Friend Request (5 Stars)

This is one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Pure terror. The film starts slowly, like most good horror films do, but the atmosphere is so intense that it draws the viewer in from the beginning.

The film has a modern premise. In a university Psychiatry course there are two girls who use Facebook. Laura has more than 800 friends. Marina has 0 friends. No, it's not a new profile, as the other girls suspect. Nobody wants to know Marina. The story begins with Marina sending Laura a friend request. At first Laura wants to decline the friend request, because she doesn't know Marina except for seeing her in class, but she accepts out of pity.

From this point on, Marina becomes obsessive. She considers Laura to be her best friend, but the feeling isn't mutual.

Facebook is a social media platform that was launched in 2004, but it's become controversial in recent years. The program's creator and the company's owner, Mark Zuckerberg, is now one of the world's richest men. His position has been reached by allowing companies and individuals to advertise in Facebook. In general I dislike advertisements, but I understand why they're needed in a program like Facebook. The program is free for its users, so the money to maintain it needs to be made from other people, like advertisers.

I consider Facebook to be a wonderful tool. I used Myspace, another social media program, in the early 2000's, but it never interested me in the same way. As far as I remember, I created my Myspace account in 1998, but I have no idea when I last logged in. Maybe 2003, I don't know.

I created my Facebook account in early 2010 on the prompting of my daughter Fiona. She told me it was something fantastic that I really ought to use, and she wanted to be my friend. Sure, why not? I spent a few weeks looking for old friends that I'd lost contact with, mostly my old school friends from England. I also added a few friends who were people that I knew from Second Life. (That's a subject worth talking about in future). It wasn't until 2011, a few months after I started writing my blog, that I became a frequent Facebook user. For me Facebook became the place where I promoted my blog.

The beauty of Facebook is that it can be used for whatever you want. For me I'd divide my regular usage into 60% talking about films, 20% writing against racism and intolerance, 20% joking. There are many other things I write about briefly, but they're not regular issues.

One of the things that Facebook is frequently used for, especially by younger people, is as a sort of popularity contest. The whole communication concept of Facebook is that people talk to their "friends", but the acquisition of a large number of friends can become a goal in itself. In the film Laura feels important because she has more than 800 friends. This gives her a false sense of security. How many of her "friends" would be there for her if she were in need?

I try to avoid the popularity contest aspect of Facebook by sending as few friend requests as possible, only to genuine friends, or at least people I know well. I've also opened my profile up by making all my posts public. Anyone at all can read what I've written and reply to it without being on my friends list. It wouldn't matter if I had 0 friends.

"Friend Request" is as much about deleting friends as adding new friends. When I began this post I intended to tell a few anecdotes about people who have unfriended me. (I have never unfriended anyone, apart from a few accounts which had been inactive for years). I'll save that until the next time I watch this film..

Success Rate:  - 0.9

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