People have just assumed that... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Facebook is made up of people you've met, but not necessarily who are similar to you. I have 850 'friends,' and a lot are acquaintances, not friends. I don't really know them. If I've met someone one time, how should they be influencing my feed?
We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends.
Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you're connected to everybody. You've got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don't actually talk to anybody. You're not close to anybody.
The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.
I don't need to go onto Facebook and pretend to have friends I've never even met. To my mind, that kind of destroys the meaning of the word 'friend.' I take exception to that. Because I value and respect friendship.
Friendships are discovered rather than made.
Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.
I often feel like Facebook is a giant friend portfolio, and sometimes it can be a much more socially appropriate way of contacting a person as compared with texting or telephone. And never mind the fact that it's integrated into the iPhone. Makes me crazy in a super good way.
Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.
Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.