Unhappy Friendings

There has been much ink, electronic and otherwise, spilled on the problems caused by social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, et al. Some points made are insightful and relevant in my opinion, hence my Living Out Loud posts. Others verge on Reefer Madness-like hysteria. So I try to limit how much I opine about social media. If you use these things in accord with their nature then I believe they cannot be very harmful. But it is possible that for many people, understanding the true nature of "social media" may be extremely difficult.

I think one of the problems with Facebook is the use of the word "friend". To become someone's friend on Facebook means that you're willing to share information on your Facebook page with that person. That's all. It doesn't mean anything more or less than that, and there is no alternate meaning. There might be a strong correlation between those who constitute one's real friends and one's Facebook friends, just like there is a strong correlation between religious people and people who protest against abortion. But to be religious and to protest abortion have two separate meanings. Likewise, a "Facebook friend" and a real friend are two very different things, and when the definition of "Facebook friend" is explained as I did above, it is not difficult for the reasonable person to see the difference.

By the way, this is why I prefer the LinkedIn.com site to Facebook. On LinkedIn, you "invite people to connect", you don't make a "friend request". Thus the terminology is much closer to the actual process which is one of granting access privileges.

Most people intuitively realize that posting things on the internet and letting certain people see what you posted has very little to do with friendship. So some might argue that I'm belaboring the point here. Really, isn't this obvious? But I think we need to go beyond intuition about this, especially if we are raising kids and have to explain to them, for example, why we don't publish family secrets or personally criticize someone on a Facebook page. As we know, what is obvious to adults is not necessarily obvious to children. And since social media was not around when we were growing up, our first impression of it will definitely be very different than that of our children.

To further clarify the difference between friendship and friending―that's the shorthand I'll use: an actual English noun for real-world friends and a stupid made-up verb for Facebook friendeds―is that there are many types of friendships between people in the world and yet really only one type of friending on Facebook. You are either friended with someone or you are not. Furthermore most of my friends are people whose friendship was never formally requested. For the most part, the question "Would you be my friend?" ceases to be cute around age 10 and begins to sound awkward and strained, to put it mildly. But this request is formally made in the friending process. And a friended person can see all of the friended's friendeds. This assuredly leads to problems among highschoolers. Imagine when Charlene finds out you're friends with Brittany. I mean... no one likes her. But the problem may be worse for older people. To take one aspect, I'll give you one word: photos. "Wow, she did not age well, did she?" Need I say more.

Thinking about the different kinds of friends one may have is what led me to write this post, along with thoughts about how someone with a propensity for "intelligence-gathering" (i.e., gossip) could glean quite a bit from your other friends' posts on your Facebook page. And those thoughts were initiated by a Facebook friend request from someone I know from long ago whose friend request I've decided to ignore. The ironic thing is that I wouldn't mind sitting down with this person―who happens to be female, not an ex-girlfriend―and drinking a cup of coffee and chatting with her. This would be a way to live charity, and I could fill up an hour or even two with innocuous conversation, although most of it would be listening to her run her mouth.

However it would be a disservice to myself and to everyone connected to me on Facebook were I to accept her request. When I knew her, she was an unrepentant gossip with a strong tendency toward exhibitionism, and the contents of the personalized invitation which she sent me demonstrates that she has most likely not changed. So it would probably be a disservice to her as well. Drinking a cup of coffee and making small talk with her would involve less sharing and be far less intimate than friending on Facebook, even though I barely use the service. I don't think I have to cite examples of the kind of stuff she was known for; everyone here knows her type.

I think that most mature users of social media realize these things. Let's not forget that it's up to us to point them out to the younger generation.