Friends Indeed?

You Can Pick Your Friends, but . . .

Life was once so simple. "I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour," went the "Friends" theme. "I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too."

Today, when you join a social network, the first thing you start questioning is if you really want to embrace every "friend" request. Such promiscuity's downside quickly becomes obvious. Do you really want every petitioner -- no matter how unclear his identity or intent -- to see your revealing personal information? Much less those pictures of Ashley, Courtney and Jason from last Saturday night?

There's this girl at school "who won't even say 'hi' in the hallway," says a 16-year-old junior at a Washington high school who desires anonymity for fear of social ostracism. The aloof girl keeps asking to be a virtual "friend" on Facebook, arguably the most sophisticated popular site, no matter how often the answer is no.

This junior struggles with the relationship dilemma. "Why would I want to be 'friends' with this person? I occasionally smile at her. I guess it's kind of really impersonal to me, if she's not even going to say 'hi.' " The high schooler says she's "selective in acceptance of friends" -- she has "only" 131 on Facebook. But if she had a relationship blow up, on the shoulders of how many could she cry?

"Probably like 20," she says.

For two decades, online social networks have been touted as one of the finest flowerings of our new era. But what is the strength of ties so weak as to barely exist? Who will lend you lunch money? Who will bail you out of jail? Who's got your back?

A remote Wyoming cattle ranch was home to Internet pioneer John Perry Barlow when he was a boy in the '50s. In the '80s, when he encountered the first settlers of online communities such as the Well, he felt like he was back in the small towns he once knew. He reveled in the throngs "gossiping, complaining . . . comforting and harassing each other, bartering, engaging in religion . . . beginning and ending love affairs, praying for one another's sick kids," he once wrote. "There was, it seemed, about everything one might find going on in a small town, save dragging Main or making out on the back roads."

He has since developed a more jaundiced view of the Internet's utopian promise to dissolve barriers between people -- "the reason I got involved in that stuff" in the first place, he says.

Barlow hoped for "a distinctly 19th-century understanding of what community was. Where it was not just bail you out of jail, but stand behind you with a loaded gun -- the Wyoming version." Instead, he sees people collecting and displaying enormous numbers of "friends" on MySpace, "for the same reason that elk grow antlers, I expect."

As part of his firm's "online strategy," James C. Courtovich, 42, managing partner of a Washington lobbying and public relations outfit, recently joined Facebook and had a small team take the 3,000 names in his address book and cross-reference them with everyone there. The overlap was "shocking," he reports. "I expected my niece, but not the chairman of The Washington Post. At my age I expected a tenth of a percent." Instead, he found 7 percent of his world there: "Capitol Hill types, journalists, friends I'd not seen in years."

Do you consider these people your friends? "Some friends are more equal than others," Courtovich says. To him, this network is no more than Washington business-as-usual -- "an online cocktail party without having to stay up late or drink alcohol."