Your Friends are Pokemon

I first noticed that I was a slave to Facebook when I was talking to a friend of a friend. We talked casually for a while, in the normal 'getting to know you' way, eventually touching on whether each other has a Facebook account. This seemed perfectly natural, however, on reflection, I could see that I had actually been working towards this question for the entire conversation; I wanted to breech The Facebook Threshold, and add this person as a friend.

This was not the first time I had considered the possibility that I have been trawling my friends friend lists just to increase the friend count on my own profile, rather the first time I have accepted this seemingly innocuous yet worrying prospect.

Speaking to my own friends, I find that this trend continues: many of those with more than fifty friends have actually collected people that they don't consider to be friends with any more - people from their pre-school days that are now 25 years old or more, and that they haven't spoken to or seen in the intervening period.

Maybe it's just our social vanity getting the best of us, but escaping from this arms race feels almost impossible from the inside.