Are you joining chat rooms left, right and centre? Adding people you think look interesting online, but you've never met? Or, perhaps you're divulging your most intimate thoughts to strangers online because they are your closest friends? Course you're not, that would be ridiculous.
Heralded by some parents and purists as the antithesis to real friendships, social networks have had their fair share of criticism from the old guard. But does the claim that the likes of Facebook simply creates a large network of 'nobodies', rather than a tight knit group of 'somebodies', have any truth in it at all?
A recent series on BBC Radio 4 looks at the 500 years of friendships and it has found that, like generations before us, the newest ways to form and build friendships, simply nurture and add value to the relationships we already have. Friendships haven't always been the same, in the 18th century it was unusual to have friends outside your family group and those which were could be considered dangerous. In the 19th century this changed with smaller families and widespread school enrolment resulting in more people building relationships outside the family group. With the most recent move online, the BBC suggests that this is just another way of deepening existing friendships and widening your net.
As someone who has recently reconnected with some old school and uni friends, I can't agree with this more. Social networks are a great way of creating a trail of breadcrumbs back to friendships that perhaps life got in the way of, and of enhancing friendships that are already in full flow. Long gone are the days where you 'grew apart' from friends. Generation Y, with social media at the end of its fingertips, isn't going to let that happen (unintentionally, at least).
While social networks have the potential for random relationships and connecting with people you don't know, so too does life. The scope for strangers to coincidentally become friends isn't any more of a culture in the digital world than the non-digital. Apart from the fact that there are likely more people within reach, and therefore a greater number of potential relationships to be formed. And, let's not forget, this all depends on how you want to use social networks – the vast majority of people do so only to solidify existing friendships.
In fact, if we have more friends, know more about our friends, and interact with them more, could the answer actually be that our generation just has more 'somebodies’?
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