“Social Networking No Substitute for a Real Social Life with Real Friends.”
Last year, a friend of mine told me she’d signed up for a MySpace account. Recently divorced and with no family that lived close, she said she was a little lonely and thought it would help her find and make some more friends. I remembered that conversation as I was doing some research for this article, so I gave her a call and asked her to tell me about her experience with social networking. The first words out of her mouth took me by surprise. She said, “MySpace is no substitute for a real social life with real friends.”
She went on to say that she had recently cancelled her MySpace account because she was spending 4 or 5 hours every day on the site and she didn’t seem to be getting anything from it. I asked her if it was because she hadn’t been able to make many friends.
“Not hardly!” she said, “I had 1,247 friends listed on my profile page. Problem was, they weren’t really friends at all. I’d spend hours reading their comments and blogs and exchange the odd email with a few. One day it just hit me – I had all those MySpace friends, but I was still lonely as hell and sitting at home on the computer instead of having some fun. That’s when I decided to quit wasting my time on people that I really didn’t care about and who didn’t really care about me.”
