As regular readers will know, I have an interest in the sociology of the Internet. As someone who has been nominated for awards on the basis of her online writing, I should try to understand the medium in which I’m working. I was therefore fascinating to learn about a study which finds a strong correlation between watching reality TV and “promiscuous friending” on social network sites.

The idea here is that in an increasingly celebrity-obsessed society many people’s social networks contain a significant number of people that they have never met and who don’t know them, but rather are famous people who they have seen on TV, read about in celebrity magazines, and whose blogs they follow. This isn’t new. My grandmother got like this in her later years. She was prone to saying things like, “a friend of mine told me,” when a more accurate statement would have been, “a character on Coronation Street said.”

This also relates to something I’ve been saying for some time about reviewing. If you talk about book reviews online you’ll find a lot of people saying things like, “I don’t want to read reviews by some supposed expert I don’t know, I’d much rather get a recommendation from a friend.” But if people regard high-profile authors as their “friends”, then a recommendation from such a person will do a lot of good for a book. In terms of marketing, it will probably be far more valuable than anything someone like me might write.