What defines a friend

Sometimes technology has a way of muddling things. Even if the goal is to simplify matters advancements always seem to create more issues than there were before. What is worse is that sometimes what makes us human, those events that cannot be broken down to bits and bytes, become victims of our own attempts at self-expression.

Back when I started up my Facebook account it asked if I wanted to import my email address book in order to determine who my “friends” were. Like everyone else I went ahead and did so and I was glad to see the profiles of a number of my friends from school automatically listed on the page. It was wonderfully simple; one click and I was reconnected with friends around the world. But the very last profile shown made me pause.

It was the profile of a girl I saw a few times last fall and who, thanks to my rampant stupidity regarding picking up a dinner tab, I totally failed to hit it off with. Now I was looking at her picture and being asked if I wanted to make her my friend. It seemed like a totally bizarre and foreign question. I wouldn’t email her because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t respond. I wouldn’t call her because I was certain she wouldn’t answer. Yet it would have been perfectly reasonable if I sent her this request to be my “friend”.

That’s one of those things that bothers me about Facebook. It seems to belittle the concept of friends to the point where they seem to be one of those things you collect and stack in alphabetical order. I wanted her to be my friend but we weren’t and I didn’t want to use a faceless computer program to try to reconcile the distance. Like everyone else I end up with a collection of friends that consist of a mix of people who mean the world to me and people who I like hanging out with and a handful of people I vaguely know. They are all lumped into the same meaningless category. Friend might be just a word but it is a powerful one. It shouldn’t be made into a worthless platitude.

But let’s say she actually accepted my friend request. What would she know of me? A couple of witty status entries, a list of books I’ve read, a couple of favorite movies, nothing of any real significance. True, all of those items are a part of who I am but I don’t know if they show the full story. Seurat proved that you can paint a picture with only dots but at the end of the day you need distance and a hell of a lot of dots to gain the full image and even then it isn’t anywhere near seeing the same image with your own eyes. If all you knew of me was my Facebook profile (or maybe even the blog) I don’t think you could say that you actually knew me. All those things are just a handful of dots compared to the complex, contradicting, ever-changing picture of who I actually am.

What I fear is that people will start using Facebook and its ilk more and more as some sort of friend management system. A way to neatly compartmentalize all of those wildly inconsistent people who make up our lives. Keep everyone to quick soundbites and away from the deeper picture. And while I love everyone who messages me through Facebook and I will use it daily myself because it is wonderful to hear from everyone I just hope I don’t become dependent on only knowing the digital form of my friends. They are so much more than a collection of zeros and ones. We should always have a chance to remain analog.