Apparently Facebook and Myspace are ruining my generation’s ability to form relationships. That’s a relief, I always figured I was just really selfish. Apparently not:
Dr Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust, said social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have fostered the idea that relationships and friendships can be formed and destroyed quickly and easily.
His argument is that the young whipper-snappers of today put so much value on their digital personas, which inhabit these social networks, that their IRL (in real life) lives are taking the back seat in terms of importance. Since on social networking sites, it’s very easy to forge — and, more importantly for his reasoning, end — relationships, kids today are beginning to believe that relationships are things to be easily disposed of.
At first, this struck me as absurd, but I’ve heard stories of people discovering that they’re no longer in a relationship upon logging into Facebook and seeing the little broken heart icon, (or worse yet: the sms breakup) so maybe there is some weight to it.
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I’d like to see some research on how often profiles are completely removed or discarded, as having the facility to quickly break friendships, or delete information is different from actually doing it.
I agree that online relationships do lack the physical cues of offline relationships, but given that people only tend to have the same number of real ‘best’ friends on and offline (Around 15 I believe, I’ll try and find the source), most of the quick drops and adds are likely to be acquintances, and less meaningful
Comment by Dan Thornton - July 4, 2008 5:36 pm
You could extend this point to include games like Second Life, where people are supposed to form relationships on a completely superficial level.
Comment by Brent - July 6, 2008 1:01 am
A friend of mine interviewed at Facebook, and during their tour they told her that their algorithms are able to predict when a couple on Facebook would break up, based on how often they looked at each others’ profiles and how much time they spent looking at the profiles of other opposite-sex (in the case of heterosexuals) Facebookers. It is a little creepy that Facebook may know better than you when you will breakup!
Comment by Brittany Creamer - July 7, 2008 10:16 am