The one huge problem I have with social media is the disturbing trend of people adding absolute strangers to their “friends” lists just for the sake of having more friends than other people they know. While queuing for a ride at Alton Towers I overheard someone’s daughter whom couldn’t have been much older than maybe twelve or thirteen brag about having more than seven hundred friends on facebook to her friends and obviously everyone else within earshot in the line; this sort of behaviour is frightening for one reason: you do not know many of these people!
I have kept the friends list of my facebook pretty low profile, within its exclusive pages contain the names of actual people I know, have known (went to school with, ex-colleagues, university friends, etc) or friends of friends met at parties whom I keep in touch with. At most I have at any one time less than two hundred people linked from that list and have no inclination to grow more because its already an impossible task keeping up with the amount of information blasted at me on an hourly basis, as it is.
As it stands, we as a culture are growing ever more information saturated and I can only presume that more events such as that depicted in the above screen shot, will become ever more prevalent to those of a younger and more impressionable age, caused simply due to our natural instinct to one-up everyone else and add people we do not know, giving them access to our personal space and information.
