The burden of being a Facebook Friend
February 12th, 2014 at 10:51 pm (Library School, Society)
Seth Fiegerman argues that the experience of aging in Facebook is a more trying one for those who joined it in their 20s than for the rest of us who joined after we’d already experienced an adult life. Younger users are “forever connected to people from the past” (even if they’d rather not be) while “older users [have] a powerful tool to reconnect with those they’ve long since lost touch with.”
He describes these younger users as being burdened by a growing balance of tenuous yet tenacious “friend” connections. These are not your true, close, cherished friends in the present, but rather those people who you once attended class with or met on a bus ride or used to date. “Before Facebook,” he argues, when the reason for regular connection and conversation was gone, those people would naturally and gently fade into the background and out of your life. But with Facebook, you must take “an unnatural and severe action” to “make a conscious choice to delete a person from your life.”
There might be a reason that Facebook cheerily informs you when someone sends you a Friend Request, but provides no announcement when you are Unfriended. Or maybe that makes it worse, as you are left to discover your change in stature serendipitously, when you return to to a Once-Friend’s photo album and realize that you can’t access it anymore.
What’s unnatural and severe, I think, is not the conscious act of managing your friendships, but rather the Facebook concept of a Friend. Being connected to someone on Facebook encompasses a broad range of relationship types, not just friendship. It can indicate a networking connection with a work colleague, a shared hobby, an interest in dating, a current partner, an ex. In many cases, you might accept a Friend request out of social obligation rather than any personal interest. That doesn’t happen in real life, because we don’t go around distributing Friend status badges for people to wear. Friendship is permitted to be fluid and continuously valued rather than a discrete state that one attains.
Google+ made an effort to recognize these nuances by creating “circles” (friend lists) that had names other than “friend” (like Acquaintances). I’m not sure this solves the problem, either. It’s still fundamentally categorical, a constraint that seems to flow from the concept of a social network as a, well, network. Each pair of people either do or do not have a link between them.
A different possible refinement would be to create links between everyone and allow them to have a real value, or weight, associated with them that indicates the strength of the connection (which might be zero). These weights could be used by a social networking site to automatically filter that overwhelming news feed from all of your connections so that the highly weighted links provide more of the traffic you see. While perhaps more flexible, this approach also has problems: who wants to spend hours specifying the degree of friendship they have with each of their connections? And updating it as life progresses? What would they get out of it?
I also find it interesting that Seth, who lumps himself in to the “under 30” crowd plagued by these lingering ghost connections and an inability to Unfriend them, characterizes anyone over 30 as blithely free of such constraints. Those over 30 instead use Facebook to RE-connect with people they’ve lost track of over the years. “It’s where you rediscover old friends, coworkers and estranged family members,” but “the thrill is often short-lived because these relationships have been dormant too long.” Instead of too many past-their-expiration-date connections, the over-30 crowd is unable to jump-start the ones they miss most.
Both experiences can be traced to a common root cause: the ease with which you can Friend someone. It is easy to connect, socially awkward to disconnect, and fatiguing and impractical (in many cases) to resurrect an old connection that no longer exists in your non-Facebook life. And yet I wonder how differently these social phenomena would play out if we simply changed the name of a social link. What if you Bookmarked people instead of Friending them? That would constitute a one-way link with minimal (or no) pressure for reciprocity, and it wouldn’t have the social connotations of a “friend.” It would allow you to keep up and share with people of interest. And for those leery of pruning even their bookmarks, it would be easy to implement a time-decay rule that gently and silently removed bookmarks that didn’t see enough use.
Another option, of course, is to sign off of Facebook and go play board games, see a movie, make dinner, or otherwise hang out with… your friends.
Terran said,
February 13, 2014 at 3:54 am
I would love to play board games, see a movie, make dinner, or otherwise hang out with you! When is good for you? Next Tuesday evening works for me.
Oh wait. There is the slight inconvenience of 3000 miles between us….
To me, that’s really what’s so compelling and insidious about Facebook. It lets you keep *some* contact with people with whom it would otherwise be challenging to do so. The trick is that it’s a very uniform and very minimal form of contact. People you want to be very close to and people you just casually know both get the same level of interaction.
I agree that the “friend” nomenclature is a pretty poor descriptor for what’s really going on. And it doesn’t help that fb makes it mechanically awkward to unfriend. I’m not sure how to do a better social network that lets people both express and experience the true subtlety of social interaction. But, you know, that’s literally a billion dollar question…
Brittany said,
February 13, 2014 at 10:31 am
Speaking of awkward…I un-friended an old roommate I never talk to anymore. A few days later she wrote a heartfelt message that guilted me into friend-ing her again. Another instance is when I broke up with an old boyfriend, one of his friends un-friended me. Later, he added me back! Why did he un-friend me in the first place? Facebook behaviors are strange.
Most of my friends (late 20s-mid 30s) use Instagram more than FB. Sometimes we refer to people by their Instagram names either because we can’t remember their real ones or because more people know them by their Instagram names! I have one friend (F, 34) who gets offended when people don’t follow her back. But I think Instagram is like the “bookmarking” option you mention, at least for me. I follow people I don’t know, and I really don’t care if they follow or like me back. I feel more comfortable following people on Instagram than I do FB. “Friending” seems more intimate than following or liking.
Liz said,
February 13, 2014 at 6:08 pm
Your analysis of Seth’s article was great. I liked you idea of bookmarking people especially for specific time periods in your life. I have ‘friends’ that I met in 5th grade, but today I would most likely not seek out a friendship with this person in adulthood. But then again there are people I am long time friends with and we follow one another on Pinterest. Images people pin say a lot about the other person and often times I think to myself “oh dear I see why her and I became friends in the first place!”
The place where it gets awkward with friending/unfriending people is when there is potential for you to run into this individual in the real world. You ask yourself “Do I need to say hi, because we are friends on FB,” or “are we even friends on FB and I am going to see a friend request from this person in the next hour after our quaint exchange of forced, polite niceties?”
Thanks for your thoughts!
Susan said,
February 14, 2014 at 12:47 pm
I always joke that “Facebook sucks, but once you join it you can never leave.” That’s only half a joke.
I joined after 30, but I still find the lingering connection to people to be a problem. I’m still disentangling from friends of Terran’s mother who friended me at her funeral, largely out of their deep love for her. It’s kind of emotionally painful to reject these loving gestures of inclusion, but the truth is that while I respected Terran’s mom, we had a difficult relationship to begin with — I have less than nothing in common with most of her friends.
I’m also uneasy with what it’s done to my close extended family. That clan did so well for so long by creating a shared reality where only the things we had in common mattered. On Facebook, I get to see more of their life, but I have to roll my eyes at all the things about them that bug me.
But the compelling reason, beyond the crappy user interface and the long trail of non-friend friends, is that you just can’t maintain relationships with all the folks you’d like to. Right now, it’s helping me getting to know the wonderful people at my new church. You can’t have one without the other.
Katie said,
February 15, 2014 at 1:19 am
Your last paragraph says it all, Kiri.