The Multiple Friendster & The Single Ego
In a recent visit to his Friendster page, I found out
that a close, relatively new but physically distant friend has a second account.
At first, this struck me as normal. One can have too many friends that a single
account couldn’t accommodate all, and so they needed another one which instantly
earned them the status– Internet‘s friendliest people. It’s their prerogative
and the maintenance team behind this site never really had silly rules like one-is-to-one.
But when I found out that my friend’s second account was under a different name
(his real first name that I never knew of or asked curiously and not the
pseudonym he’s been known to me which was based on his profession), I had a rethought
and asked myself, hey, why do some people need two Friendster accounts?
Some probably live a double life. They don’t need superhero
costumes to make Tony Stark’s Friendster page different from Iron Man’s but
they needed an account for people that know the real them on a personal level like
family, friends they’ve known for a long time, their closest officemates, their
SS (special someone) who they keep in touch on a regular basis. This to them is
“the first class Friendster”.
Then “the other Friendster” could be for those people they’ve
just met casually but never intended to be known deeply on a personal level. It
has become a system of segregating or controlling the people that enter their lives.
Like when they meet someone new and ask if they are on Friendster, they would provide
the details to add them in ‘the other” account. This may appeal to most as a
friendly gesture but underneath it is an unintentional and subtle form of discrimination.
The true friends and self-confessed Friendster addicts whose
last login status seems permanently “within 24 hours” would add you on both on “the
first class” and “the other” account. While some of these multiple Friendster account
owners who never really do a weekly assessment of their friends will never
realize that some of those in “the other“ account deserved the promotion to the
“first class”.
On the other end, some of us just have that undeniable
pride that we don’t want to do the first move of applying for the “first class”
with the fear of being denied of the exclusivity or being questioned for our purpose.
We heal our hurt egos by reasoning that not all the
thumbnail faces we see every time we login to our Friendster accounts, are really
the friends we know. Or maybe, our expectations on some of them betray us
because they are not just simply friends to us,
