Facebook friends you can(‘t) count on

“Probably like 20,” she says.

For two decades, online social networks have been touted as one of the finest flowerings of our new era. But what is the strength of ties so weak as to barely exist? Who will lend you lunch money? Who will bail you out of jail? Who’s got your back?

A remote Wyoming cattle ranch was home to Internet pioneer John Perry Barlow when he was a boy in the ‘50s. In the ‘80s, when he encountered the first settlers of online communities such as the Well, he felt like he was back in the small towns he once knew. He reveled in the throngs “gossiping, complaining ... comforting and harassing each other, bartering, engaging in religion ... beginning and ending love affairs, praying for one another’s sick kids,” he once wrote. “There was, it seemed, about everything one might find going on in a small town, save dragging Main or making out on the back roads.”

He has since developed a more jaundiced view of the Internet’s utopian promise to dissolve barriers between people — “the reason I got involved in that stuff” in the first place, he says.

Barlow hoped for “a distinctly 19th-century understanding of what community was. Where it was not just bail you out of jail, but stand behind you with a loaded gun — the Wyoming version.” Instead, he sees people collecting and displaying enormous numbers of “friends” on MySpace, “for the same reason that elk grow antlers, I expect.”

Some encounters can be novel and strange. Jessica Smith, 23, remembers the time someone she’d never heard of from Vassar tried to friend her. It happened when Smith was an undergraduate at George Washington University and had just started dating her boyfriend, Peter. Turned out the stranger was Peter’s ex.

“There was nothing friendly about this,” she says. “She only wanted to know about me.” When Smith didn’t fall for this probe — like it was the ex’s business how cute she might be, or clever — “a friend of hers friended me. Like that would trick me — ‘Ooo, a new friend from Vassar!’ It was weird. Really creepy.” Before social networks, “she wouldn’t have called me, or written me a letter.”

Stitched together

We’re inventing Friends Next every day.

“For most people, when they thought of their close friends, it was people with whom they would share personal things,” says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist at MIT who has studied online social networks from their beginnings. “What’s changing now is that people who are not in the other person’s physical life meet in this very new kind of space. It is leaving room for new hybrid forms.”

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