The Fake Relationships of Facebook

The social networking site, Facebook describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you." However, i believe that rather than connecting us, facebook is disconnecting us and weakening our real world relationships. Whilst barriers that previously restricted communication, such as geographical boundaries, have been broken down by the social networking site, allowing for people to construct and maintain friendships, many relationships that have been formed are superficial, based on false identities and would not survive in reality.

As Hodgkinson argues, Facebook "encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship." In online communities it seems that with friends, quality counts for nothing and quantity is everthing. I'm positive that most people have friends in their list who they would not speak to if they past them in the street. Yet online, individuals find it necessary to classify these people as their 'friends' and indulge them, with photos and personal information about themselves. These friend requests are likely to be for obscure reasons; they were in your grade 2 class or know someone who used to date your cousin, and are added for the pure sake of building your friend tally as an indication of your popularity. In doing this, individuals are flaunting a constructed identity of themselves and results in constructing imagined relationships between people who do not or can not maintain a relationship in reality.

“Participants in virtual communities increasingly come to view ‘real life’ as simply one window through which a personality is developed and expressed, and that computer mediated communication constitutes a constructive and potentially liberatory space through which the obese can become slender, the beautiful plain, the “nerdy”sophisticated" (Flew, 2005, 64). Facebook like other social networking sites allows individuals to create an identity of themselves and show it off to a wide audience. How can facebook connect you with the people around you, if the identities of the people have been exaggerated or are completely untrue? Without establishing a genuine face to face relationship with someone, it is impossible to know for sure if their virtual identity is truthful.

Facebook has changed the way we communicate. Rather than directly communicate with one another, we now look to the 'news feed' and 'staus' of individuals for gossip and information. Rather then make a phone call, we write on each others wall. Facebook is disconnecting people by allowing their relationships to exist purely online and eliminate face to face contact. Relationships are not defined until they are defined on Facebook and the way they are defined is restricted to a short drop down box you can choose from. I have added an amusing video to my blog page which i found on YouTube. It satirizes the way we interact with each other on facebook, comparing this to the real world.

With applications such as "rate your friends," 'top friends" and "compare friends," facebook is disconnecting people by becoming a source for exclusion and bullying. Facebook allows people to display opinions of each other in a passive, indirect method. Is the point of rating the 'hotness' of your friends, not indirectly to say that others are not as 'hot'? Events are also open for your friends to see who is and isn't invited. Facebook and other social networking sites are providing an arena for people to publicly humiliate one another from the comfort of their bedrooms.

Facebook does provide an easy way to communicate with those around you and in different geographical locations. However, i think its functions have been abused and the result is that face to face relationships are weakening. We no longer go to each other, but rely on what is displayed on our facebook pages for confirmation and self assurance.

Flew, T. (2005). Virtual Cultures in T. Flew, New media : an introduction, Melbourne: OUP, pp.61-82.