(Planet S Magazine, December 31st, 2009)
The Changing Face Of Friendship

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES MEAN MORE — AND LESS — FRIENDS THAN EVER BEFORE
by Charles Hamilton

Another night, and once again I’m neurotically checking my Facebook account — sifting through friends’ photographs, reading their innocuous updates on the news feed, clicking on funny links and scrolling through the chat list to see if there is anyone worth talking to.

Right when I’m about to close the window, a friend from high school messages me — and when I tell him I’m writing an article about social networking sites, he laughs out loud at the coincidence. At least, I think he laughed out loud — I can’t really tell, since he lives in a different city and we haven’t actually seen each other in years. We haven’t really talked either, we’ve just typed back and forth. If it weren’t for Internet, I would be hard-pressed to claim that he was actually my friend.

Which brings us to the issue at hand.

There’s no doubt that social networking websites (also including the likes of Myspace and Twitter) have dramatically altered the social landscape in the last decade — and not one of them has had more effect on the modern conception of “relationships” than Facebook.

Since its inception, Facebook has grown from just under one million users in 2004 to over 350 million today. According to the website’s own statistics, the average user spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, and one-tenth of all users update their status every day.

All that “Face” time (sorry…) has turned it into one of the most profitable websites around. The company’s worth is estimated at $10 billion, and huge software giants like Microsoft have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into it, betting that it will soon surpass Google as the number one destination on the web.

Evidence of Facebook’s success can be seen everywhere. The common phrase “I’ll Facebook you,” for example, has earned its place in the long list of grammatically incorrect Internet verbs — right up there with “Google it.” Facebook messaging (or Facebooking) is well on its way to replacing email, while Facebook event promotion is outshining the effectiveness of postering for rock shows. Overall, it’s become more than just a way to keep in touch — it’s become a lifestyle, and in some cases, an obsession. (Trust me — I’ve even found myself thinking in “status updates” now and then.)

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the popularity of Facebook isn’t what it says about our collective attention deficit, our predilection for exhibitionism and voyeurism or even our love for the idea of social media. It’s what it says about what we now consider to be “friendship.”

For example, I have 895 friends on Facebook — and according to the website, that’s six times more than the average user. But does this mean I’m more popular than the average user? Does this mean I have more meaningful or intimate relationships than the average person? Do I actually have more friends?

Probably not. Sigh.

Much has been written about Facebook and its affect on friendships, with everyone from psychologists to Internet pundits weighing in. The argument usually goes like this: on the one hand, you can keep in touch with people from around the world in an easy and accessible way — hence, Facebook is improving friendships. On the other, the ease of being a virtual “friend” (not to mention the fact that some people apparently compete to have the most “friends”) is devaluing the idea of friendship. Or, to put it another way, in the same manner that Google and Wikipedia, for example, provide us with more accessibility to information than ever before yet possess the very real potential to make society dumber, Facebook is making our friendships less genuine.

People like American literary critic William Deresiewicz have taken that line of criticism further, claiming that Facebook is causing the very nature of friendships to devolve — essentially saying that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we forgot how to be friends with anyone. Fair enough, perhaps: the vast majority of the 895 “friends” I have on Facebook aren’t in fact close friends of mine — and generally, they aren’t even people I know very well.

Deresiewicz even goes as far as to claim that these aren’t real people; instead, they’re “little dehydrated packets of images and information.” His Facebook friends, he says, are “no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.”

It’s hard to disagree: there are many people I never see in real life, but I follow them on Facebook because their online lives are interesting (more interesting, probably, than their real lives). Still, at least for me, it’s hard to say that Facebook is devolving or devaluing the idea of friendship. I mean, I still have “real” friends, don’t I?

Looking at it from a more positive perspective, the rise of Facebook coincided perfectly with my early adulthood — those few awkward years where more like-minded people replace those “not really your friend” friends you had in high school. Facebook was the perfect tool for me to separate myself from the latter group in a relatively guiltless fashion — even though I’m really just reading their innocuous updates, I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned them completely.

And that, in fact, is the thing I love about Facebook (and ironically, perhaps, the thing that might just prove much of what critics have said): I can keep in touch without actually touching. It’s friendship at a distance, where the awkward obligations to acquaintances no longer exist. I still get birthday wishes from old bosses or people I knew from high school, and I still send them — even though we all had to be reminded by the little box in the corner of the screen.

As inane as it perhaps is, Facebook lets us know that the world is still going on — that we still exist in a society of people who consider us friends, even if they aren’t friends in the flesh, so to speak. Just to be clear, I do have real friends, in real life. Some of them have Facebook and some of them don’t, but this doesn’t play heavily into the relationships we maintain. Still, I like Facebook: I like looking at photos and posting links and getting messages from people I never really see anymore.

Overall, I remain at a loss to say whether or not that’s bad thing. I guess virtual life can sometimes be just as complicated as the real thing.