"A friend to all is a friend to none"
(Aristotle)
Isn't social media an amazing phenomenon? I must admit that I am not a big Facebook user and only started using it as a way of maintaining easy communication with my kids when they started to move away to university. I'm not a big fan of 'technology for technology's sake'; there has to be a purpose or a good use to put it to.
But it seems to me that Facebook is seen by many, particularly the young, as the keystone of their identity: without it they do not exist or they will be excluded, overlooked and on the fringes of all that's good and exciting in the world. Kids are not officially going out with their boyfriend or girlfriend until Facebook states that they are 'in a relationship'; it actually needs to be written down in their profile! Facebook has become so ingrained in society that some young people (not all, of course) measure their self-worth by the number of 'friends' they accumulate and the image they portray in their online space. I wonder how many people have been made to feel somehow inadequate if they do not have hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook?
I know for certain that the quantity of 'friends' on Facebook says nothing about a person's ability to make friends, be sociable or have high self-worth. Isn't social media giving our young people the impression that they have a large circle of friends, while in reality they hardly ever see those people in person or even speak to them on the phone? Are they really friends or was Aristotle right when he said "a friend to all is a friend to none?"
What do you think?
