And that's just the way it sometimes seems, doesn't it? Of course, there would be many who would take exception and umbrage to the quote above--and more to the opinions, the provocations, in the remainder of the article. Among them would be my daughter and many of her friends, and many of the 50- to 60-somethings who find Facebook a social, emotional Godsend. It's all about connecting and reconnecting for them, which in itself is not such a bad thing.We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all...As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.
Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.
---"Faux Friendship," by William Deresiewicz, The Chronicle Review (12.7.09)
But for me, the jury is still out, but not by much. I've been on the FB site for about three months, but remain there primarily because of contact or access to only a few old friends who otherwise were not so accessible. I have 13 "friends" on Facebook; those are the only ones I have found there, anyway. And most of them are also on my group e-mail lists and have access to my blog site. Yes, and too often my Facebook page is just a place to post an abbreviated version of my lengthier blog posts to be read by people who have likely already seen them. And for those few others, the Facebook post is often so abbreviated that it loses most of its content and impact. But yes, I also get to passively stay current on some aspects of some people's lives. Some of it can be of interest, sometimes. And, there are also the pictures, the little photo albums that represent them and their lives. I often like the pictures.
Oh, and yes, I am too aware that my open Facebook profile page is also a place for any time-traveling voyeurs out of my past to find that my appearance is still holding up fairly well for a 60-something, thank you very much, and that I have managed enough success in life to avoid landing on public assistance. Vanity. Worse, vanity toward people I hardly know and likely won't have any contact with now or ever. They just want to look through the window, and I am happy to let them do it. I think I could do without that, don't you?
So, for the most part, I am sympathetic to the position and arguments of the author, Mr. Deresiewicz. I think that in large part, for many people, he is right. Most of my friends are not on Facebook--for all the reasons the article cites, I suspect. Those people that are there so often appear just passive observers of the banality of other people's everyday lives, people they are often not really close to and don't really care that much about. Don't read that as an insensitive or misanthropic sentiment. It's just that there are people who really are friends, people we share or have shared our lives with to a meaningful extent, and most others who are not. The rest are passing acquaintances, at best. Let's be real about it.
And more, at my wife's urging, I have more than once buckled up to my computer to chase down some once-close friend I shared life with in the long-ago past--a classmate, a Marine buddy, a mentor, or colleague--only to find that what we once shared was very much in the past, and could not be meaningfully carried forward to today. As I wrote in an essay a few years ago about such experiences, "I still love you and miss you—but in that time, place or cause we once shared together. And I'm still grateful for that time together, what it meant to me then and what it means to me now." But in too many cases, that was then, and this is now.
And then there is the PR aspect of Facebook, the all-but-blatant commercial or professional functions it serves for so many who operate under the guise of just staying in touch with their vast network of "friends." Please. Anyway, the article covers all that and much more.
But don't misunderstand. I am not against Facebook. I'm on it, after all. I recognize that for many people it is a meaningful, important part of their social lives--for some, it may even be indispensible and irreplaceable. For many others, it may provide a healthy complement to active, vital face-to-face friendships. Then, for those real friends separated increasingly by time and distance, it is likely a reasonable and welcome option.
Let's just be clear about what it is and what it isn't. As for me, I live with a palpable sense of unease about phenomena such as Facebook, the aspects of them that promise more than they are, and more, that actually deter you from realizing that promise: real friendship. And so, every couple weeks, it seems, I'm considering anew whether it isn't mostly a waste of my time--and whether I wouldn't be better off just working a little harder to stay in touch with those few other friends through e-mail, my blog, an old-fashioned phone conversation or, better yet--if possible--over a cup of coffee, lunch or dinner. Mr. Deresiewicz makes the point in his own way.
So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture. But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third. Yet even those are just descriptions, and no more specify the individuals uniquely than to say that one has red hair, another is tall. To understand what they really look like, you would have to see a picture. And to understand who they really are, you would have to hear about the things they've done. Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories.
Give the article a fair reading, if you would. If you are on Facebook, you might reconsider from time to time whether it plays a balanced, meaningful role in your relationships with real friends. Obviously, I do. (But, as of today, I'm still there.)
http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
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