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SHADEE
MALAKLOU has lots of friends. A whole lot—1,295,
according to her latest
Facebook count. But whom, exactly, can she count on?
Malaklou, 22, acknowledges that if she ran into some of
her “friends” on the street, she might not remember
their names. When she went to Duke, where “I was, quote
unquote, popular,” social life was so competitive that
sometimes invitations were based only on online
determinations of how hot a person was, and whether her
“friends” were cool. Now that she is working at a
Washington nonprofit, Malaklou is planning on pruning
her “friends” as a rite of spring cleaning, defriending
people who have come to mean little to her. She does
stay Facebook friends, however, with professors who
might be good for letters of recommendation to graduate
school. “The biggest value-added is that it helps
maintain relationships—somewhat superficial, but not
worth getting rid of,” she says. The word “friend” has
long covered a broad range of relationships—roommates,
army buddies, pals from the last law firm, old
neighbors, teammates, people you used to smoke dope with
in the back of your high school, people you see once a
year at the Gold Cup, scuba instructors and carpool
members, along with fellow gun collectors, Britney fans
and cancer victims. The Oxford English Dictionary traces
“freondum” back to Beowulf in 1018, and “to be frended”
to 1387.
But
MySpace and all the hundreds of other
social-networking web sites, from
Flickr to
Twitter to Bebo, have caused us to think afresh
about the boundaries and intensities of these
relationships.
Never
before in history has it been so easy to keep up with so
many people with whom you otherwise would have lost
contact. These new electronic meshes are more than mere
improvements over alumni magazines, holiday cards with
pictures of families and those horrible letters about
their lives,
Rolodexes, yearbooks, organizational newsletters and
birth and death notices in the newspaper.
Summer
friendships, for example, have been transformed. The
ritual of meeting again at the beach after a long winter
was once marked by hours of catching up. Not today.
Networked people who haven’t seen each other in forever
already know about the new boyfriend, and what happened
to the old one—in very great detail. They also know
about the old school and the new job. They have known,
every day, no matter where in the world they roamed, the
instant that emotional change occurred. Now, after the
initial squeals and swaying hugs, conversations pick up
in midsentence. It’s a mind-meld uncanny to watch.
This is
a world of “participatory surveillance,” says Anders
Albrechtslund of Denmark’s Aalborg University in the
online journal First Monday.
Real
online friends watch over each other—mutually,
voluntarily and enthusiastically, in ways that can be
endearing.
Others
have referred to it as “empowering exhibitionism,”
Albrechtslund says.
Call it
Friends Next.
You can
pick your friends, but...
LIFE was
once so simple. “I’ll be there for you, when the rain
starts to pour,” went the Friends theme. “I’ll be there
for you, ‘cause you’re there for me, too.”
Today,
when you join a social network, the first thing you
start questioning is if you really want to embrace every
“friend” request. Such promiscuity’s downside quickly
becomes obvious. Do you really want every petitioner—no
matter how unclear his identity or intent—to see your
revealing personal information?
Much
less those pictures of Ashley, Courtney and Jason from
last Saturday night?
There’s
this girl at school “who won’t even say ‘hi’ in the
hallway,” says a 16-year-old junior at a
Washington
high school who desires anonymity for fear of social
ostracism. The aloof girl keeps asking to be a virtual
“friend” on Facebook, arguably the most sophisticated
popular site, no matter how often the answer is no.
This
junior struggles with the relationship dilemma. “Why
would I want to be ‘friends’ with this person? I
occasionally smile at her. I guess it’s kind of really
impersonal to me, if she’s not even going to say ‘hi.’”
The high schooler says she’s “selective in acceptance of
friends”—she has “only” 131 on Facebook. But if she had
a relationship blow up, on the shoulders of how many
could she cry?
“Probably like 20,” she says.
For two
decades, online social networks have been touted as one
of the finest flowerings of our new era. But what is the
strength of ties so weak as to barely exist? Who will
lend you lunch money? Who will bail you out of jail?
Who’s got your back?
A remote
Wyoming cattle ranch was home to Internet pioneer John
Perry Barlow when he was a boy in the ’50s. In the ’80s,
when he encountered the first settlers of online
communities such as the Well, he felt like he was back
in the small towns he once knew. He reveled in the
throngs “gossiping, complaining...comforting and
harassing each other, bartering, engaging in
religion...beginning and ending love affairs, praying
for one another’s sick kids,” he once wrote. “There was,
it seemed, about everything one might find going on in a
small town, save dragging Main or making out on the back
roads.”
He has
since developed a more jaundiced view of the Internet’s
utopian promise to dissolve barriers between people—“the
reason I got involved in that stuff” in the first place,
he says.
Barlow
hoped for “a distinctly 19th-century understanding of
what community was. Where it was not just bail you out
of jail, but stand behind you with a loaded gun—the
Wyoming version.” Instead, he sees people collecting and
displaying enormous numbers of “friends” on MySpace,
“for the same reason that elk grow antlers, I expect.”
As part
of his firm’s “online strategy,” James C. Courtovich,
42, managing partner of a Washington lobbying and
public-relations outfit, recently joined Facebook and
had a small team take the 3,000 names in his address
book and cross-reference them with everyone there. The
overlap was “shocking,” he reports. “I expected my
niece, but not the chairman of
The Washington Post. At my age I expected a tenth of
a percent.” Instead, he found 7 percent of his world
there: “Capitol
Hill types, journalists, friends I’d not seen in
years.”
Do you
consider these people your friends? “Some friends are
more equal than others,” Courtovich says. To him, this
network is no more than Washington business-as-usual—“an
online cocktail party without having to stay up late or
drink alcohol.”
Some
encounters can be novel and strange. Jessica Smith, 23,
remembers the time someone she’d never heard of from
Vassar tried to friend her. It happened when Smith was
an undergraduate at
George Washington University and had just started
dating her boyfriend, Peter. Turned out the stranger was
Peter’s ex.
“There
was nothing friendly about this,” she says. “She only
wanted to know about me.” When Smith didn’t fall for
this probe—like it was the ex’s business how cute she
might be, or clever—“a friend of hers friended me. Like
that would trick me—‘Ooo, a new friend from Vassar!’ It
was weird. Really creepy.” Before social networks, “she
wouldn’t have called me, or written me a letter.”
Worlds
colliding
YOU know
all those separate lives you lead? When you’re not being
the
FTC lawyer, or the hair-metal band freak, you’re the
wife of a glassblower and mother of two who likes to
spend every vacation she can on the black-sand beaches
of
Dominica?
Forget
about keeping those lives neatly partitioned in Friends
Next.
“It’s
the postmodern nightmare—to have all of your selves
collide,” says Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro who edits
Personal Relationships, the journal of the International
Association for Relationship Research.
In
villages of the agrarian age, you wouldn’t even have
developed those various personalities. In Friends Next
you can’t escape them. “If you really welcome all of
your friends from all of the different aspects of your
life, and they interact with each other and communicate
in ways that everyone can read,” Adams says, “you get
held accountable for the person you are in all of these
groups, instead of just one of them.”
This
became dramatically clear in September 2003, on an early
site called
Friendster. Two 16-year-old students approached a
young San Francisco teacher with two questions: Why do
you do drugs, and why are you friends with pedophiles?
So reports danah boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the
University of California at Berkeley’s School of
Information who has become renowned for her research
into online social networks, and who insists on
rendering her name without capital letters.
The
teacher’s profile was nothing extraordinary or
controversial. Her picture showed her hiking. But she
had a lot of friends who were devotees of Burning
Man—the annual weeklong festival in the Nevada desert
that attracts tens of thousands of people experimenting
with community, artwork, self-expression, self-reliance,
absurdity and clothing-optional revelry.
“The
drug reference came not from her profile but from those
of her Friends, some of whom had signaled drug use [and
attendance at Burning Man, which, for the students,
amounted to the same thing],” boyd writes. “Friends also
brought her the pedophilia connection—in this case via
the profile of a male Friend who, for his part, had
included an in-joke involving a self-portrait in a
Catholic schoolgirl outfit and testimonials about his
love of young girls. The students were not in on this
joke.”
In
Friends Next, all your lives and circles of
relationships are collapsed. Extreme cases of friend
mash-ups resemble the barroom scene in Star Wars.
“You can
be friends with someone you know well and don’t like,”
reports Susannah Clark, a sophomore at the
University of Mary Washington. “You read their
profiles and blogs and are well aware of their life.
It’s a love-to-hate type arrangement.”
“I even
agreed to be one person’s friend because he’s so
psychotic I was scared of what would happen if I said
no,” writes blogger Dan Kaufman.
Stitched
together
WE’RE
inventing Friends Next every day.
“For
most people, when they thought of their close friends,
it was people with whom they would share personal
things,” says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and
psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who has studied online social networks from their
beginnings. “What’s changing now is that people who are
not in the other person’s physical life meet in this
very new kind of space. It is leaving room for new
hybrid forms.”
The
weirdness of Friends Next is that it comes at you like a
melodrama: “Is he married yet?” “Is he still straight?”
“She’s changed her religious views to ‘rain dancing’? I
thought she had a cross tattooed on her hip.”
“Facebook is more about entertainment than work,” says
Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist who
studies social networks at
Harvard. “Instead of watching soap operas, they’re
watching soap operas of people they sort of know.”
“It
sucks you in,” says
Mary Washington’s
Clark. “The
public conversations—it’s digital eavesdropping.”
Losing
friends in this new world is as fraught as making them.
“Real-world friendships are not usually intentionally
ended,”
Adams says. “Folks just let things naturally cool off. On Facebook,
decisive action has to be taken.” Defriending cements
that a friendship is over.
The best
soap operas occur when a couple breaks up. Change your
profile from “In a Relationship” to “Single”—or even
more ominously, “It’s Complicated”—and little press
releases blast out to all your gossip-hound “friends.”
Massive e-mailing and tongue-wagging ensues.
It’s
futile to try to erase latent traces of Friends Next.
“The digital trails of an online friendship—true or
not—really do last forever,” Albrechtslund says. Its
evidence is stored on servers indefinitely, beyond the
control of the persons involved. While many are still
trying to figure out how to make Friends Next work for
us, Todd Huffman is trying to harness this new social
form to save us.
The
Phoenix software developer is creating a company called
sStitch. In times of crisis, like the recent San Diego
wildfires, Huffman notes, there are vast quantities of
useful information buzzing among Friends Next. They turn
to their social tech—text-messaging, blogs, e-mail, web
networks—to announce: “I’m okay.” “I’m evacuating to
this city.” “This freeway is shut down.” “That road is
flooded.” They send pictures on the fly. Their cell
phones’ global positioning locates them precisely.
This is
all instant bottom-up information from hundreds of
thousands of eyes not now available to the people trying
to manage the disaster. How great would it be, Huffman
thinks, if you could aggregate all that into a
comprehensive and sensible God’s-eye picture of what’s
going on that would allow instantaneous and effective
response?
Huffman,
28, sees the potential in this because Friends Next is
at the heart of his personal life. “I’m one of the first
in that generation of people very defined by friends
obtained and maintained through social technologies,” he
says. “Almost all my close friends I originally met over
the Internet. They’re very geographically spread out.”
The one
thing he’s learned is Friends Next is not enough to
sustain relationships. “A lot of friendship is sharing
experiences, not necessarily planned. It’s people going
through the world, negotiating a pathway together.”
But
Huffman has discovered Friends Next can be a gateway to
genuine intimacy.
Recently
he organized a ski trip to
British Columbia
with his core group of buddies, and for the hell of it
announced on Facebook that anybody who could read his
profile was invited to come along. To his surprise, an
acquaintance from Texas took him up on it. Houston-boy
started off not knowing anybody else, but intense bonds
ensued. “Now he’s going with us to Burning Man—he’s
become a de facto member of the core group,” Huffman
says.
The
novel ties of Friends Next have caused Huffman to think
hard about what the word “friend” means.
“You can
maintain a friendship over a distance. Once the person
is a friend, it takes very little data to communicate
very complex things. You can send a five-word e-mail”
that, for someone else, “would take a two-hour
conversation.”
“A
friend,” however, he has decided, “is someone who you
like a lot who understands you at a pretty deep level.”
The real
thing
SO, in
Friends Next, what matters? Is being good company
enough? Is trust a key ingredient? Or loyalty? Or
self-sacrifice?
Go
through your phone book, call people and ask them to
drive you to the airport,”
Jay Leno once said. “The ones who will drive you are
your true friends. The rest aren’t bad people; they’re
just acquaintances.”
“It’s
the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter,” said
Marlene Dietrich.
While
Facebook will allow you as many as 5,000 “friends,”
enduring realities impose far more significant limits.
No
matter how thick your soup of constant communication,
sooner or later you may have to decide who will be your
bridesmaid.
No
matter how easily you can get Facebook on your
iPhone, sooner or later you may have to decide who
will be the godfather of your child.
And no
matter how extensive your profile, it is certain that
someday, someone is going to have to decide who will be
your pallbearers. |
