Youth ministries exist in a world where students already have too many "friends."
The average Facebook user has about 105 mutually accepted friends, obviously more than any one person could keep up with in the physical world, but that's just the average. Many users have many more friends, and some are bumping up against the 5,000-friend ceiling.
The popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch recently posted a false alarm that Facebook was about to end a 5,000-friend limit, but the company has no plans to raise the limit in the immediate future.
On MySpace, however, "the term 'friend' goes beyond 'people I know in the world,'" says Steve Pearman, the company's senior vice president for product strategy. In turn, there is no limit to the amount of friends one can have. Comedian Dane Cook had 2,372,807 MySpace friends as of last week.
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Many questions about social networking revolve around the actual quality of these friendships and whether or not having so many online "friends" distorts a person's perception about their real life connectedness. "Instead of 'friend,' it might be better to say, 'I'm linked to you,'" says Clay Shirky, author of
Here Comes Everybody, a book about social networking.
Online linking has deep social implications, and as one's friend list grows, so do problems. "People judge each other by whom they list as friends."
"It's socially awkward and very hard to draw the line," says Danah Boyd, a researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
More friends in this world may indeed actually lead to less connectedness and more anxiety.
Discussion StartersWhat's your opinion on the usefulness and dangers surrounding online friends? Could you design a youth group activity involving Facebook or MySpace friends and use it to talk about true community? What would you do?
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