I don’t think the Internet planned this or anything but I read several threads today about friendship and the Internet.  Essentially there is a growing debate over whether or not things like Facebook and even blogs really help us communicate and know each other better or if it just gives us an excuse to not actually talk in person.  Are our e-relationships overtaking our real relationships?

Scott Brown from Wired had this to say about Facebook:

Think of it as the Long Tail of Friendship—in the age of queue-able social priorities, Twitter-able status updates, and amaranthine cloud memory, keeping friends requires almost no effort at all. We have achieved Infinite Friendspace, which means we need never drift from old pals nor feel the poignant tug of passive friend-loss. It also means that even the flimsiest of attachments—the chance convention buddy, the cube-mate from the ’90s, the bar-napkin hookup—will be preserved, in perpetuity, under the flattering, flattening banner of “Friend.”

Next came Brad Abare from the Church Marketing Sucks blog:

I’m not against match-making sites, but I am concerned that we let the illusion of social connection replace our ability to really connect. We’re addicted to watching our friends list grow, yet we have very little connection to any of them. Experts tell us that it’s impossible to have that many friends anyway. How can sitting at a computer, scrolling through status updates and photo feeds be community-building? I understand people chat online and swap information, but that’s hardly transformation. I would argue that the people who do have “deep” connection to others online have been or are in deep offline relationships with those people too.

Finally, “Jeff” had this to say on the Dreamhost blog: (Dreamhost happens to be the host for this blog, of all things)

While the web’s penchant for facilitating so-called navel gazing garners criticism at times, I believe that this, too, serves a purpose. The more we explore our own thoughts and ideas and allow others to peek into our world, the better our relationships with those people will be. I, for one, am happy to see the web evolve into a tool to connect people. It has become a humanizing technology.

Personally, I’d have to say I lean more toward the opinion put forth by Jeff on the Dreamhost blog.  I love how much information I’m able to glean about what my friends are doing by looking at the news feed of Facebook.  But I also see the argument from the other side.  I have friends (yes, I would could them as actual friends) who I have had far more electronic interaction with than face to face time.  Some of that is geographic and some is just convenience.  I don’t write letters not because I don’t like to write (to the contrary, I’ve always journaled by hand and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve practiced my penmanship) but because it requires buying paper, stamps, and an envelope.  It takes far more time and effort to mail a letter compared to sending an email or even a quick text message.  I believe there is still a place for written letters when it is important to convey a level of care about the recipient emails or other forms of electronic communication just can’t.  But I think in some ways it makes the physical and vocal interactions all the more valuable.

I don’t think I’m going to go through and clear out my Facebook friends list to my 30-40 closest friends, but I have thought of it.  It is a very curious feeling to audit your friends.  How do you place friends on a sliding value scale.  Do you take into account the things they can do for you, that this guy owns a truck or that girl bakes great cookies?  Or do you solely look at who you enjoy spending time with the most?  Or do you go completely dark and shut down your profile under the assumption that you have all the contact information you need for the friends who really matter the most?

I had a very interesting discussion at church a couple weeks ago about the fact that for the people I have real relationships with, our electronic interactions during the week make for many of our talking points when we finally see each other in person.  I enjoy being able to follow people on twitter who I’ve never met but I think are funny.  I like that there are people following my flickr stream that I’ve never had any contact with outside of a few sporadic comments.  I am certainly guilty of taking pride in my friends list (I’m almost at 200!) despite the fact there are people on it that I haven’t talked to in years and some I might not even recognize if I met them in person.

Those are my thoughts for tonight.  So hopefully if you are reading these words, and don’t know me, you feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.  Maybe we’ll even become Facebook friends.  You never know!

Filed under: blogging, life by Jonathan