Scott Brown's Essay Facebook Friendonomics

In Scott Brown’s essay Facebook Friendonomics, he discusses the idea of infinite friendspace and friend hoarding as allowed by social networks and what he calls the “networked world” (para. 3). In his essay, he mainly criticizes how these networks have turned people and relationships into a kind of social “currency” that follows the same rules as financial relations: more is better, but the more you have, the less worth each friend holds (para. 3). Friends are no longer people with whom one has a relationship or connection with -- instead they are simply collectibles that are infinitely preserved in the folder “Friend” (para. 2). Thus, social networks allow people to hoard friends through a kind of “friendonomics,” as people grow more and

5). By never losing touch with acquaintances made throughout life, we lose what has made “good old-fashioned” losing touch so good (para. 5). We lose real friendships and “long-forgotten photos and mixtapes” (para. 5). Without these natural aspects that are so important to friendship, friends have not only lost their worth, but the whole point of a friendship has been lost as well. Arguing that losing touch is a necessity of friendship, Brown suggests that maybe the issue could be resolved if only social networks would create a “Fade Utility” app that would allow unintended friends to gradually blur into a sepia cast, similar to the way unintended friends naturally fade away from our lives (para. 6). Maybe if networks treated friendships the way nature does, providing opportunities for people to reach out to lost friends if they choose, then online friendships might hold the same meaning as natural friendships, where the title “friend” is not just a banner of status, but a position in a