Facebook has built its business around our relationships but as the site turns 12, are we just too busy for the emotional labor of real friends?
When I was a little girl, everyone at summer camp was going to be best friends forever. A few weeks away can feel like a lifetime to an adolescent, and the minor trials of those times homesickness, secrets, social crises, skinned knees loomed large. Camp would conclude with group sing-alongs, tears, the exchange of addresses, and earnest promises that the closeness and unity formed in those endless sunny days would last forever.
Of course, it never did. Reality set in once you got home to your parents and the regular neighborhood kids, and your thoughts turned to new notebooks for the school year and whether you got prettier while you were away and whether your crushes were going to notice. You always meant to write, meant it in your heart, but you never did. I still vividly remember getting in the mail a package from a camp friend containing a pen-scribbled loyal letter, pages long, and a tiny box of plastic earrings I received it with equal measures of shock and guilt, never having expected such an earnest delivery on her promise, and wholly unprepared to reply.
But that was a lifetime ago. As an adult, almost everyone Id like to see again is at my fingertips. I can add them on Facebook, a way of mentally storing them to catch up with later. Once I was out at a club and made my way up to the front of the crowd to dance. There I smiled at another girl, struck up a conversation as the music swelled alongside us, fatefully. I should warn you, she said, twinkling, Ive met all my best friends in the front rows of shows.
We exchanged phones and added each other on Facebook. I see her in my feed now; sometimes I like her travel photos. But in the months since then, we have not become best friends. We have not interacted again, and we have not gotten any closer than we were that one night in the front row of the show, and perhaps its inappropriate that I keep the line of contact open in the same way I keep it open to my coworkers, my close family, the people who read my personal updates and the links to my work. Maybe this is symptomatic of how the possibilities of social media have just made our friendships shallower, an economy of likes and thoughtless adds.
Real friendships, of course, take effort and time, things my long-ago camp friend spent to write that notepaper letter and to package and mail a jewelry gift. The effort I never paid to reciprocate. My most important relationships werent forged in accidental meetings or through social media gestures, but through years of long-suffering emotional labor on one anothers behalf calls across time zones, long letters, scraped-together plane tickets, screaming fights and reconciliations. People can grow up to be very different from you, leading very different lives elsewhere in the world, and yet they remain immutably your friend for always, because of the love and effort you both gave and received. You cannot replicate that on Facebook, no matter how many times you click like on someone.
Theres this idea that technology has made us distractible, and that its ruining our relationships with other people. We ought to put down the phones, some say, so that we can really spend time together. Its a shame, everyone says, that this new generation seems so addicted to likes and follower counts and favorites that they have lost their inner compass, and that, lost in our devices, we are robbing our fellow human beings of attention, humanity and true friendship.
But theoretically, as a human creation, technology cant exist as some entity separate from society and will always be a natural extension of ourselves. By some methods of quantifying intelligence, each individual in the western world is now smarter and more capable than ever never again will we have to memorize, guess, or bluff in order to share knowledge, because weve invented a device that holds the answer to any single question at our fingertips. What some characterize as distraction may be a new, device-supported ability to process many kinds of information and interpersonal connections at once, where before we were trapped within ordinary human limits.
What if devices and social media have done the same for friendship? Young girls today will never feel the overwhelming sense of obligation and regret I felt at the prospect of returning my camp-friends letter, writing by hand, buying a gift, going to the post office they will be able to add their best camp friend, and every camp friend, on Facebook. And in most cases there is no superficiality to my Facebook friendships my colleagues are globally distributed, my precious childhood friends and I are thousands of miles apart, and yet every day I can briefly see and contact all of them, where I might lose them from my life otherwise.
As the cost of living soars and the standards our parents enjoyed disappear in the rearview, we are working harder and longer whatever the promises of technology and efficiency. Our spare time, our emotional energy, seems whittled to a finer point than ever. Whether or not we suffer from anxiety, we all have less time than we once did; we are all offloading our emotional and intellectual labor onto devices, and Facebook has become a priceless tool to make sure we do not lose anyone in the transition.
I still sometimes feel the same pang of anxiety and guilt that I felt when I opened that little box of glittering plastic so long ago. I should keep more in-person plans. I should do more with and for these loved friends in my life. I should think more about who my real friends are, and less about my internet acquaintances. Yet who is real anyway? Is it really only an internet acquaintance if this is how many of us sustain one another?
Maybe in some senses this is the new face of friendship. I would like to send more physical letters. I would like to do the emotional work required to stay involved with my real friends. But Facebook makes it so easy to keep in touch with and to have brief but genuinely meaningful contact with the people I care about that for once, no one gets forgotten, and the list of people who actively matter in my life just gets longer and longer.
When life is hard and time is precious, does it matter on which terms someone is here for me, so long as they are?
Read more: www.theguardian.com
