Media view on Facebook phenomena wide of mark

NET RESULTS:You never read about how shallow business has become because people use LinkedIn, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

HOW MANY friends do you have on Facebook? Or, as many in the media writing about the phenomenon would have it, “friends”?

If you have a Facebook (or any other social media personal profile), the likelihood is that you have far more people connected to you than you have “real world”, old-fashioned style friends – people you would actually meet face to face at least occasionally, send a Christmas card to, or chat with on the phone (mobile, most likely).

If you have anyone in the house under 20, and you check their Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or whatever profile – and most likely that should be plural, “profiles” – don’t be surprised if “friends’ number in multiple hundreds or even well over a thousand.

Would all these people care about what the profile-owner did last weekend? What music the person listens to? Would they supply a shoulder in a crisis or enthusiasm for an achievement? Of course not.

Does that matter? Is it somehow a testament to how indifferent and detached society has become? Is social networking evidence that people no longer have capital-F Friends, the ones who – in my definition of friendship – are people you stand by; the ones who you might not see for years but when you meet up, it is as if it were yesterday?

Well, you can find the answer you want, depending on your point of view and what pundit you prefer. But as with any social shift that comes with a new generation and the development of new subcultures, the prevailing perspective of media stories and punditry (the wrong generation, of course) is negative.

There’s always an anecdote to illustrate the negative. With a column in the Guardian this week, headlined “A thousand links but no connections”, a deplorable story was offered of a girl who had 1,048 Facebook friends yet none took her seriously when she posted on her page that she was taking an overdose on Christmas Day.

Some replied with a dismissive smirk: “She ODs all the time and she lies” – but she wasn’t lying, she did overdose and she died the following day.

But the number of on Facebook connections she had simply isn’t relevant or a sign of anything more significant than noting a person attended a school with 4,000 others.

Social network “friends” generally represent, primarily, casual connections. For anyone in their teens and 20s, it is often going to represent your extended school or college milieu, including connections of connections. If someone is at your school, you are probably likely to “friend” them.

Should it mean something that, on the surface, a person seemed to have an incredible amount of friends online and no one listened to or understood their desperation? Well, that goes against much of what is known and understood about suicide “offline”, and why would the online world be different?

Many suicides involve people with what seemed a happy and wide social circle, who nonetheless felt deeply isolated.

Put this one dreadful story aside for now. Social network connections – few or many – are not symbolic of anything other than a norm for many teens and young adults which once would have gone unremarked but now is made more obvious.

Teenagers and adults “friend” people casually because for some reason they feel a link: they attend your school, like cats, they listen to Kings of Leon, they play camogie or football, they enjoy baking or they met you at a conference.

Maybe people would be less likely to read more into social network “friends” and what they mean and symbolise if a different word were used, say “connections” as on business social network LinkedIn.

Oddly, you never read stories about how shallow business has become because people have hundreds of connections on LinkedIn.

I have a few hundred myself. Some of those are people I know, some are in areas that interest me or whom I have contacted via LinkedIn for stories.

The vast majority are not immediate, active business contacts, but they are a sometimes useful and interesting business network, a virtual rolodex that is easier to maintain (and for other people to see and use if helpful) than a collection of business cards.

The number of LinkedIn connections in no way reflects anyone’s importance. I know some key business people who maintain a small circle of connections – others have thousands.

Some relatively insignificant business players who love seeking connections also have thousands – there are competitive connection collectors; we all know a few.

The point of all this though is that it seems okay and even admirable to have lots of casual, and often meaningless, business connections in your business social network but vastly symbolic and full of implication about the emptiness of your personal life to have the same kind of nebulous social connections.

Indeed some would be shallow or deeply meaningful or promising of future real world connections on a personal social media profile.

The media really need to get beyond analysing more into isolated anecdotes than is actually there. Indeed, they do it while missing the bigger picture of the ways in which such networks are actually used.