The cruelty of...Facebook?

I joined Facebook. I'm certainly not one to exercise the "social" in "social networking", but there's a Facebook group for the families of my daughter's school, and just as I once did with beer, weed, and listening to Motley Crue, I succumbed to the peer pressure. (Only because the member I met was charming and interesting.)

So I start searching for folks I know, and looked to see if my friend Frank D'Andrea was a member. (Is that what they're called, members? Participants? Lemmings?) I found a variety of people who matched that name, but many of the profile summaries were too vague to determine if it was him, so I clicked on "view friends", thinking I could confirm the real Frank by recognizing those friends. This is what I saw:


Isn't there a more delicate way to say that Frank hasn't taken advantage of the friends feature than "Frank has no friends", period? It sounds like something an elementary student would say about the classroom nerd. (Or would have in the era that I went to grade school, before the dawn of political correctness, back when exclusion was a practiced art.) You can almost hear what comes next: "Because nobody likes Frank. Frank is a loser."

Couldn't it say, "Frank has not yet populated this page", or perhaps, "Frank is a lone wolf", or even, "Frank seems to find online friendships to be as tenuous and shallow as they sometimes really are"? Social networking sites put such a premium on having "friends" that it feels like high school all over, where the "most popular" superlative can be earned by cultivating acquaintances rather than deepening your friendships. Perhaps Frank likes to actually talk to his friends rather than communicate with them in 150-character text bytes---should the man be judged for that?

Poor Frank, a virtual-reality misfit. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.