Social Networking bites back
At the request of a friend of mine from my home town, I joined facebook. Initially, I thought it was pretty nice and within a few months, I managed to connect with various people that I’d lost touch with over the years including:
- Someone from my kindergarten class
- A girl-friend from high school
- A girl I had a crush on in high school (and who is now a detective constable)
- Several of the people that I still associate with whenever I visit my home town
- Various and Sundry people who I would consider acquaintances (at most)
Its that last category that has me in trouble now. Although I’m using facebook as an example, I’ve had the problem with other social networking sites (specifically linkedIn).
Here is the problem. I get “friend/network requests” from people who:
- I can’t actually remember at all. I mean, their name sounds vaguely familiar, but the picture (if there is one) doesn’t actually ring a bell.
- I don’t really like – the worst of these are people that I once worked with who I really think are assholes and who couldn’t do their job if their life depended on it
- Are really interesting (in a car-wreck kind of way), but to whom I probably shouldn’t associate
The quandary is what do you do with these requests?
For the first category, I normally just break down and add them as friends. We have a quick conversation about the weather or “what have you been up to for the last 2 decades” and then they fade back into the woodwork never to be heard from again – no harm done.
The second category is different. I generally just sit on the request for a while and eventually delete it. I believe that if someone hires these folks because of my recommendation, (I think that “friending” someone on linkedIn in some way “recommends” them) and they are still idiots, then my reputation is tarnished.
The third category is the one that has me in trouble now. Recently, the marriage of one of my friends broke down due to an extra-marital affair. I received a “friend” request from the “other woman”. For about a week, I sat on the request, weighing the desire for more information on the situation against the possible negative side-effects. I knew that should my friend’s wife find that I was communicating with this woman, she would feel this was in some way advocating this affair – which I do not. Eventually, however, the desire to get the other worman’s story won out over the more pragmatic side of me, and I accepted the friend request. Over a span of about one week, we had a conversation of 6 messages none of which increased my understanding of the situation at all.
Today, I received a chastising message from a friend who had looked at my profile and found that I was “friends” with this woman – it seems that this fact was spreading like wild-fire (and causing just about the same amount of destruction).
I care deeply for my friend and his wife and I like to think I would not do anything to hurt either of them, however, it appears thats exactly what I’ve done. I deleted the “other woman” from my friend list shortly after.
In summary, I think the right thing to do is to drive right on by that car accident on the freeway – don’t look over and don’t slow down. I wish thats what I had done.