How many friends do you not really have?

A few months ago, I started getting paranoid about the number of pictures featuring me going up on Facebook for the world’s consumption. Suddenly it was possible to meet me on a Saturday and by Monday be perusing pictures of myself aged 6, 18, or 21. A potted history of the Groover all contributed by unreliable witnesses, snapping off shaky digital camera shots and publishing them with little thought of whether I thought it appropriate to be pictured maroot in hand or with my arm draped around some hapless girlfriend, long since ashamed to have known me.

When the number of such photos reached 48, I decided to take definitive action, locking down my profile to a Fort Knox degree, so that it is now pretty much impossible to view anything more than my name and my profile photo. You can’t write on my wall, and I certainly won’t be joining any efforts to kill vampires, cowboys, gangsters, or super poking you.

Then I tuned out of Facebook completely. It had become infested with people I hardly knew insisting that I was their friend. It felt rude to refuse them, but I began to realise that I was collecting up faces for my virtual book, without ever emailing them. A sort of human Pokemon where the playing cards were all people who I had talked to once at sixth form and never ever thought about again. Some of my real friends (primarily those in doss jobs or unemployment) are still in their element with it, firing off wall posts and collecting items for their aquariums, but mostly they fall into the easily distracted category, just killing time, or poking about with other human relations because the boss is out for the afternoon.

I’m being a bit cynical, because I do see that there is fun to be had with this social networking thing. I do still check it every couple of weeks for salient communications from people who I do actually know, but whose email addresses I’ve lost. I’m just saying I’ve stopped counting how many friends I don’t really have.