We like to bring a range of stories and commentaries to the GG blog. What follows is as much for your stomach as your social network. And could do damage to both…
In the light of Facebook’s fifth birthday (yesterday) have you heard that the ‘King’ of the burger giants has created an application for Facebook that allows users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free Whopper. Is this a marketing promotion gone mad, a social signal that our friends are just our ‘friends’ (and therefore disposable in exchange of soggy bun and a pound of flesh), or a promotion of an unhealthy meal deal both for stomach and friendships alike?
Via the beef-cow King’s website there is also the social opportunity (suicide) to nominate friendships to ‘sacrifice’. On reflection, this has a disquieting effect. Increasingly mediated through a range of technologies friendships can be experienced as ‘quite different’ from those previous days when friends were made, sustained and broken across the playground.
Perhaps his majesty is making a valid point, where SNSs by their very nature have replaced the sanctity of friendship with a blatant disregard of their value and personal place in personal lives.
From its humble origins as a site to connect Harvard students as ‘The Facebook’, today 150 million registered users/friends occupy its social networking space and live out friendships in the full broadcast view of others.
On the flip side there are those (such as I can count on one hand) who doggedly dismiss, ignore and reject Facebook requests. Such persistence has to be admired. It would be hard to diversify as a Girl Geek without an accompanied (over) attachment to technology.
In the past there has been suspicion about purely ‘online’ connections – particularly if we recall the 1990s days of cyberspace full of chatrooms and online ‘dates’. At best such introductions represented exchanges that were ill advised and imprudent, at worst irrational and dangerous.
Where the Whopper wades back is acknowledgement of the level of participation. Friends cannot be ‘made’ unless both parties take action and accept the mutual invitation. However, it seems you can break friends all on your own and for the sake of a burger.
I’m tempted to conclude with ‘have it your way’, but then I’d think you would agree the marketing monkey’s have got me after all.
Image: Flickr unsureshot.
About Dr Mariann Hardey
I hold the position of Lecturer in Social Media Marketing at Durham Business School. I also spend too much time enjoying social technologies, media+ stuff. That'll make me a Geek then. And a gal.
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