Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
According to a report in the Guardian, a recent survey by researchers who study how social websites change the nature of friendships networks, sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook don’t help people make anymore close friendships than face to face contact.
Talk about wasting time and money on a survey that states the obvious!
While there’s no doubt that social networking websites can open up a world (literally) of contacts and can bring people from very different cultures and backgrounds, you can’t truly get to know someone you haven’t met and spent a considerable amount of time with.
Quite aside from being impersonal, the Internet allows us to be whoever we want other people to think we are and not who we really are.
There can be no guarantees that the person you’ve spent the last six months chatting back and forth with on a social website is even remotely the person they claim to be.
On the other hand where they do come in very handy is when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family around the world that we know on a personal basis.
I learnt my lesson when I joined MySpace and came to the conclusion that the majority of people that made invite requests and were added as friends were either sleezy perverts or people I didn’t really have anything in common with.
After shutting down my account and joining Facebook instead, I made the conscious decision that it would only be for people I actually knew and had met.
In less than two weeks, I was back in contact with at least six school friends I hadn’t heard from in over 15 years and two cousins I didn’t even know I had.
Three months later my Facebook network consists of some 40 odd people I know and keep in touch and share photos with rather that the couple of hundred strangers that thought I “look cute/ sexy/ hot and would like to be your friend”. Yuk!
