Facebook – a help for nurturing old relationships, not to establish new ones

I recently found a message on my Facebook profile from a person from Miami, USA, who I never heard of until that day. I instantly recalled a blog post of an acquaintance of mine, who wrote about the dating experience in the ‘’online’’ era. He explains that in the past, people met face-to-face and a man would ask a woman for her phone number. Relationships were more restricted and there were more boundaries. Then came the Internet and its tools like the now died out IRC and the Messenger. By then, we didn’t ask each other for our phone numbers, instead we asked for each others nickname on the IRC or our e-mail address on the Messenger. The other person still needed to respond to that request, and that lead to more contact or none whatsoever. Now, with the rise of Facebook, we don’t even need to ask the other person for his or her permission, it enough to know his or her name and last name or a few of his or her friends.

And now I asked myself where does this lead to. In the past the contacts between people were more genuine, you communicated with people, who you actually knew and wanted to talk to. Your privacy is there for all to see and even if you restrict you privacy settings that only your ‘’friends’’ can see your information, you know it is still somewhere out there. Now you have 500 friends, most of which you know just by name or which you met only once, and you can see their most private information that they share on Facebook. The relationships became looser and even with those friends, that are our real ones, the relationships aren’t the same. In the past, before all the modern technology, we could easily agree upon where and when we will meet and that was that. Now, when we have all this technology in our reach, we more often postpone or even cancel meetings (often with the excuse that we will meet on the internet tonight or the day after). Mobility gave us too much power, that we are using when it suits us (and I am not saying that this is wrong most of the time). Don’t get me wrong, I think the modern technology, including mobile phones and social networks are great, but only if you know, why you are using them. We should think of Facebook, for example, as a tool to nurture and to evolve already created relationships and not to create new ones. If we use it for our search for new relationships or for other things that are missing in our ''real'' lives, we are missing its point...