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On the Net friends come and go, talking of ...

By Mark Hughes (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-17 07:46

The young woman was visibly upset and clearly wanted to get something off her chest.

"What's up?" I inquired.

"I've just been defriended," she said.

Now "befriended" is a word with which I am familiar. I have been befriended by - and befriended - many people since arriving in Beijing. But defriended?

It turns out this is a new word created by the Internet-savvy younger generation specifically in relation to the worldwide social networking phenomenon, Facebook.

Those who join can invite friends to become members of the site, too. They can then share photographs, "chat", swap messages and observations and perform a host of other mutually accessible applications.

I've seen some people's sites boasting hundreds of friends, all moments away down a fiber optic cable, providing they are logged on to their computers or hooked up to a high-spec cell phone.

It creates the possibility of "befriending" anyone in the world who has online access. Currently, Facebook has 150 million users. That means there's a lot of "friends" out there.

The downside is that you can be "defriended" - you can be denied access to the Facebook site of someone who had previously invited you to be his or her friend. And you can do it without the potential for instant recrimination.

Where once, in the school playground, one child might have petulantly shouted at another, "I'm not going to be your friend any more", now the same hurt and loss of face can be performed remotely with the click of a button.

Just as bombs are dispatched impersonally against an unseen enemy in modern warfare, so relationships are blown out of the window with the same callous disregard, without the risk of any face-to-face comeback. One second you are there, the next you are deleted.

Search Google using the words "defriended on Facebook" and you will find some 24,000 responses.

A controversial aspect of "defriending" is that, unlike with other applications such as the "What are you thinking about?" posting (a digital depository of the often dire, dreary, dull and desperate), no message is sent out alerting you or your contacts about the change in status. You only find out you've been dumped when you try to visit a "friend's" site, and you find you can no longer get in. The delay of the discovery is all too often doubly hurtful.

The US fast food restaurant Burger King came up with a hilarious and ingenious marketing campaign (now sadly withdrawn) exploiting this feature.

The "Whopper Sacrifice" offered a free hamburger to anyone who deleted 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. The social networking site suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the newly defriended to let them know their online friendship was worth less than, perhaps, 2 yuan each. By close of play, Burger King had informed the grand total of 234,000 people that they had lost a friend for the price of some fast food.

In other words, a Burger King meal is better than 10 Facebook friends.

The fast food chain touched on an interesting psychological - and dietary - point. Surely a human being's ability to nurture true friendship is essentially restricted? Fast food is better than fast friends.

Maintaining friendships with several hundred people must, by the laws of mathematics, spread one's involvement with them all pretty thinly. And receiving the torrent of shared banalities from such a multitude every day would surely challenge the patience of God-fearing Job in the bible? Friendship on Facebook, like fast food, comes cheap. It's probably driven by competitiveness (back comes the childhood taunt, "I've got more friends than you").

I would wager that if there is an individual with just one friend on Facebook, their shared intimacies are far more fascinating than a phalanx of frippery from the more promiscuous.

Yes, the Internet has democratized us. Everyone's voice can now be heard. The trouble is, it is so loud it means nothing.

(China Daily 06/17/2009 page9)