‘Cyberclinic: With Friends Like These…’ by Rhodri Marsden, talks about social networking sites and friend collectors. They are the ‘people who have an overwhelming desire to either feel, or appear, massively connected to an enormous matrix of human beings’. He mentions the fact that he has been ‘friended’ many times by a number of people who he has no connection to or acquaintance with. Whether generated by ‘friend bots’ that automate friend requests, or by people who are attention craving or just curious as to who you are and what you do, these friend requests reveals a Facebook culture that revolves around numbers and lists. There is focus on how many ‘friends’ you have, and what types of people make up that friend list.

Facebook culture reveals an important question: ‘What is a friend?’ Before, a friend could be defined as someone you can trust and depend on, regardless of the situation. But in this social network culture found on Facebook, MySpace, and other numerous sites, the term ‘friend’ goes from having the traditional definition of a friend, and expands to contain those of acquaintance, and even, stranger. This article reflects on the concept of popularity and the endeavor of trying to achieve it. In this case, a number of individuals rely on numbers in their quest for fame and popularity. They try to do so by raising friend counts by friend requesting all types of people, whether or not they actually know that person. The difference between a ‘popular’ person and an ‘unpopular’ person can be very large, yet in some circumstances, not very great at all. Within social networking culture, many people seek to make the ambiguous jump from a ‘regular’ person to a ‘popular’ person by becoming connected with many people by accumulating a large friend list. Even though this idea of randomly ‘friending’ people can seem strange, it provides an interesting example of the six degrees of separation. You may very well find a connection with this random friend requester by finding out you have mutual ‘friends’. Although this connection may actually be artificial and fabricated, it can be exciting to see how small the world can be, at least online.