To add or not to add - that is the question!
Being in a mood where I have lots of important things to do and am anxious not to do any of them, I decided to conduct a survey of my Facebook acquaintance. This was prompted by the fact that yet another person who I would never have expected in a million years to add me as a friend, just did. My policy when someone adds me as a friend on Facebook is to click yes, even if I dislike the person intensely. This is partly because I have an insatiable curiousity to read about what people are doing with their lives, and partly because I don’t like being consciously rude.
Please find the results of my survey below. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether Facebook are devaluing the meaning of the word “friend”.
There are 148 people with whom I am friends on Facebook. Out of these..
Family members = 1
Colleagues = 36
People I went to primary school with = 15
People I went to secondary school with = 66
Esperantists = 21
People I went to uni with = 9
These can be subdivided into the following, which won’t add up to the total as a few people are in more than one category.
People with whom I have been in love = 4
People I dislike intensely = 15
People I dislike mildly = 22
People I have hardly ever spoken to = 34
People I have never met = 9
People I think are cool but don’t know well enough to deem real friends = 10
People I deem as acquaintances = 37
People I used to be friends with but no longer see = 23
Actual friends = 4
To clarify those tags, “people I dislike intensely” covers individuals such as the class bully, whereas “people I dislike mildly” are more just people who irritate me. “People I have hardly ever spoken to” are mainly people I was at school with. “People I have never met” are not necessarily people I don’t know, just Esperantists. “Acquaintances” are people I vaguely like and see in the present time, as opposed to “people I used to be friends with but no longer see”, who are people I used to vaguely like, but lost contact with. And the as for the four lucky people I class as “actual friends”, they know who they are because they periodically get my emotional garbage dumped on them 
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am
Without looking at your list of friends, I can think of three people. The fourth, however, escapes me. Details?
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Don’t be so modest darling, i was including you too
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Ha!
Well avoided. I probably deserved that for being so cheeky as to ask
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Nah, no secret about it, I just like winding you up
It’s probably poor categorisation on my part but it’s difficult to come up with one description which covers a range of feelings for different people. I initially called the category “People I have kissed” but that excluded a certain infamous German. Perhaps “people to whom I have formed an emotional attachment” would have been more accurate… but yeah, if you haven’t worked it out I’ll tell you tomorrow 