Do I want to be your friend? Who are you, anyway?

I'm part of the vast social networking site that is facebook.com. Within the past couple of days, I received a request to become "friends" with someone. This person is someone I'm pretty sure I've never seen in my life. His name is not familiar. He goes to the same university I do, so I guess we have that in common. He is not, by any stretch, my friend. If he punched me in the face, I wouldn't say "Why did you do that, friend?" I'd say, "Ouch! Some clown just punched me."

Perhaps the point of this site is to make new friends. And I might consider making this guy a new friend, but he doesn't mention anything about himself. Just a sterile "Mr. X has added you as a friend. Confirm?"

Some people add anyone they can lay their hands on. I blame the site, since it numbers how many friends you have, and how many other people you connect to through friends. Six degrees of separation on steroids! But I have no interest in adding people simply because they also happen to be named Andrew Schwartz. I've received about four requests from various Andrew Schwartz's to be their friends. They're from other universities and I've never met them before. I will never meet them. If I look at their pages and see that they have no interests that interest me, I have no desire to be their "friend".

It reminds me of the old Beatles fan clubs. If you join, you get a newsletter. Plus, you get to feel closer to people you would never meet otherwise. The modern equivalent is being friends with a band, comic, or television star on MySpace. Actors and musicians have profiles run by their People, and if you just shoot them a request, you can be one of Eric Clapton's friends! Wow, I'm friends with Eric Clapton.

Except that Mr. Clapton doesn't know my name, doesn't know what I look like, and likely wouldn't buy lemonade from my stand even if he was thirsty and FOUND fifty cents in the grass.

Ahh, modern friendship! Good thing I have numerically more friends than YOU.