Too Many "Friends"

One of the great attractions of social media is that you can have hundreds of acquaintances - called "friends", "followers", or just plan "virtual people I know but have never met."  Suddenly you are meeting people all across the world.  It feels, well, connected.

Except that, sadly, you are not.

For any of these services, the more people you have, the more you flow through their radar and the more they flow through yours  Suddenly, your last act is not an act that people see and react to but one of fifty that just runs together in their feed of the moment.  All of these stories become nothing more than a background tide of information, flowing and ebbing across the brief moments that people engage with it.

It is not these people are "ignoring" you (probably not, but there is always a small group that does) as they are just overwhelmed by the amount of information that is coming through - and unless you have been marked as "important", you are likely to get lost as background noise.

Suddenly, those hundreds of connections are completely meaningless as they are not really connections or "friends" but rather statistics.  And you have simply become one more of them.

No wonder so many people feel so disconnected and alone in this age when we are more connected than ever.  We have become not people and relationships, but bytes of information scrolling across a screen and we nothing more than a value, a number to be either bragged about or forgotten about but seldom engaged.