Group Hug

By Mike Willard
    
Facebook has 250 million users worldwide; 70,000 are in Ukraine.  They are online five billion minutes a day.  That's a lot of people spending a lot of time with other people they call friends.

In many cases, we're not talking really great friends, the kind from whom you can borrow more than a cup of sugar, say a car payment.  But all this camaraderie is wonderful… sort of virtual group hug.

However, like many a close encounter, there is always a chance of catching a social disease.  For lack of a better term, let's call this one Facebookitus, a malady that steals from paying work, from time with significant others and from working on that great novel you always said was lurking inside you, somewhere.

One of the first steps one must take in shaking this social malfunction is to, as Alcoholics Anonymous requires, admit your addiction. This is difficult when you, as I do, protest of only maybe, perhaps, 30 minutes a day of those five billion minutes on Facebook. In the global scheme of things, it seems insignificant.

Additionally, we can also claim that Facebook, or other social network sites such as Vkontakte.ru are an essential part of our work, keeping in contact with clients and people who might, if we were to generously expand our mind, become clients. 

The fact is-citing Facebook's own statistics-the 35-and-older group is the networks fastest-growing demographic. This certainly belies New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's contention that the network is made up of prepubescent teenagers about to explode with acne.

In a recent meeting, a top executive of the worldwide PR company Burson-Marsteller said that he recently went to take a brief from a potential client, along with other PR company suitors.  The company's briefers told the agency representatives that they shouldn't bother pursuing the company's business unless they were on Facebook. The B-M exec immediately signed up.

The average Facebook user has 120 friends. However, occasionally one comes across a rhinestone cowboy who claims more than 500 friends, with more than a few celebs in tow. This person, we surmise, is merely spending his or her day trolling for friends, which is rather pathetic.

There is also growing discontent as to the trivial nature of much of the content. A status posting of "I am now going to brush my teeth" is probably not relevant to anyone other than the mother of a five-year-old.

A writer for CNN, Brandon Griggs, had some pretty interesting things to say on the types of postings that have become prevalent, dividing them into categories like the Self Promoter, the Friend Padder and the Town Crier.

Griggs says many of the posts read more like "navel-gazing diary entries" than the pithy nuggets that most friends would like to read  (See page XX).

I somehow have managed to accrue 240 friends, but, to tell the truth, I don't really know some of these people. They focused on me because they either have read a book I wrote, or somehow managed to land in the same profession, public relations and advertising.  Some are mere passing acquaintances.

However, if they took the time to ask me to add them as friends, then so be it.  I might need to borrow a cup of sugar one day.