Digital etiquette: Is it worth adding friends to everyone?
Text: Ekaterina Sivkova
Social media is not only a universal communication tool., but also the reality that gave us new rules and new problems. So, the delight of dialing the first thousand subscribers has been replaced by caution by many: how did everyone who knocks you into friends know about you? Should I judge a person by one comment and immediately add it? Does a hundred friends together guarantee that you share some values - or not? As a result, someone closes an account or targets each status to different groups, and someone fights trolls in the comments every day. It all comes down to one very simple question: is it worth to add strangers as friends in social networks?
A recent study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that adding friends generated sympathy for a person, even if it was an unfamiliar person. Scientists came to this conclusion during an experiment in which 231 students of one lecture flow participated. The researchers divided the subjects into two groups: some were asked to accept an online friend request from an unknown fellow student named Jordan, others were simply shown the same page. Then, the participants in the experiment were to express their impression of Jordan as a person (and Jordan was a fictional character — sometimes masculine, sometimes female). As a result, students from the first group were much more positive about Jordan than students from the second group.
This suggests that even on the Internet, where the laws of interpersonal communication work in a peculiar way, adding friends still creates some kind of connection based on mutual trust. Although if in real life, before “opening our soul”, we need more than one meeting, then on conditional Facebook we open access to personal publications with one click. When we receive an application from a stranger, there are only two strategies: to accept or reject it. Let's be honest: sometimes we easily add those whom we hardly remember or have never met in reality. Hence the statistics: on average, the number of online friends exceeds the number of real friends twice. We continue to multiply our contacts and do not think about the amount of personal information that these barely familiar people receive. Maybe we should stop and stop adding friends, whose names we don’t even remember, and focus on those who really care about our life?
Writer and consultant James Baer believes that getting to know someone on social networks, then cross in real life and really make friends is an increasingly less likely scenario today. Social networks are globalizing, and the gap between real friendship and "frending" is getting harder and harder to bridge. "When the number of my subscribers in social networks has grown, I stopped writing about my personal life, because most of my" friends "know nothing about me, or about my family, or about the city in which I live," he explains. . It turns out that, by facilitating the mechanism of acquaintance, technologies deceptively bring us together, but ultimately divide us even more. So the old wisdom in a new way seems to be right: even a hundred virtual friends will never compare with one new real one.
Photo: ekostsov - stock.adobe.com, samsonovs - stock.adobe.com
Material was first published on Look At Me