Social Media: A Virtual College Party
Here’s something that’s completely obvious: social media has totally changed the way we interact with others.
But now, here’s something that might not be so obvious: social media has changed our friendships – how we start them, how we maintain them, and even what we consider a friendship.
When you’re in pre-school and kindergarten, you choose your friends based on who is nice and shares their toys with you (and, if you believe in cooties, you avoid the opposite sex). If you meet a friend outside of school, it’s usually in a playgroup or activity arranged by your parents.
In grammar school and high school, you start finding friends with similar interests, both in school and at after-school activities. Generally these friends all live in your school district or at least your town, so the friends you make are at least partially based on your location. The field is even more narrowed if you consider that, based on where your school is and if it is public or private, or based on the activity you’re involved in, the friends you make may be from a certain class or socio-economic group, or of a particular race or background.
In college, though, there’s a whole world of new friendships opened. You can meet people from different places and completely different backgrounds than yourself. You won’t become friends with everyone, but you will encounter these different people in class, activities and social situations, some more often than others.
Social media, at least message boards and sites like Twitter, is a virtual college – it considerably expands your pool of potential friends and acquaintances, even more, in fact, than college does. It’s perfectly acceptable to “follow” or converse with people you do not know, because they have something to say that is interesting or relevant to your hobbies and interests, career or life.
(Due to some crazy, unspoken rules, however, most people would tell you that doing the same thing on Facebook is just plain creepy. You don’t friend those you don’t know, for the most part, but exceptions do occur. We could do an entire piece on social media etiquette because of this stuff.)
But social media doesn’t just alter how we start friendships. Once we have these virtual and real-life friendships, social media also affects how we keep them.
If you’re connected on Facebook and Twitter, if you have Skype, a cell phone, and an IM screen name, there’s virtually no way to feel disconnected from a friend, no matter how far away they are. Even if you catch up via a nightly or weekly phone call, doing so is completely different than it would have been 10 years ago. By the time that call comes, you’ll already know most of what’s going on thanks to social media or texting.
In fact, due to the nature of social media, we sometimes refer to people we’ve only talked on online as friends, only to then find ourselves fishing for an explanation of how and why we consider these people friends although we’ve never actually met because others think it’s strange.
I do find the whole online friendship thing a little odd, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I’ve never met the other writers on this site because I don’t live in Boston, but I know that if I were to meet them, we’d probably soon be talking like we’ve known each other forever – because of social media.
And just because I find it odd doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. Twitter allows me to find funny and interesting information and share it with other people, like I would in a conversation. Skype makes it so much easier to keep in touch with a friend in China. And Facebook and IM allowed me to keep in touch while I was away at school without running up a huge cell phone bill.
That’s not to say we don’t appreciate the importance of real-world interaction. We really do. No matter how a friendship begins, it cannot develop through instant messages and Twitter updates alone.
But I’m grateful that social media makes it all a little bit easier.
Photo Credit: intersectionconsulting
Angela – strangely, social media has almost become a necessity in maintaining relationships. For a long time I resisted SM. I got on Facebook late, and Twitter, only recently. Relatively speaking, I'm a passive observer in both, but now things are changing.
Bizarrely, I've had the same group of close friends since high school. The difference is that those friends are now in Japan (other side of the world), Toronto (6 hours away), Northern Quebec (8 hours away), and New England (6 hours away). If I wasn't on facebook, I'm not sure I'd ever talk to some of those people.
Alternatively, I was pretty luke warm on Twitter until I stopped using it as a professional tool, and started really using it as a social tool. I've met some really cool people on Twitter, and while I've never met them in person (who knows, that might change sooner rather than later), I think I can still call them friends.
All that to say, I was wrong about social media. And any one of those high school friends, or social media friends, will probably tell you, I don't say that often.
I have really mixed feelings and thoughts about social media. On one hand, I appreciate the opportunities it provides me with in terms of connecting with my family and friends in Europe and the rest of the world. If it wasn't for Skype and Facebook I would be so disconnected from them. On the other hand, I feel that we spend so much time on Facebook to communicate with friends that live a block or two away. It is so much easier because we are already online and it is just there. You don't need to pick up a cell phone and dial a number (because it takes so much time). While I understand why we do it, I don't think communication over Facebook should be a replacement of face-to-face communication with people who you can actually meet, people such as classmates, coworkers, etc.
The other things is that Facebook has always been and will be a place only for my friends or people I feel I can trust, even though I might not know them well at the moment (I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense). I've never added people I don't know. I even hesitate about adding people that I know. For example, one of my sister's best friends sent me a friend request 2 months ago and I still haven't decided what to do. Maybe I am too overprotective about my Facebook.
Facebook used to be my favorite social network and I still love it. But Twitter has gone under my skin for some many reasons. It is almost all I need in one place: news, interesting links, random conversations about cheese, jaguars, football and even a birthday party
I’ve gotten to meet so many great people from around the world on Twitter, something I would have never done on Facebook.
I'm the same way with my Facebook. I will add people that I know vaguely (for example, from blogging or through freelancing), but they're on my “limited profile” — an option I really enjoy having. And I agree — like I said, Twitter opens up this whole other world that is actually a lot of fun to converse in. It's sort of like chatrooms v 2.0, I guess.
I'm definitely not knocking all the social outlets the Internet's opened up, but I'm pretty confident I could live without them — though it would make communicating just a little bit harder/more inconvenient.
I think you and I have pretty much the same view of social media. I definitely used Facebook a lot more than I would have if I had stayed in the same area as my friends for school, or if I hadn't made friends that lived all over. Twitter, I'm still not sold on. Yeah, I like it, and, yeah, I've met some really cool people — but why is it necessary? What's the point of it?
Like I said to Addy, I like all this stuff — but I could live without it. I guess I should amend that, though, and say that I could live without it IF everyone else was doing the same thing. So, if we reverted back to the late '90s-early '00s.
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