I've had a Facebook "account" for something like nine months now - and I just discovered the option that shows me all the people I could potentially be friends with - based on the people I AM friends with.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I started to scroll through the names and pictures of potential friends expecting to find maybe fifteen or twenty. I stopped counting at two hundred and gave up at what I guess was somewhere around four hundred.
I couldn't imagine who I could possibly know who would in turn know all these other people. So I explored the link that shows me who the mutual friends are - and that's when, discomfited, I navigated away from the whole page. I felt like a peeping tom examining other people's private lives.
Now I begin to understand how I have come to get friend requests from people I've never heard of. I always thought such requests were really weird. It seems to me the proper first introduction should be a friend suggestion from someone I'm already friends with. The equivalent of: Hey, I'd like to introduce you guys to each other.
A friend request out of the blue... that's like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying, I've seen letters from you in my friend's mailbox. Want to be friends with me too?
You can wind up shaking hands with a rooftop killer that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment