Is Facebook killing our friendships?

The life of the average American looks nothing like it did 10 years ago.  The advent of Blackberrys and iPhones in conjunction with the development of web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Twitter have created a social environment where communication is mostly done by text message and email.  Today, these technologies are media darlings and signing up record numbers of users every day to their services.  But is this a good thing?  Are people better off in a world where everything is done over email?

Fifty years ago, the advent of the computer was supposed to lead to the paperless office.  Today, we are drowned in more paperwork than ever before.  Similarly, the rise of social networking is supposed to make us happier by giving us better friendships and relationships, but in fact the opposite may be true.

Increasingly, the computer monitor replaces the phone call; and the phone call itself remains the stand in for a cup of coffee at the corner cafe.  There is much ado given to the freedom that comes from the information age, but no one has yet to answer what this freedom is used for or what it does to make life a healthier and more joyful experience.  

A website as popular as Facebook is a chilling reminder that for many people, image remains more important than substance in the realm of human relationships.  What is important is not the quality of a friendship, but the quantity and the number of pretty faces with whom one can claim some connection, however remote.  It would be ludicrous for any person to claim they had 1,000 friends in real life, but such numbers are common on social networking sites.

The term “friend” is now bandied about to the extent where it has lost all meaning.  The word “acquaintance” is the proper English word to define someone you interact with and even like, but just don’t know well anyone to call a friend.  A friend is someone with whom there is a life long connection, a bond forged from common experience and even common troubles; it must survive a “shock of adversity” before entitled to the term, to quote George Washington. 

It is interesting that modern technologies are so focused on vision — only one of the primary senses.  There is so much about human experience that goes beyond the visual — touch, smell, auditory stimulation — yet today people insist on using technologies that are divorced from these other sensations almost entirely.  We know what our friends sound like, their mannerisms, and could probably even recognize a familiar scent; but Facebook does not provide us with these equally valid impressions of other people.  

The atomization and alienation in American society is well documented, but it remains unclear and even doubtful whether social networking will bring people closer.  More and more, social networking presents more ominous problems related to the rise of surveillance and the breakdown of privacy in ways that are troubling to people who value the genuine cultivation of the personality.   Walt Whitman famously observed, “Do I contradict myself?   Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”  Yet it is not the inner multitude that Facebook is concerned with, but simply a uni-dimensional profile that may serve as a stepping stone towards monetizing human relationships.  

This is not to single out Facebook, but it is the most popular social networking site, and also the one which has the most trouble monetizing its platform (MySpace, by contrast, was somewhat profitable for some time prior to its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).  And to the credit of its users, Facebook’s more overt efforts to commoditize interpersonal relationships have been met with fierce resistance.  But Facebook is ultimately a business, and in its attempts to reap a profit, it may find itself engaging in behavior with potentially hazardous consequences.  Facebook claims that its users own their content on the site, but there is an enormous amount of intellectual property on the website that could be monetized.  How will that effect content on Facebook, and even on the internet more generally?  Are we moving to a world where uploading a picture deprives you of your right to use it after that?  If you engage in a discussion group on Facebook, does Facebook own your thoughts associated with that discussion?  These outcomes are well within the framework of current intellectual property law. 

We forget that life is nothing more than a collection of memory; and that those people who are most joyful on their death bed are those who cultivated a joyful life.  To the extent that social networking can aid in genuine human interactions, then it is a wonderful thing; but to the extent that it cheapens people and relationships, to the extent it acts only as a distraction or even as an instrument of surveillance, then people ought to be wary of what they are signing up for.  An hour with a good friend and a beer on a nice day seems far more enjoyable than writing 50 different wall posts to 50 different friends.  In person communication and all that it entailed is how people interacted for thousands of years; it is how they laughed, how they fell in love, how they argued and how they resolved their differences.  For some reason, we are eager to dispose of such a place and replace it with the cold blue glow of the computer monitor.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Art and Culture, Social Alienation and tagged with alienation, forgotten wisdom, happiness, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.