You're sitting at the bar having a great conversation with someone you just met. This continues for upwards of 30 minutes until one of you pays your tab and commences with the standard "It was nice to meet you" departure speech. Do you exchange phone numbers? Email addresses? Home addresses? Work schedules? No. Instead you ask, "Are you on Facebook?"
You really have to be at least minorly ignorant to deny the fact that Facebook has completely changed the way we interact with each other. For one thing, we're doing it all online. Forget the telephone or actual face-to-face contact. Just log into your account and you have instant access to hundreds, even thousands of friends with the click of a mouse.
Social media has created this other world existence for users. You don't just talk to your friends anymore, you chat with them on Facebook. You don't play board games aymore, you tend to your farm in Farmville. And forget about sending birthday cards through the mail, just write a happy birthday message on someone's Wall.
However, the luxery of being able to create an existence in the online world is not without its awkward moments. And I believe a lot of those awkward moments are created through the act of friending (God, Facebook even has its own vocabulary....)
The first rule for making friends on Facebook: there are no rules. You can literally befriend anyone you want even if you have never met them before. Instant popularity right at your fingertips. But what is one to do if a friend request is ignored or worse yet.....denied?
I really don't know of too many people who track their friend requests. But I'm sure they're out there because deep down a lot of people are highly insecure and want, above all else, to be liked. Using the logic of more friends on Facebook means I am super cool, they will send friend requests out like they're gong out of style. But even if you don't fall into this obsessive friend collector category, do you still find yourself feeling slightly hurt when a friend request is ignored or denied?
I'm not going to act tough here, so I will admit to having felt a small sense of bitterness when this has happened to me. It brings up a lot of questions about what should stay in the online world, and how much of the online world can be brought into our everyday interactions. For instance, does one confront the individual about the friend request? Should a joke be made out of the situation? Or are you supposed to pretend like the friend request was never sent or at least never given a second thought? Do friend requests live and die only on Facebook, never to be brough into the light of the real world?
Thank you, Facebook, for creating yet a whole new level of social awkwardness that we as humans are so not prepared to deal with. I am not big on confrontation so, 9 times out of 10 I will go with the avoidance/denial route if I happen to see someone in person who has more or less rejected me online. The idea of calling someone out because they have not admitted to liking me online makes me want to unfriend myself.
But say you pass the test. You send a friend request, the request is accepted, and your total number of friends continues its steady incline. A couple months go by and you decide its time to reconnect with this person by browsing through their status updates and newly tagged photos. You find their profile photo, click, and discover that this person has, for one reason or another, removed you from their friend list. Ouch. How can this be? It's only been two months....where did you go wrong?
Moral of the story: if you cannot maintain an online "friendship" with a person, you can just forget about forming a genuine friendship with the person in real life. If someone is not interested in getting to know the "online you" where interaction is completely optional and non-committal, there is no chance the relationship could survive without the buffer of the computer screen.
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