Will You Be My (Facebook) Friend?

OK, enough of gods, goddesses, cardiologists and the beings that they impregnate. Those cardiologists will never listen to me any way. Soon everyone over 50 will be on a statin! Anyway, back to the humble world of emotion, psychiatry, and the question of…

…will you be my friend?

That’s right, folks, facebook time. And blogging. Front and center.

I had a story about the ‘will you be my friend’ quote but it isn’t appropriate for public consumption.

Anyhoo, you know what I am talking about. Using your mouse to point your cursor at someone’s name on Facebook and then waiting for their response, and then…

…voila! You have a new friend!

[heart goes pitter patter, etc]

I have become ‘friends’ with people I have never met, who ‘friended’ me because they read my book, and then ‘introduced’ me to others who had written books on similar topics, or had similar views, or were liberals like me, and I became ‘friends’ to them site unseen. I found the exchange all quite exhilarating, liking being at a fancy ball. It didn’t matter much to me that I had never met them. I just liked reading their posts, causes, status updates. And for old college friends and the like the where are you now stuff is kind of interesting.

My fellow shrinks blogging on ShrinkRap have written about the psychological meaning of facebook.

I agree with them that you should not “friend” your patient, your doctor, your children or your parents. You can, however, friend nieces and nephews, siblings, spouses, old schoolmates, and (disagreeing with them, I feel that if you want you can friend) people you have never met but who share similar interests.

As I wrote on their site, facebook is a way for vapid narcissists (such as myself) to form weak relationships with others through the internet. In my “book” it is fine to friend people you don’t know who share a similar interest, in my case health and drug news.

However, I have attempted to ‘friend’ others who had similar interests, who responded:

Hi Doug, Have we actually ever met?

To which I had to reply in the negative, although I said I had read his writing, and sent him a link to my blog, which he never responded to, which left me with a feeling of…

sadness… [head down, sniff]… emptiness (especially since Mrs. Bremner is away at the AHA this week)

Which leads me to the next topic, being ‘out there’ on the internet.

A friend of mine was sending some of my post to a yahoo group and so I joined, not knowing anything about these groups. And then when I quoted some of the things they were saying someone said they felt ‘violated’ because these comments were not for public discussion. She informed me that the ‘rules’ were that comments in the ‘group’ were private.

I realized I really knew nothing of these ‘groups’ or whether the comments were public or private. I needed Emily Post for the internet.

Here is another example. In my initial enthusiam for my blog when I got copied on emails for health related things I would put people on my email list. I posted that they should say ‘unsubscribe’ if they wanted off. But I have since learned that some people think that is a violation to have to say ‘unsubscribe’. So I no longer put people on my list unless they ask. Now I have figured out RSS feed (say Dinosaur, Duh!) people can choose for themselves.

And if you want to get off of this list say *unsubscribe* or f**k off!

Or, if you don’t take me off of this list I will blog about you! (real comment)

Ciao.

[Originally posted November 11, 2008]

COMMENTS

Great blog as always Doug!

Check out the Wikipedia link for facebook.

With the advent of social networking, an irony is occuring. On some such site, one may share intimate details about themselves and their lives, yet have not spoken with their neighbor across the street since last year. Is is because we are bombarded with [information from the internet]

Greetings from the Shrink Rappers!

Dinah on the web site Shrink Rap pointed out her post on psychiatrists as bloggers here.

And I got the quote of the day therebased on my comment that psychiatrists are not magicians or mind readers and cannot be blamed for all the adverse reactions our patients have to psychiatric drugs which led to a lively ongoing discussion on that site.

btw the person I blogged about agreed to be my friend! [not sure if he read my post first though]