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Topic: Impacts of making friends on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, My Space, etc. and my thoughts

               If a group of classmates had first met each other five years ago, they would have had tendency to exchange their Yahoo! Messenger or Yahoo! 360 accounts. Now, a classmate would rather add friends through “mutual friend” application than directly ask his or her friends’ Face book accounts to befriend. Social networking sites like Face book, Twitter and My Space allow their users to have widener friend network even though they may not know who their friends really are. The simple mouse-clicking to befriend with someone, which seems to be harmless, actually has more meanings and impacts on its doers than they can think of, especially teenagers and adolescents. In this paper, I would like to give my own experiences and opinions reflecting upon the text “Meet My 5000 New Best Pals”, which is about the impacts of “friending” on social networking sites on teens and young adults. This article is a part of my fifth week’s curriculum about “Video Games and Cyber Culture” presented and instructed by Ms. Tran Thi Le Dung.

          The wiring mentions the impacts of “friending” on teenagers’ tendency of making friends on social networking sites, on their appraisals of their virtual friends and on their behaviors in real life.

Firstly, it claims that “friending” does not have any influences on real relationships of anyone; “real friends can never be replaced by online ones. Friending appeals to the ego, where friendships appeal to the conscience.” However, it does influence on real relationships if people spend most of their time using Face book, Twitter or My Space. They may feel interested in the way people from different continents and nations connecting with each other and together they discuss hot issues or play funny games such as Restaurant City, Hotel City, Farm Town, etc. Hence, they have less time for communicating with their real friends and families.

Secondly, the writer considers friends list on Face book or My Space as the mean that helps others to judge a person. In other words, friends list here stands for the popularity and somehow characteristics of its owner. Nowadays, it would be strange if a student in my university does not have an account on Face book, My Space, Twitter or any other kinds of social networking sites. I own at least one account for each popular site like Face book, Twitter, My Space, Yahoo! Plus, Google +, Zing Me but hardly use them except Face book and Twitter. When looking at my friends’ friends list, I can have general opinions of their characteristics thanks to what kind of friends they have and communicate most. If many persons in the friends list are students from the same university, that person has close relationships with his current friends. If most of them are old friends from high-school or secondary school, he may be somehow clever at managing long-term relationships. It would be cool if friending with ones who have many friends studying abroad or many foreign friends – except the case that they are friends in games – because this shows that those friends of mine at least have the ability to be friends with educated people. Thus, I can assess the general habit and background of a person by looking at his friends list. “Friending is a way of finding status and is the definition of who you are online.”


Thirdly, the size of friends list also has impacts on friending. There are three situations happens to the size of a friends list, it may contain a few friends’ accounts – usually less than fifty persons, it may be around a few hundred or it may be a long list which comprises approximately a thousand friends. Often, most of users do not want to make friends with the two extreme situations. The reasons are an account’s owner with a small size of friends list might be one who does not have interest in the site or does not like friending while one who has more than a thousand friends makes others think that he is over-popular or has a hobby of adding friends then never sends those friends a message. To me, it does not matter if my friend on Face book has only 20 friends or whether she has 1020 friends. My “criteria” for accepting a friend request on social networking sites are first, I have to know the sender in real life and second, I have directly talked with that person. I would prefer a medium size friends list rather than a large one, so now I have 151 friends on Face book and know all of them well. However, some of teenagers want to have large friends lists full of popular accounts. They tend to add friend with someone looks cool or famous people – hot girls, hot boys, teen models, etc. And if they cannot have these accounts in their friends lists, they will add all of “friends of friends”. “Some people used to collect pet rocks or trinkets or stamps and some people collect friends.” Thus, “friends” on social networking sites become a kind of collection and there is soon no friendship online.

I am used to censoring my list every three months so that I can control who can share my private information. Strictly unfriending after my birthday is what I usually do; I proudly keep ones who remember to send few words on that special day.  When I first played Face book, I had more than 800 friends because of playing games and unconditionally approving friend requests. Then I make a count of number of comments on each of my status it accounted for one over two hundredth of the number of friends. Furthermore, my mailbox was always filled up with games and applications’ notifications which annoyed me most.  Therefore, it does not make sense to add friend with someone who has large or medium friends list but whether that person considers us as his real friend.

On the other hand, friending has negative impacts on social skills and behaviors of teenagers and adolescents. In case they have problems with online “friends”, all they need to do is “unfriend” and “block” those accounts while in real life, they still have to face those persons, communicate and even work with them. To some extent, the habit of deleting ones who we no longer want to see in our friends list can lead to the eluding behavior in real life. Instead of trying to improve bad relationships, we would choose to “escape” from those persons as criminals! However, friending online is positively useful for keeping in touch with real friends who, for some reason or other, have to live afar such as my boyfriend living in the U.S with his family; owing to friending on Face book, we still can update news of each other every day and tighten our relationship. It might help us to have deeper friendships with ones we can only have simple conversations in life as well. Hence, it belongs to how we take advantage of friending in our social life.

The last problem that friending may cause is leaking of private information. The more friends we have, the less privacy we can protect. It is true even though Face book, Twitter as well as My Space have their privacy policy which allows us to decide whom we want to share our information with. Although I put strict privacy settings on my Face book account, it is quite complicated because I have to recheck the settings whenever Face book changes its appearance or applies new applications, and somehow the strict privacy prevents me from reconnecting with my high school’s friends if they do not have at least one mutual friend with me.

It would be better if we know how to control friending in a reasonable limit. Some teenagers seriously find friends on social networking sites because they feel lonely and isolated from the real society. However, online friendship is both interesting and dangerous because of its unpredictable progresses and unknown partners. In my thoughts, it is better if we make friends online with the ones we know offline – though we know well or not. First, we can enlarge both online and offline friend network. Second, we can learn how to deal with problems which might happen at any time in process of being friends, if we find it hard to solve offline, having heart-to-heart talk or sharing meaningful pieces of music may improve the relationship. Hence, do not let ourselves trapped line a prey in the spider-friend-net.

              Overall, I think it is necessary for users of social networking sites, especially teen ones, to be aware of what they are joining in and whom they are communicating with. Friending itself has both positive and negative impacts, or, we can see that it has no side function than a tool of entertaining and communicating afar. If we know how to use it as a mean to have fun and widen our real friend network, it will be useful for our social skills and behaviors.