A friend and I recently discussed the fact that with the advent of Facebook we had somehow managed to escape many good old fashioned emotions. Specifically we were talking about the concept of missing someone. We had both made recent connections on Facebook with people from our past. Someone who had been somewhat influential. Someone who we often had wondered about, perhaps somewhat whimsically, and remembered with fondness but who was now just a memory. Upon learning they were still alive (because without Facebook you might as well be dead, right?), we were flooded with memories. I found myself really missing this person, regretting losing touch and trying to remember how we had and thinking about our past friendship more than was probably healthy. Of course it didn't mean we were friends again in any way that mattered, Facebook just gives us the ability to try and stalk whatever public virtual life they make available and pretend that might make up for the person’s absence in our real life. When expressing this to another friend, she suggested it was because we simply are not used to missing people, and she’s right. With Facebook we are able to keep daily tabs on people from our past, we are able to stay somewhat informed about their lives, we are able to convince ourselves that we never really lost touch because we feel like we still know them – even if the truth is we haven’t actually spoken to that person in years, even if we have relied on Facebook to allow us to fabricate these friendships. We can tell other people about them as if we know things, report back to other people on things in their life, as if we have any basis for our statements. It has somehow allowed us to believe we are friends with people we are not really friends with. We don’t miss people when we still feel as though we still “see” them, even if they are only in our lives in a completely artificial sense. Even if we only know the things they choose to share with 500 other people on the internet, it is enough to keep our hearts from feeling the emptiness it might otherwise feel if we were not connected to them, even in this somewhat contrived way.
And, that isn’t too say we can’t reconnect through social media even in a real way, we can and we have. Through both linked in and Facebook I have indeed rekindled – to a certain extent – friendships. And, I know people have become extremely close friends (again or for the first time) or started relationships as a result of this ability to connect with people they used to know. It is an easy way to keep tabs on people we care about, to remind us when we need to call, to fill the voids that occur due to our busy lives. Instead of just an email here and there or a phone call every couple of months we are able to pick up without skipping a beat because we are not completely in the dark about what has been going on with these friends. Indeed, it sometimes serves as a reminder that we do miss someone, that it’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, since we’ve really talked. A picture posted of a good friend’s baby that you haven’t gotten the chance to meet yet, can do wonders in the guilt arena, but, a glance at a Facebook page can’t – or shouldn’t – replace those phone calls, it shouldn’t eliminate the need to have real conversations, to plan trips, to know the things that none of us would broadcast on the internet.
Of course, this also leads to questions such as what if Facebook disappears, the way Friendster and MySpace did (at least disappeared as far as real social networking sites are concerned, now MySpace is generally associated with music and Friendster seems to be some type of gaming site) but with no replacement, what happens when we move on from this type of social media? Suddenly we go from having this minute by minute connection to people (albeit a surface level connection) to knowing nothing about them. There are definitely people who I recognize I am only Facebook friends with, some are people from my past and some are friends of friends (some are people I apparently went to high school or college with and keep meaning to delete but haven’t gotten around to doing so), but if I deleted my Facebook page or someone erased all of our Facebook pages, I would have no way to get in touch with them. No email addresses, no phone numbers, I’m not even really sure where many of them work. This then begs the question of whether I would even care, whether I would notice. Other than missing the procrastination tool that Facebook has become, would I find myself missing any of these people whose virtual presence I had taken for granted?
I already question the ability of kids growing up in this age of technology to truly cultivate any real relationships. Remember when we were in high school and we had to – gasp – speak to our friends on the house phone? That meant, not only were you constantly at the risk of mortification at the hands of your parents or siblings who might beat you to the phone and insist on speaking with your unlucky caller, but you also had to be prepared to speak to your friend’s parents any time you called their house. I truly believe that you simply haven’t gained the same level of character, if you never had to call and ask for a guy or girl and hear their father yell across the house “it’s you girlfriend/boyfriend” upon which you promptly died a little inside. With the introduction of cell phones, kids never had to deal with a friend’s parents. In fact, now you don’t even need to speak to your friends. With bbm and text messages, most people don’t even pick up the phone. Granted, I am as big a fan of the text message as the next girl and - to send a quick message, to try and set up easy plans, to send a one-liner, they are certainly more efficient than dialing a number – or rather clicking on a name, we don’t even know people’s numbers anymore. I once went a day or two without my cell phone and realized the only people I could call if I wanted to were basically my parents or my ex-boyfriend (whose number I had long since deleted from my cell phone but I annoyingly could not erase from my memory), I hadn’t been forced to memorize many other numbers. Today we create entire friendships without even requiring the face to face interaction. Kids go home from school and talk to each other on the computer, rather than spending time together or having a real conversation. I’m guilty of this too, I’ll go months without really speaking to some of my closest friends because I’ll speak to them almost daily via Gchat or check the updates on their Facebook page and as a result won’t feel as guilty when I’m too lazy to actually make a call when I have the time to. Thanks to Gchat and Facebook I will have the artificial sense of being caught up with their lives, a somewhat manufactured closeness.
Texting, Facebook posts, tweets and an occasional email have become our primary form of communication. People don’t just pick up the phone anymore. People conduct entire friendships via written words. We have gained the ability to completely lose our voice. Intent is often lost without expression and inflection. What effect has this had on people’s relationships? Face to face meetings have been replaced with the internet. We no longer have to think on out feet, react immediately, say what we mean without first analyzing the correct response, discussing wording with a cohort - we are able to truly manufacture so many aspects of our life. I am embarrassed to admit how many times I have artfully crafted a text message response to a friend’s object of affection at the request of such friend because they don’t know what to say or prefer my wit to whatever their response would be. And while I’m not suggesting people didn’t always put on a bit of charade in the beginning of relationships – both social and professional, this ability has been truly exaggerated in the current age. We are able to mask our true selves for much longer; we are able to create entire personalities that we control from the privacy of our room. Protected by the computer screen in front of us. Of course, you might have beat me to this next thought – but this phenomenon has led to the prevalence of online bullying that has become a constant on the news, with the resulting suicides, the questionable parenting skills, the confusion over how kids could be so cruel. People are able to act in ways they would never act in person courtesy of the shield of a computer. We edit our thoughts in ways we never did before and delete posts as if they were never said.
I went to my high school reunion about a year ago and realized how utterly pointless it was. Thanks to Facebook, the entire need for small talk had been eliminated. What have you been up to lately? Oh, never mind, I know – congrats on your wedding, your new job, your kids – I’ve seen so, so many pictures of your kids. The concept of a reunion survives entirely thanks to the ability to engage in small talk. As you can imagine, with no better options, we drank heavily and fabricated friendships the old fashioned way. We woke up the next day with pounding heads and no intention of speaking to the many people we promised to hang out with. While I truly appreciate many aspects of Facebook , and barely got through the 3 weeks it was blocked at my office, I do question what it has done to our ideas of friendship, our ability to accurately feel certain emotions, the way it has encouraged our laziness and general complacent-ness. I do think that the overwhelming amount of new technology, while helpful in so many ways, has weakened our personal relationships. I do fear that the ability to have so many virtual friends blurs the realities of our social lives, helps us believe we have many more significant relationships than, in fact, we do, keeps us in many ways from feeling lonely while ultimately making it easier to find yourself alone. It has been said many times that New York, while being one of the most populated cities in America (if not the most populated, I haven’t checked stats) can also be the loneliest and the most isolated. It’s hard to imagine that being surrounded by so many, many people, you can find yourself so completely alone. With Facebook, we’re also able to keep up appearances. To look as though we have lots of friends, to trick ourselves into thinking we have relationships that don’t fully exist. The truth is we may have hundreds of Facebook friends, but if we're spending our Saturday nights alone, is anyone believing the façade? Are we believing the façade?
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