The Journal has an article up today on “How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendships,” exploring some of the problems social networking media can cause in everyday life. My auntie Leah D’Emilio posted a similar blog rant recently, lamenting the dying art of deep and interesting real-world conversations and the apparent decrease in people able (or willing) to carry on witty, informed, and lengthy conversations. D’Emilio decries our increasing “soundbite” tendencies, something she notes is fostered by social media like Facebook status updates and Twitter.
I’ve been thinking about some similar things lately, which prompted the following response to auntie Leah’s post:
One thing I’ve been thinking about of late is how bittersweet the whole social networking thing is. On the one hand, it allows us to maintain some form of contact with people who we otherwise would have totally lost contact with. We know details about these people’s lives, we can keep up with them in some form. It also allows people like me who are terrible with remembering names to have a pretty good crutch.
On the other hand, it also serves as a reminder that we don’t really know these people anymore. For example, reconnecting on Facebook with some of my old teammates, etc., has been a little sad for me, simply because it’s a reminder of how long it’s been since I spent any time with them, how I don’t even really know them anymore despite all the time we spent together not too long ago. (Then again, I wouldn’t know about a “reunion game” a bunch of guys are going to this fall if it weren’t for Facebook, either.)
And for the people I do keep up with regularly, the fact that I have a Twitter, a FB account, and two blogs means that a large share of what we would otherwise talk about has already been “purged” from my system. I already put the work into communicating in some form and might actually feel a little irritated that I have to repeat myself (feeling as though I might be wasting time) when they could have just read my blog, for example. You probably know what I mean; when you go back to Toledo, for example, and your good friends don’t know what you’ve been up to (despite your videos, blog, etc., you probably feel exactly the same mixture of emotions/thoughts — and also a little of the guilt for thinking they should be following you more closely).
Before social networking, it was more necessary to talk with other people, because there was no expectation that they would have kept up with one’s thoughts online. Now, because of our virtual relationships, it’s harder to maintain our real ones in some ways.
That said, it doesn’t have to affect our communication in a negative sense entirely. For one, we should drop the sense that repeating what we’ve already posted is a waste of time — it’s not a waste, because now we’re actually able to share it with someone else in dialogue rather than simply spouting it in monologue. Secondly, we can use what we (and others) have posted as launching pads for what we do talk about — when we are a little more up to date, we can get into more detail on these things.
