Y-Files
June 23, 2007 05:08 AM
By: Samuel Dunsiger
“So-and-so has added you as friend.”
It’s a message most people get in their e-mails. Natalie Zak has, with more than 600 friends on Facebook, the most popular social networking website.
But a lot of the people she ended up deleting.
“There’s no point having someone as a friend you don’t know and don’t talk to,” says Ms Zak, a 23-year-old student and avid Facebook user.
With the number of Facebook users in Canada rising to more than 2.5 million and growing about 5 per cent every week, this is what making friends has come to.
Ms Zak checks her Facebook daily. “Generally, I look on people’s profiles and see people’s photos. It depends how bored I am, I do whatever everyone else does.”
Rebecca Goldberg, 18, says she is addicted to it.
“I go on all the time, even when I’m at work. I go on it almost every half hour,” she says.
Why does social networking appeal to students?
“It makes it much easier. You can say anything to anyone, anywhere,” says Elizabeth Sterlin, 17, responding to an interview request sent through Facebook.
Ms Sterlin says it’s a useful tool when you often don’t get to see your friends face-to-face. “You don’t really have time to see them, so you keep in touch by talking.”
One of the interesting things about networking is how much people are willing to reveal about themselves.
“I like to build up my profile, like I’m expressing myself through it,” Ms Sterlin says.
Facebook has been around since 2004. Created by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, it began as a student directory and spread across the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada.
“I have about 204 friends on Facebook,” Ms Sterlin says.
“But they’re not really friends, you just add people for the sake of having more friends.”
According to Jerry Durlak, a professor of communications at York University, a friend is somebody you meet face-to-face and become acquainted with.
When you reveal things to the person and they respond favourably, you start to build up trust with that person, which can turn into a friendship.
But as you move into the network area, it’s a very different kind of relationship.
The characteristics are different. We find friends mediated through networking and social software. We never meet the person, yet we call them a friend.
Brian Staroselsky, a 14-year-old student at Westmount Collegiate Institute, says it’s rare for somebody to refuse a ‘friendship’ on Facebook when you request it.
“It’s common practice for students to add anybody they’ve met to their Facebook,” Mr. Staroselsky says. “Because of this, I think a lot of people are generalizing friends as people they know, rather than people they have fun with and can trust and rely on.”
Mr. Durlak says one of the most interesting points is the level of intimacy.
“I think that if we have a face-to-face conversation, I reveal something to you and you reveal something to me. This goes on in a personal conversation and we build up trust, which I think is missing on something like Facebook.”
Mr. Durlak says 70 per cent of the meaning we get comes from non-verbal communication.
“We see the way they say something and we see their persona. We have access to all the other senses.”
“I’ve gotten into fights with people over MSN Messenger because I’ve interpreted what they said wrongly,” Ms Zak says. “That’s not a way to communicate.”
In the past eight months, Facebook members have jumped from nine million to 23 million worldwide, making it the sixth most-accessed site, with 60 per cent of users logging in every day and putting it in competition with My Space, a rival social networking site, which has been around since 2003.
“Nobody uses the telephone anymore,” Ms Zak says. Instead of asking ‘What’s your phone number?’ people ask ‘What’s your Facebook?’”
Samuel Dunsiger is a journalism student at Ryerson University and a member of the York Region Media Group’s y-team. You can reach him c/o dteetzel@yrmg.com