It occurred to me that BFF (best friends forever) and FbF (facebook friends) have the same 3 letters. I found this amusing and ironic at first…and then ironically not ironic at all. What?
Allow me to explain. At first I thought it was ironic because, well, your BEST friend or friends is one or a few people at best while your facebook friends might be thousands and thousands of people. Your BFFs are the folks with whom you share intimate details of your life and from whom you draw support in times of crisis. Your BFFs are the people that you keep photos of for years, dragging them out to point, laugh and reminisce. Your BFFs are easy to get to if you get arrested for protesting…or peeing on a patrol car.
So what about your FbFs? Super different than described above? Aren’t the FbFs just the exes, former co-workers, creepy schoolmates and randoms you met in passing thrown in with your REAL friends? Many of whom you maintain zero contact with except for passing remarks on shared LOLZ?
That was where I started my thinking and so I found it amusing and ironic how close in spelling were these these vastly different words…and then it hit me: I was being an old-fogie
in my thinking. Many folks (myself included) have talked about the power of weak connections. About how much better off we wind up being when we embrace that not everyone is ONLY either 1) a good friend with whom you speak frequently and deeply OR 2) a casual acquaintance with whom you have little obligation. There’s a new middle of the road: weak connected relationships that seem to flourish on social networks.
And the truth of the matter for me is that facebook and other social platforms like SnapGoods have not weakened my ties with my real friends (and my even realer BFFs), but rather have given me additional chances to randomly find shared interests or help hook folks up with things they need. People that in a non Fb or SnapGoods world I might not realize I could connect with and to. And frankly it’s even made me more thoughtful of some of my BFFs (I mean seriously who the hell could remember all those birthdays?)
So maybe, it’s fitting that BFF and FbF are so closely spelled. Aren’t we sharing intimate details, tagging each other in photos, calling out for help, responding to requests for help, connecting friends of friends and generally improving even our offline real relationships with BFFs by being good FbFs?
Just a few friday afternoon thoughts. What do you think? Have BFFs and FbFs become hard to distinguish in the hyper connected friendship-o-shere of social network living?
