Welcome to rieblog!

an American electronic friendship...

[More:]

I've fallen into the black hole that is Facebook. It's gravity was simply too strong to resist. For months I'd been getting automatically generated notes from Facebook that friends had joined. Spam is pretty easy to resist, but then I contacted my old friend Libero and he told me that many of my other childhood pals were communicating through the site. I went to Facebook's site and looked at its terms of service. It didn't look promising. Facebook gained the rights to use any content I posted for the duration of my membership, and probably in perpetuity. I make no great claims for the drivel I put on the Internet, but what's mine is mine. I set up a profile just to say I did it and left it at that.

A few weeks later, I received an email from Zig P, an old high school friend, who had gotten my email from Wayne H., through Facebook. Once again I found myself relying on Facebook to communicate. I must admit, I was also seized by curiosity. Who else was in Zig's “Friends Network?” I went ahead and posted a picture on my “wall.” I used a terrible picture as a feeble protest against Facebook, and waited for the friend requests to pour in.

Well, I'm not sure if they poured in, but they certainly trickled. Mostly from friends of Zig, mostly from high school, and mostly from people I don't know or can't remember. Certain names ring a bell. I find alliteration is the best mnemonic for names. Whoever named their kid Misty Morrison created a memorable name, but while I remember the words, I have no recollection of the person. Pictures are no help. We are all older, and, at least in my case, even less attractive. There are a few exceptions. Zig's face may have filled out, but his grin is the same as it was 20 years ago. Libero Della Piana, the Salt Lake City school district's only Black student in the 1980's has a timeless face. As for the rest of us, time marches on. Some people have blossomed. Facebook is telling me that Kristy Jensen might be someone that I know. I certainly hope so, because it appears from the one centimeter square photo that she has become a serious hotty.

Facebook has an insidious way of promoting and controlling communication by acting as a proxy for other communication services. For example, if I want to email someone on Facebook, I can click on a link on that person's Facebook page, write a message and off it goes. But it all happens within the Facebook world. What if I just want to email someone by cutting and pasting their email address into gmail? No dice. Cut and paste doesn't appear to work on Facebook web pages. I'm sure the Facebook people are pleading some kind of security concern, but the message is clear, Facebook is trying to supplant email, chat, and soon probably voice communications by making it difficult to communicate with their members through competing services. Well, I'm not playing. Sure, I may post something to someone's “wall,” but I'll take the extra step to take my communication out of the Facebook black hole. No one tells therieb he has to use one service. MSN tried, and look where that got them.

Facebook reinforces the peculiar idea of American friendship. Americans believe that a friend is anyone you have met more than once, or only once if they are good looking. In Europe friendship is much different. The word friend is reserved for people you have known for a long time, and have kept up with. Orthodox Europeans only call people from their deepest, darkest childhood friends. The English word acquaintance doesn't get used in the same way as the French “copain” or the German “Bekannte.” On Facebook we are all friends, just like in America. A German acquaintance explained this situation to me. She told me that Europeans are like walnuts. It's very difficult to break through their hard shells, but if you keep trying, you will reach the chewy center of their beings, and they will be your friends for life. Americans, on the other hand, are like avocados. We're soft on the outside, very friendly, easy to get to know, and we'll call anyone our friend. At the center, however, is the hard, unknowable pit of an American, the person who moves away, who doesn't write, and who starts over with a new group of friends. Facebook allows us all to stay friends, albeit in this squishy American way.

I'm not comfortable with this arrangement. In the first place, I don't like the concept of sending messages requesting people's friendship, I had enough of that experience growing up Jewish in Salt Lake City. Of course I'm petty enough to love getting these friend requests. It makes me feel as though I'm the emperor of my own little social kingdom, able to anoint the chosen and cast out the malcontents with a single click. Maybe I should start referring to my network as my “acquaintance network.” Who should I let in? It appears that the common practice on Facebook is to grant everyone's acquaintance requests. For me that would be distinctly weird, especially when it comes to people from high school. Now, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since that time, and I'm quite sure that the people from my former high school, friends and enemies alike, have developed into fine, upstanding citizens and healthy, balanced people. That being said, high school in Salt Lake City was an incredibly dark journey for me, and getting a friendship request from someone who regularly threatened to “kick my faggot ass” is a little unnerving. I think of my friends from that time not as fellow students but as fellow survivors. I had successfully removed most of the high school experience from my memory, but here it is, popping up like an evil jack-in-the-box on Facebook.

Facebook has also given me an opportunity to reflect on the different circles of friends I've passed through during my life. My oldest friends are from grade school, and I rarely have contact with them, although I'd like to hear from them more. The second circle would be high school, and I'm curious about the whereabouts of my fellow survivors. This group presents another challenge. Most of my friends from that time bear little resemblance to the people I knew. They are adults. The have wives, husbands, jobs, and kids. I haven't gone in for any of these extravagances. The survivors were an incredibly tight-knit group at school, but now I have little in common with them. The dissonance makes communication difficult, and perhaps a bit dishonest. When three of my closest high school friends visited a few years ago, we ended up talking about the past, because our presents were so different. My next circle of friends was made up of fellow Reed College students. Far from being survivors, we were the fallen angels, in heaven for four years and then promptly kicked out. I keep up with lots of people from this period, but curiously, I've found very few of them on Facebook. Perhaps it's that Reed non-conformist streak. Perhaps these people have better things to do. After Reed came graduate school at the University of Virginia and a new group of friends, survivors one and all. Facebook is actually really helpful for this group, which was scattered on the four winds by academic failure, failure to gain admission to the doctoral program, burnout, or, in rare cases, actually finishing dissertations. I'd lost contact with most of these people, but they're active on Facebook, and they are easier to talk to because we met as adults, so the distance (temporal, not physical) isn't so great. Next up, the Seattle crew. Some friends I met as housemates, some at work, some at library school. This is a great group for Facebook. We're close, we know each other and we have a lot in common, but I'm certainly not going to see them very regularly. Finally there are the travelers and Europeans. Facebook is great for them too. We are always on the move, and we need a central place to make plans.

What would happen if I had a party and invited members from all of these groups of friends? Would they get along well? Would they find something to talk about? Some are professors, some are actors, some are struggling to get by. I know Republicans, Democrats, and other weirdos, and they are all on Facebook. Perhaps Facebook is the party, but if it is, it's a bad one. There are too many rules, the music's no good, and it feels like the people organizing it have a ulterior motive for the fun. Accordingly, I'll be asking my new friends just what I used to ask my friends in high school: “This party's beat. You wanna get out of here and have some fun on our own?”