Are we really friends?

The average number of Facebook friends a user has 245. This raises the question, can you really be friends with all these people. The use of social networks has allowed users to maintain their friendships with more people. However, the concept of ambient awareness develops as well. Ambient awareness is when you feel as though you are close with someone because of the constant updates on a social networking site.

Facebook allows me to know who my friends are with, Twitter lets me know when they are hungry, Pinterest displays their dinner recipe ambition, and Flickr shows me how it actually turned out. But the question is, do you really care? Probably not. Social networking sites and “check-in” apps make us believe that all this useless information is actually important.

"This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting." – New York Times, 2008

http://blog.ketchum.com/

Along with social networking sites, apps are becoming popular to keep tabs on your social circle’s whereabouts. According to the March 2012 Yahoo! article, the new apps are different from Facebook check-ins and Foursquare. “Ambient awareness apps help users discover friends, friends of friends or strangers who share similar interests who are in your vicinity.” There a wide variety of these ambient awareness apps are available now a few of them are, Banjo, Intro, and Sonar.

Personally, the thought of my friends knowing where I am at all times freaks me out but there are times it could be useful. When I got my first Twitter account I had a hard time figuring out what to tweet about because I didn’t think anything I had to say would be interesting enough. To be honest, it probably isn’t but I still tweet multiple times a day. My friends feel as though they are connected with me and know exactly what is going on in my life due to the constant micro-blog updates.

The use of the social networks and apps and the concept of ambient awareness are strengthening our weak tie relationships. We are able to send birthday wishes to high school classmates we haven’t spoken to since graduation or view pictures from your former boss’ weekend vacation. Even though the constant pointless updates from these people fill our news feeds everyday, it is actually developing a sense of closeness with each other. Just don’t admit to your weak tie next time you see them that you already know everything they have been up to.