Social Media & Facebook Friends: In Need of Defense
A new social media website wants to encourage us to follow the advice of our friends instead of complete strangers . With perpetual skepticism, sarcasm approaching warning levels, and being named yet again to People Magazine 's "Sexiest Curmudgeon of the Year" list, I've somehow accumulated more friends than I really should have. (O.K. so I may have substituted the word "messiest" with "sexiest" in the previous sentence.) And some of my best friends are strangers I have only corresponded with through social media; ones I have never met and not likely I ever will. If you think about it, you didn't really choose the friends you saw this weekend. More likely, they're your neighbors, your family, work associates, fellow students who sat next to you in Algebra class, or the parents of the other kids on our kid's team. We "promote" these people to friendship status due to their close proximity to our lives, their ti...