William Deresiewicz just published a long essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that’s worth spending some time with: “Faux Friendship,” in which he traces how the concept of friendship has changed since classical times — it used to be an intense and serious matter; these days, not so much — and worries that social networking in general, and Facebook in particular, is accelerating a trend he perceives in our culture towards shallower friendships. More “friends” on Facebook, less engagement with friends in life. Or so the argument would seem to run.
[Click for more, we want your feedback!]Plus email has ensured that nobody ever writes a letter longer than a thousand words. “The 10-page missive has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon to be followed, it seems, by the three-hour conversation. Each evolved as a space for telling stories, an act that cannot usefully be accomplished in much less. Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too.”
I agree with all this, except the notion that Facebook is somehow making us incapable of connecting “for real.” Long emails, long conversations, and hanging out with friends continue to be a part of my own life, after all.
What do you think? Has Facebook completely destroyed your capacity for intimacy? Or has Google made you too stupid by now to reach the end of this post?
Ironically enough, I learned about this essay because a previous contributor and friend of the Rumpus — somebody I probably wouldn’t have gotten to know without the mediation of Facebook, I might add — posted the link on her Facebook wall.
