Geeky Impresario | New Media, Comedy, Entertainment Insight by Frank McDade

Geographical location was a big deal at recess, I distinctly remember there were designated areas for each type of kid to mingle. For those of us that never had the opportunity to become the “Big Man on the Playground”, the time has arrived for us to take claim to our glory. Too often, I find myself on Myspace or Facebook connecting with people that I claimed I would never talk to again just to see my friend count raise one more number. We have limitless boundaries with social media.  The sad truth is the person on the other side of your friend request doesn’t have to deal with the awkwardness that is you, which leads me to be weary of how people look at those they interact with online.

Social Media websites thrive on the thought of users making as many connections as possible. These connections are commonly referred to as “friends” and the more that an individual has is the direct result of their popularity within their online community. As futile as online friendships can be, I feel as if they are only going to get worse. Users are connecting at rapid rates but those they are connecting to hold no true value to them outside of the online landscape. Meaning – you may have 345+ connections on Linkedin, but what will most of those people really do for you? If anything, your increase in friend count jams these websites linking strategies. They take the information formulated by you and your contacts and tie them together in to a nice little package.  With that package, they present it to users searching for those with similar interests. If the information on you and your “friends” pages are not similar and you have no real connection besides that of the online nature, it screws with their system and at times may provide faulty results.  There are automated systems that present you with certain people based on similar information, then ask if you would like to become their friend.

According to the Dunbar number, one person is able to effectively communicate with 150 people during a given period of time. With this principle in mind, anyone with over 150 friends on any given social networking site has obvious intentions other than friendship. Establish why you are online! What is your goal? Are you there for entertainment purposes? To reconnect with those you have lost contact with? Or to be another number on somebody’s friend list? The following is a chart developed by the website Life Without Alacrity that outlines social media friendships in correlation to Dunbar’s Number.

You can see that the the number of users with a considerable amount of connections stay fairly consistent until it hits around the 150 range. The peak on the right-side of the graph represent the people online that I am most afraid of. These people devote their lives to dominating the blogosphere with no foreseeable end to their madness in the future. If this chart looks the way it does now, imagine how it will look within the next few years! The power of these online friend feasters, along with the domination of social media websites, will create enough force to destroy a planet such as Pluto. Oh, wait. Not a good sign.

Actually, Social Media Website Digg has recently been deleting the accounts of those that are taking advantage of their website by posting an unconceivable amount of information just to gain populatirty within the website.  

As I sit and think about it, I wish that I could grow down and take claim to the portion of the playground that I was socially assigned to. By doing that, I would have created my own opportunity to become the BMOP (in my own little territory of course) which would have prepared me for the overwhelming world of social media interaction. I am declaring myself as a narcissistic self promoter. If you stumbleupon me in the web world ask why I am there, or why I am requesting your friendship. I will have an answer along the lines of “For the sake of sane online users everywhere, accept my friendship!” If we continue to allow people to clutter their way to the top of the Social Media platform of popularity, we only have ourselves to blame.