Oh boy have you hit on an issue that is a powder keg issue for me. I absolutely detest the whole 'friends' thing on LJ and especially FB. I could go on about it for a while, but what it boils down to for me is the effect it has on the very young (still learning what social interaction is) generation. My niece (19) counts her number of FB 'friends' several times a day. She measures her worth by the number of comments she gets to status updates. She has never even met most of these people, but she gets depressed or happy over them (and not just the drama the interactions sometime cause, but just the existence/non-existence of them).
The (bigger) problem is, she think RL is like this too. She is living with a boy, with whom she has a child. If he annoys her, even in the slightest bit, she unfriends him by moving in with someone else, taking the child with her. I asked her if she thought this was a good way to teach the child to resolve conflicts (not that an infant is probably learning much, but I thought she should be thinking about this) and she told me that she thought it was. If people don't go her way, then the hell with them. When they start thinking/doing things her way again, they can be friends again, until the next disagreement.
She sees absolutely nothing wrong with this. And this is the person she intentionally planned and chose to procreate with--they treat each other this way and see it as perfectly normal. She also treats employment this way and has never held a job longer than a few months. Neither have any of the people in her RL high school group. They are all very similar and treat their group relationship as very come and go. I see no evidence of any of them being true friends with another human being. I just don't get it.
no subject
The (bigger) problem is, she think RL is like this too. She is living with a boy, with whom she has a child. If he annoys her, even in the slightest bit, she unfriends him by moving in with someone else, taking the child with her. I asked her if she thought this was a good way to teach the child to resolve conflicts (not that an infant is probably learning much, but I thought she should be thinking about this) and she told me that she thought it was. If people don't go her way, then the hell with them. When they start thinking/doing things her way again, they can be friends again, until the next disagreement.
She sees absolutely nothing wrong with this. And this is the person she intentionally planned and chose to procreate with--they treat each other this way and see it as perfectly normal. She also treats employment this way and has never held a job longer than a few months. Neither have any of the people in her RL high school group. They are all very similar and treat their group relationship as very come and go. I see no evidence of any of them being true friends with another human being. I just don't get it.