Facebook friends you can(‘t) count on

Malaklou, 22, acknowledges that if she ran into some of her “friends” on the street, she might not remember their names. When she went to Duke, where “I was quote unquote popular,” social life was so competitive that sometimes invitations were based only on online determinations of how hot a person was, and whether her “friends” were cool.

Now that she is working at a Washington nonprofit, Malaklou is planning on pruning her “friends” as a rite of spring cleaning, defriending people who have come to mean little to her.

She does stay Facebook friends, however, with professors who might be good for letters of recommendation to graduate school. “The biggest value-added is that it helps maintain relationships — somewhat superficial but not worth getting rid of,” she says.

The word “friend” has long covered a broad range of relationships — roommates, army buddies, pals from the last law firm, old neighbors, teammates, people you used to smoke dope with in back of your high school, people you see once a year at the Gold Cup, scuba instructors and carpool members, along with fellow gun collectors, Britney fans and cancer victims. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “freondum” back to “Beowulf” in 1018, and “to be frended”to 1387.

But MySpace and all the hundreds of other social networking Web sites, from Flickr to Twitter to Bebo, have caused us to think afresh about the boundaries and intensities of these relationships.

Never before in history has it been so easy to keep up with so many people with whom you otherwise would have lost contact. These new electronic meshes are more than mere improvements over alumni magazines, holiday cards with pictures of families and those horrible letters about their lives, Rolodexes, yearbooks, organizational newsletters, and birth and death notices in the newspaper.

Summer friendships, for example, have been transformed. The ritual of meeting again at the beach after a long winter was once marked by hours of catching up. Not today. Networked people who haven’t seen each other in forever already know about the new boyfriend, and what happened to the old one — in very great detail. They also know about the old school and the new job. They have known, every day, no matter where in the world they roamed, the instant that emotional change occurred. Now, after the initial squeals and swaying hugs, conversations pick up in mid-sentence. It’s a mind-meld uncanny to watch.

This is a world of “participatory surveillance,” says Anders Albrechtslund of Denmark’s Aalborg University in the online journal First Monday.

Real online friends watch over each other — mutually, voluntarily and enthusiastically, in ways that can be endearing.

Others have referred to it as “empowering exhibitionism,” Albrechtslund says.

You can pick your friends, but ...

Life was once so simple. “I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour,” went the “Friends” theme. “I’ll be there for you, ‘cause you’re there for me, too.”

Today, when you join a social network, the first thing you start questioning is if you really want to embrace every “friend” request. Such promiscuity’s downside quickly becomes obvious. Do you really want every petitioner — no matter how unclear his identity or intent — to see your revealing personal information? Much less those pictures of Ashley, Courtney and Jason from last Saturday night?

There’s this girl at school “who won’t even say ‘hi’ in the hallway,” says a 16-year-old junior at a Washington, D.C., high school who desires anonymity for fear of social ostracism. The aloof girl keeps asking to be a virtual “friend” on Facebook, arguably the most sophisticated popular site, no matter how often the answer is no.

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