Redefining Friendship

For most of my life I have considered myself a man of few friends. I am pretty introverted, and keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances – or even family – is something that takes a lot of effort for me. Unflatteringly enough I also have rather high expectations when it comes to friendships: I want to surround myself with a particular sort of people. I want them to understand and appreciate sarcasm and dark humour. I want them to be creative, witty, and interesting.

It’s not that I want to be an arsehole. It’s just that this is the way I am. I can tell fairly quickly upon meeting someone whether I will be able to become good friends with them. It’s not a long and tedious process for me. If I feel like I am on the same brainwave with them, I can discuss personal issues with them in a matter of minutes. If I don’t think they have the capacity to understand the way my mind works, then it’s never going to happen. It sounds selfish, but the truth is, I used to be very reluctant to acknowledge this about myself, and all it really accomplished in the end was waste my time and that of others.

Ergo, being that I see myself as a person who can be difficult to get close to, I did not think I had very many friends. It turns out I was wrong. Once I signed up on FaceBook, all these people started coming out of the woodwork. Some of them I went to school with, some of them I had a crush on at some point or another. Some of them I don’t really remember that well, but I recognize their names, and I have a hard time declining a friendship request on FaceBook. I look at those ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline’ buttons and suddenly I get this Pontius Pilate feeling about the whole decision. So I accept and add another soul to my ever-growing list of somebodies.

Because on FaceBook, that’s really all many of them are. Somebodies. People with names. That’s all you need to be someone’s friend on that site – a name.

You would think that for an antisocial prick like myself it would be just heavenly to have a tool like FaceBook at my disposal. When I log on, the site tells me how many friends I have. It also tells me what they are doing, who they are friends with, where they live, what they do. There are pictures, links, and an endless stream of lists of random personal tidbits, and applications you can attach to your account so that you can receive more personalized spam in your inbox.

It’s all very interesting, to a point. And then it becomes very tedious, very quickly. You realize that the fact that you are on your way to work, or that you just took a dump, may not actually be all that fascinating to the rest of the world. FaceBook revolves around bits of random information, and heavy-duty social networking. The only problem is that while you can share anything and everything about yourself on this website, the friends you have there do not really get to know the real you, unless you hang out with them often in real life. You may not be the same person today as you were 20 years ago, and the same applies to the people on your friends list. Interests change, personalities get modified, amplified. The high school sex magnet found Jesus. The class clown is a district attorney. All of a sudden you are friends with fifty people you don’t even know.

Makes me wonder what is happening to the whole concept of a friendship.

Tagged as: Culture, Facebook, Society, Technology