A Swedish daily newspaper (which I will not link to for reasons I might go into in another post) had an article a couple of days ago about a research report showing that people who spend a lot of time on the Internet don’t have more friends. Now, newspapers often misunderstand things and write about them from weird angles - I’ve been misquoted in that very paper myself - but I thought the way they reported the research was rather absurd. The researchers had looked at online communities such as Facebook and Myspace. Now, one of the features of those sites, as with LiveJournal which I think I wrote about some years ago, is that “contacts” are called “friends”. So from the article it looked as if the researchers believed that the users considered all their Facebook contacts friends. It doesn’t really take a research project to figure out that every person a user has “friended” at Facebook is not actually a “friend” — users add former colleagues, ex-boy/girlfriends, people they have met once at a conference but the application’s nomenclature only allows the designation “friend”. The same with LiveJournal, but even more so there: if you want to keep track of a person’s blog, you add them to your “friends”, even if it is somebody you cordially dislike, whose words you want to read to distort them in your own blog posts.

So it looks as if the researchers got blinded by the terminology. And the terminology is a problem, I agree with that, but I don’t believe that Facebook users have a problem realising that all the people they add as “friends” are not really their friends. The research included surveys which showed that 90% of people’s “friends” were people they had met in real life - well, of course. Sites like that are built around the ability to link to people you already know; there are other sites that are much more conducive to meeting new people. If that was discussed in the report, the article in the paper didn’t bother mentioning it.

And of course the paper couldn’t resist opening the article with the line “Real friends are not the same as Internet friends”. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, of course (and doesn’t really have anything to do with the article).