Social networking has had, without a doubt, a net positive effect
on our lives. However, if I had to pick my biggest regret about this
technology, it would be that it has caused us to distort the meaning of
the word "friend." When you meet someone in real life, you would
probably not immediately consider them a "friend." A "friend" is
someone you genuinely care about and whose company you genuinely enjoy
and actively seek ... and vice versa. If the feeling isn't mutual, then
the person is not your friend. If being around someone is a chore,
then you are not their friend. If someone invites you into their life
but you don't want to be there, then you are not their friend. If you
feel that you only have to be nice to someone because of what they can
potentially do for you, then you are not their friend.
If I could
change one thing on Facebook, it would be the misuse of the term
"friend" to describe people on your contact list. Really, how many of
your Facebook "friends" meet the above description? Probably very few.
How many people that you call your "friends" in real life even meet the
above description? How many people could you really count on if you
needed them? How many people could really count on you if they needed
you? When I think of the people who I could call if, for instance, I
were bleeding to death and needed a ride to the hospital, the list fits
on the fingers of both hands (as they say, a friend will help you move,
but a real friend will help you move ... a body.)
I have 300
Facebook "friends", which is not really a lot compared to some people,
but when I look at that list, I see a lot of people with whom I really
have no relationship in real life. There is nothing wrong with that, in
and of itself, and sometimes it can be a blessing in disguise. On rare
occasions, I discover that I have something in common with someone I
didn't really know outside of Facebook, and we can use that as the foundation for a
friendship in real life. Other times, however, too much information
about a person is not a good thing, and it can have the opposite effect,
driving a wedge between two people who got along fine in real life.
Facebook is sort of like a virtual cocktail party with hundreds of
people, but each of those people can hear every word you say. Thus, it
is inevitable that, unless everyone keeps their guard up, someone is
eventually going to get offended. To be clear, I'm not preaching about
any mistakes that I haven't myself made 100 times. The more I participate in Facebook, though, the more I realize that, unless I'm going to limit my
Facebook contacts to just people I know well (and where's the fun in
that?), then I have to avoid saying anything on Facebook that I wouldn't
also say to a room full of people I barely know. At this point, I have
to ask myself whether the person I present to people on Facebook is
really me anymore.
I started using computers to do social
networking in the 1980's, before the term "social networking" was even
invented. We had what were called "dial-up bulletin board systems"
(BBS's) back then. A handful of people would set up a second phone line
and a dedicated computer (usually a Commodore 64 or an IBM PC) in their
house, and they would use this computer to run a special type of server
software whose feature set bears more than a passing resemblance to
Facebook. Unlike Facebook, however, only one user at a time could log
in and post things, and other users would have to wait for them to
disconnect so they could log in and respond to the posts. BBS's had
online games (a proto-Mafia Wars, even), file sharing, and online chat,
although the only person you could chat with was the SysOp (system
operator.)
There were a few big differences between the group
dynamics of these BBS's and modern social networking, however. The
first difference was that BBS users were almost all local, so if you
found out that you had something in common with one of them, it was
pretty easy to meet up in person. The second difference was
that you always had something in common with the users of the BBS, just
by virtue of being a user of the BBS. Not many people participated in
these forums, so it was a very tight-knit community. Pretty much all of
my close friends in high school came from this community. We would
frequently get together to swap software and work on our computers, and
sometimes we'd even take weekend trips up to the lake so we could swap
software and work on our computers in a more scenic environment. The third
difference was that there was a sense of accountability. You didn't
want to offend anyone in the community, because there was a good chance
that you would either be barred from one or more of the BBS's (of which
there were few) or that you'd have to face that person in real life at
some point. Most BBS's set up dedicated (and usually anonymous) fight areas in which users could let out their aggressions, with the understanding that nothing said in those areas was to be taken personally.
Flash forward two decades, and social networking is
no longer just a hobby for shy geeks who have trouble meeting people
through "normal" means. Now, social networking is one of the most
common ways in which we interact with people, particularly if you're
a member of Generation X or younger. Social networking is a great tool,
but like any tool, it can be misused. I tend to fall into the trap as
well, and posting this is, as much as anything, a way of reminding
myself not to. The problem with the advent of online relationships is
that it has created a phenomenon that I will refer to as "the disposable friend." This is not
just Facebook's fault-- it is a trend among our society in general.
Ease of contact with a variety of people gives us a false sense of
friendship. We are led to believe that we have a ton of friends, so why
should we bother to put any effort into any one relationship? Why
should we compromise? Why should we resolve any differences we may have
with one of them? If someone starts annoying us, we can just ignore
their e-mails, send all of their calls to voice mail, and pretend they
don't exist. If we're really annoyed, then we can defriend or even block
them on Facebook. We are no longer required to settle our differences
with people in our personal lives. We can choose to congregate only
with people who agree with us, and these congregations will then become
more and more polarized, insular, and elite. However, when we choose to
do this, we run the risk of creating what Vonnegut, through the voice
of Bokonon, called a "granfalloon." A granfalloon is a group of people
who appear to have something in common on the surface but whose
relationship with each other is actually shallow and meaningless.
Contrast that with Bokonon's "karass", which is a group of people who
are working toward the same goal, even though they may not know it yet.
These days, when we have interactions with someone from outside our enclave, we
often don't even attempt to find common ground with them. Why
should we? We can retreat to our enclave and find plenty of people--
and even entire TV networks and publications-- that make us comfortable
by agreeing with everything we say. But are the people in our enclaves
really our friends?
Facebook is, in some ways, an effective
means of breaking down cultural barriers and exposing ourselves to new
ideas. However, if we forget the cocktail party analogy, Facebook can
also tend to amplify and distort the differences between us. For
instance, I've spent entire weeks enjoying the wilderness with people
whose politics I know are 180 degrees apart from mine. We simply
didn't discuss politics, and everything was fine. However, when we
friended each other on Facebook, we got into knock-down, drag-out
debates on each other's walls. Sometimes too much information about a
person is not a good thing, and sometimes it is entirely possible to
have a meaningful relationship with someone in real life with whom you
could never get along on Facebook. That was one of the first things
that we learned from the BBS's-- people's online personalities are
rarely the same as their in-person personalities.
Another thing
we learned pretty early on was the importance of face time in cementing a
friendship-- as well as establishing accountability. You could chat
with someone for hours and still not really know them as a person. It
wasn't until you met them in person that you figured out what they were
really made of. From that point on, whenever you saw their handle on
the BBS, you could relate it to a real flesh-and-blood form, to someone
who had real feelings. Before that point, it was all too easy to say
something online that you would never say in person. The importance
of face time hasn't changed in our modern society, but what has changed
is the frequency of it. Even with the BBS's, you'd probably interact
with at least some of the users in person several times a year (and some
of us hung out with each other several times a week.) However, I've
had two jobs in the last ten years in which I've seen my boss in person
less often than this.
Enter social networking tools like Meetup,
which are geared solely toward creating face time among people with whom
you share a common interest. Sometimes these relationships evolve into
true karasses, and other times, into granfalloons. However, until you
have that face time, there is no way to be sure. Facebook seems to lend
itself more toward creating granfalloons than karasses, and I think a
lot of that hinges on our misuse of the word "friend". Facebook was
originally intended as a platform for people who already had a
relationship in real life to keep in touch with each other and find out
more about each other. However, most people (self included) don't use
it in that manner. We use it as a sort of "acquaintance aggregator", so
being someone's "friend" on Facebook isn't the same as being their
friend in real life. Yet, the use of the word "friend" conveys a sort
of artificial status to the relationship. Be honest with yourself-- do
you get offended if someone defriends you on Facebook? Probably so,
even though that person may or may not have met any stretch of the
definition of the word "friend" in real life.
There are pretty
much only three things that will make me defriend someone on Facebook:
(1) posting offensive (particularly racist) material, (2) using
information gathered from my Facebook wall against me in real life, and
(3) engaging in personal or ad hominem attacks (i.e. not fighting fair.)
I've defriended a total of 8 people in my FB career, 6 for these
reasons and 2 that were collateral damage. Most of them were people I
barely knew or did not know at all in real life, and I had always
wondered why they wanted to be my Facebook friends in the first place.
However, a couple of them were people with whom I did have a
relationship in real life, and unfortunately, Facebook drove a wedge
between us. Sometimes, too much information about a person is not a
good thing. Friending someone on Facebook does not make them your
friend in real life. Likewise, defriending someone on Facebook does not
mean you can't be friends in real life. It just means that, for
whatever reason, you don't want to read someone's innermost thoughts, or
you don't want them reading yours.
If you were in a room full of
people and you knew a lot of them disagreed with you, you would tend to
tread lightly with respect to certain issues. You probably wouldn't
put up a big sign in one corner that said the president was a socialist
or that people who don't subscribe to your religion are un-American,
unless you were deliberately trying to make people mad or drive out
those who disagreed with you. A friend would do neither. Friendship is
knowing that someone disagrees with you but wanting to hang out with
them anyway. It is respecting differences in opinion and trying to work
past them and make the other person feel comfortable, because you know
that there is more that you like about them than dislike. Friendship is
being honest and upfront when someone does something to tick you off,
rather than just ignoring them and hoping they will figure out what they
did wrong.
In short, I think that I have gained more from
Facebook than I have lost, but I truly regret what I have lost as well.
If you've read this far, then I'm genuinely surprised, so I will just conclude
by saying that social networking, if used correctly, can be a great
tool for building real-life friendships. If used incorrectly, however,
it can also be an effective means of destroying them. Facebook is never
a substitute for face time. Tread lightly.
