably heard this already: Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who my friends are.  One of those modern modified proverbs.

Not exactly the most helpful advice on the planet, yes.  But in the online world of social networking sites, it means something.  Every time we search, invite, and accept friends to our Friendster, Multiply, or Facebook, it means one more friend is added to our list, one more branch to our ever-growing network, reaching out to so many others out there.  Before long, we shall be connected to just about everyone in the planet in no more than 3 degrees of separation.

And yet despite all the friends we've successfully invited, added, and amassed in Friendster, Mutiply, MySpace, and Facebook, etc., we can't help but feel a little lonely every now and then.  There’s a word for this: Social networking fatigue, the “mental exhaustion and stress,” according to wordspy.com, “caused by creating and maintaining an excessive number of accounts on social networking sites.”

Social Fatigue

Which is probably why at Multiply, you do not add friends; you add “contacts.”  Semantically, a “contact” is less emotionally-charged and, well, more professional-sounding, than chummy “friend”, so there’s less reason to feel lonely about.  After all, they’re just your contacts; you guys didn’t exactly do the blood compact and swore to be friends for life no matter what.

Compare this to the 1,000 friends you have back at Friendster— 71% of which you have never personally met, 11%: you’ve met only once but never again, 8%: you meet now and then, but are not really in speaking terms with, 7%: you just added as friends out of politeness, and the remaining 3%: people you actually, amazingly enough, have a deep, meaningful relationship with.  At your most distressful moments, you can’t help but wonder where those 1,000 friends are.

No doubt Multiply still alludes to numbers.  It has that viral, if not biblical, connotation going for it: you go forth and multiply, as would a virus, implicating oneself to people’s lives.  Friendster sounds like jester or prankster: someone with a service to offer, someone you can count on to bring you countless friends.

What happened to Friendster is that it got too friendly.  For a while, the big numbers looked great on our Friendster profiles: I’ve got 788 friends, Let’s see yours.  It’s this silly sort of numbers game that many users of Friendster now find off-putting, which can be forgiven if only for the age factor: Friendster has been here since 2002.  But then again, some of these 700+ friends accounts are not even three months old (This is quite feasible though, and will only require you to make 8 friends a day to reach your 700 quota).

Admittedly, at Friendster we still find good friends, reconnect with long-lost loved ones, search, spy on, even stalk crushes, we stumble on love, temporary purpose or meaning, work, distraction.  We get our dose of curiosity satisfied as we check out the latest with our friends.  Whatever.

And we don’t just share self-centered blog entries or pointless anecdotes, or yet another cute photo of our cat or dog or hamster, or videos of drunken parties, or MP3s, or those innocuous or inane comments we leave at each other’s doorstep.  What we’re sharing is a consciousness

This wasn’t always the case.  Not so long ago, people waited for letters, actual ones written on paper and inside an envelope, to arrive at their mailbox, an actual mailbox with a slot in it.  There was a whole business of waiting, a sense of yearning, and hope, and lots of patience.  Now, everything’s instant and easy, whether it is coffee or friends.

Or is it?  The trouble with having too many friends is that you don’t know where they are when you need them.  When you start sending messages to all, you’re not sure who’s listening, if there’s any at all.  You begin to wonder if you guys really know each other at all.

Let’s Face It!
“Friendster has too much mass appeal already,” Jason, (not his real name), a Friendster member since 2005, laments.  But isn’t that what the Web is all about anyway?  Convergence.  A sense of community.  The masses connected to each other in ways unexpected.

So Jason has recently opened a Facebook account because that’s where everyone is at the moment, everyone who is not the masses, that is.  No doubt Facebook has more features and innovations than its rival social networking sites.  For example, there’s the Wall to post messages, a NewsFeed about real-time updates about your friends (can be annoying though, especially if your friends are the type who does too much), and an assortment of virtual gifts to send out to people.  You also get to “poke” people you like, and hopefully, they’d poke you back.

Together, these perks allow users to make the most of their pages unlike no online diary has ever seen.

Created by a Harvard undergrad back in 2004, Facebook was supposed to be just a social networking site for Harvard students to rate who’s hot and not among themselves.  Later on, it included students in other colleges and universities, then high schools in the U.S., before finally accommodating anyone aged 13 and above, anywhere in the world.  An initial sense of exclusivity, yes.

And this time around, we’ve resolved to get it right.   No more accepting invitations from ghost friends.  No more adding pseudo friends for which we’d be subjected to endless updates about their lives each time they post anew.  This time around, it’s not about numbers.  Now, we downsize, trim, weed out, discard, screen prospective friends, and only add to your network those you really know.  Minimalism is inevitably discriminatory and cruel, but at least it’s neat.

Online/Offline

Pretend for a while that you have 330 friends in Friendster, 250 contacts in Multiply, 117 in MySpace, and 195 in Facebook.  In short, you're a pretty friendly fellow, albeit someone who's been spending too much time on the Net.  Yet you've just never gotten around to asking the name of the guy you buy cigarettes from everyday.  The daily repartee between you and your neighbor never goes beyond hi and hello.  And the smile you manage at the McDonald’s crew taking your order is weak at best.

How to cope with this contradiction?  Maybe there is none.  The online identity/identities we painstakingly create and maintain don’t necessarily have to bear resemblance to who we are in the offline world.  Online, we can be interesting, look kind and/or interesting, sound nice and/or interesting, never mind if in real life that’s exactly the opposite.

So why do we join social networking sites?  To foist better versions of ourselves?  The undeniable fact is that we’re still social animals.  We’re suckers for that warmth feeling of belongingness; we want to be part of the group. 

Gone are the days of the top-secret diary in the locked drawer you didn't want your family to find out.  Now, when you rave about this obscure restaurant you rightfully think you were first to discover, or about your recent shopping trip, or the latest movie you saw, you can't wait for your friends to leave their comment.

A few years back, cyberspace was thought to be a place you went to, somewhere you hung around.  Now, cyberspace is a verb.

There’s no end to this sharing, this swapping of thoughts, pictures, music, reviews, friends.  If anything, social networking sites have allowed us not only to connect with new and old friends, but also to stake our piece of territory in the virtual world.  Ten years from now, we’ll have an idea what we looked like, what we were so crazy about, what the fuss was.

In our Friendster, Multiply, and Facebook profiles, we’re forever young, our profiles just floating in cyberspace, accessible by anyone interested enough.  We’ve stopped going gaga over celebrities; we are now celebrities in our own right.

Now, everyone's life is an open book.  Or books, depending on the number of social networking sites one is a member of.

Too much sharing can also be tiring however.  When we update our Friendster, we’d have to do the same thing to our Multiply, and to our Facebook, and before we know it, an hour or two of our lives have passed by, and for what?  We have to blog about it or else it just didn’t happen.  We can’t disappoint our friends.  The more social networking sites we’ve unwittingly involved ourselves in, the wider the arena for loneliness can get.

There’s always that faint hope that someone cared enough to view your profile.  Or that someone has left a comment while your back was turned.

Online/Loneli

The next time you’re lonely, try typing in I am lonely at Google, and you will be whisked to possibly the loneliest page on the planet, a discussion forum entitled "I am so lonely will anyone speak to me," posted at an unlikely website: moviecodec.com.

That was back in 2004.  The thread’s starter, Lonely, never imagined the responses he would be getting.  Initial replies were far from friendly, and for a valid reason: moviecodec.com is a website you go to for info regarding codecs and other technicalities of digital video—not a lovestoned forum where you pour your heart out.  Eventually though, people who typed in their loneliness at Google discovered the site (Google’s algorithms have curiously placed the forum at the top of its search results for the phrase I am Lonely) and so people began sharing their own brand of loneliness—be it childish, suicidal, or existential, you name it.

Now the list is almost 1,900 pages long, and keeps growing everyday.  Everyone’s loneliness is legitimate

Meanwhile my used-to-be friend, now failed contact at Multiply (username habagatan), still hasn’t pressed the button.  Any button.  Either accept or decline.  My invitation is in limbo.  Nice. 

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The author used to be an SEO specialist, and is a supposed film major.  He is also a blogger,and occasional freelance ghostwriter.

Contrary to the article’s title, he doesn’t have 300 friends at Facebook.

Add him up at Friendster: mattegraytoaster@yahoo.com and mothproof.multiply.