A couple of months ago I wrote about how I had recently started using my Facebook account, and had in the process found that most of my old classmates and I had lived fairly parallel lives. Today I want to talk about something else...I looked at my Facebook page today and was startled when it said I had 111 friends. Really? 111? Am I THAT popular?
I guess it all depends on what you consider a "friend." After all, I have 300 co-workers, and I know probably 250 of them by name, and I'm friendLY with all of them, but I wouldn't say that I'm friends with most of them. Not real friends. Not people that I would talk to about personal problems or that I feel particularly close to. There are probably 8 or 10 people at my workplace that I'd consider a real friend.
So I started doing some digging, and what I found was that you could pretty much separate those 111 people into four distinct groups: 1) Old students from my teaching days, 2) old classmates from my learning days, 3) family, and 4) people that I would consider CURRENT friends. And when I crunched the numbers, what I found was that about 50% of my "friends" are former students, about 33% are old classmates, and about 12% are family. Only about 5% of my "friends" on Facebook are what I'd call current real friends.
That's not to say that I wish anything ill towards the other 95%, nor that I'm unhappy they're on my friends list. And truth be known, I'd like to be better friends with a whole bunch of those 95%. But I just found it interesting that my real friends by far make up the smallest population. And even more interesting, several of my closest friends aren't even on the list at all. And that includes my wife, who IS on Facebook but refuses to accept my friend request! (But that's a different story, I guess. She's smart not to accept my request because I promised if she did to flood her with comments and requests to all sorts of applications and all sorts of suggestions for friends. )
I don't know what all of that says about me, but I think it says something.
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