Don’t be a cyberwhore
March 16, 2007
Last week in BECA 300, my professor for the class, Kathy Skillicorn brought up the topic of MySpace. She pointed out that it is a sign of status on MySpace to have as many friends as possible. I’m sure that there are those who will accept a friend request from anyone who asks, just to watch the number go into the thousands on their profile. This has not been my approach at all.
If someone I don’t know asks for a friend link, I will write back and ask nicely what interested them about my profile that they want to be friends. The reason is that I want to make sure that I am only making connections with people that, if I met them in the real and not the cyber world, I would really want to be their friend. This is my way of maintaining integrity in an impersonal medium.
One of the nicest things about online community is that it is possible to connect with new folks that one would not ordinarily meet, because of distance and time constraints. One need only be brave enough to put forth a sufficiently representative public face and be open to possibility. The pitfall to avoid, I think, is to allow immediate gratification and relative anonymity to erode standards of interpersonal conduct. Abraxas
I so agree with that statement that people add friends on myspace as a sign of status. Why do people think it is a popularity contest? It’s so ridiculous.
People can pretend to be anyone they want to be on the internet. It would seem that this myspace popularity contest is equivalent to people making make believe friends to impress other make believe people. I agree it is ridiculous.
I totally agree! I will admit though, i have a myspace account and I look up friends that I have not seen in a long time. But one other thing that I did in the fall with other classmate had to do with making mocked up profiles on myspace to see if anyone would add us. It was crazy how many people added us and they had no clue who we were. SO yeah I am with you on this one.
If you have a music page on myspace then you probably want to add as many people as possible so that more people will hear your music. Or if you have a personal page and are trying to make business connections then it is also a good idea to add lots of people, even if they don’t seem to offer anything valuable to what you are trying to do at first. Of course everyone will know that a person doesn’t have 10,000 real friends. I think trying to network with real friends becomes harder with too many myspace friends clogging up the inbox and bulletins.
I agree with you about music pages and business connections, but I know that I don’t go to people’s pages and look at how many friends they have as a sign of status. If some random girl I don’t know is trying to add me, I’ll check her friends and if she has only five friends, I know it’s probably a made up profile. But other than that, I never pay attention to how many friends someone has.
Man I am with you guys on this. People add random people whom they ahve never seen just to make their number of friends skyrocket which I guess makes them cool. Its so stupid. How can you trust someone you dont know and let them check out your personal information?