So when did friendships become an internet roleplaying game? It seems to me that social networking is not just another mode of communicating with people you know, or people who know the people you know, or people you would like to know. It is an outlet for boredom, and a weird points-system that is way freaking out of control.
Now, it is a tough call about all this, because there is no official rule-book and the rules keep changing. Remember when people used to write on their own facebook walls? Not anymore, Bucko, that would make you a type-1 LOSER and egomaniac, and plus it means you (sigh) kind of don’t know how it works.
What about friend numbers? This is also tricky, because if you have millions and millions of so-called “friends” on there, but most of the pictures on there are of you taking pictures of yourself on your macbook wearing lipgloss and trying to look cool, then it is just painful and you are trying too hard. On the other hand, if you have very few friends and very few pictures of yourself, but the ones on there are high quality good-time/drunken or artsy pictures (preferrably posted by someone else) then that means you are too cool to spend most of your time trying to use the internet to prove how cool you are. (This type of profile is becoming increasingly rare. Because even if you never post a picture of yourself–you dinosaur, get with the times–then everyone else still will, trust me.)
And Facebook is a really cool way to stay in touch with people you meet when you travel, or friends who you rarely get to see. But often this “keeping in touch” only surfaces in extremely shallow ways, like commenting on a PARTICULARLY hot picture, or writing “happy birthday” on somebody’s wall when the internet tells you it’s their birthday. (And, also, falling out of touch is kind of ok. Let’s leave something up to mystery, something up to chance sometime…can we? no?)
Which brings me to the phenomenon of The Wall. Remember when you would only write something on someone’s wall if you really didn’t mind if everyone else read it? Like, maybe a stupid in-joke, or the occasional gut-churning “i wuv you” from one end of the siamese-couple to the other. Writing on the wall was the equivalent of talking loudly, perhaps rudely, in a crowded room.
But now, everyone writes EVERYTHING on the wall. (for example: What time are we meeting? Friday? 3pm? At Dusty’s Pleasure Warehouse? Seeya then! ) Everything goes on the wall, because otherwise nobody will know how many people care to contact you. TRagic. Now, it seems, writnig a private message is like whispering conspiratorily to someone after pulling them aside…whatever is being said not is REALLY very private, not for anyone else to know.
I realize it is a bit hypocritical for me to use the internet to criticize…the internet. (Kinda like when they forst invented writing, and all these philosophers started writing essays about why writing was so bad.) I am not AGIN it, you understand. I do it too. But it scares me the extent to which these internet outlets are having more and more of an influence on the activities to which they are ostensibly separate. Some vapid tart in this magazine I was wasting my time reading said something about how if you are not on the internet, you do not exist. Vapid tartliness aside, the truth of that statement freaks me out.
If a tree falls in the forest with no one to digitally recapture it and put it on the internet, does it make a sound?
May 12, 2008 at 8:44 pm |
yea, it’s funny all these unspoken rules about facebook. i had my best friend actually stop talking to me because of these rules, haha. basically when i left for college, she saw my facebook pictures (which were like, me with you, me with ruby, giggling, whatever the silly event was at the time. hell i didnt even drink my first year of college) and decided that i had “lost myself” and “become too popular” and stopped being my best friend. which shows that well shes got some issues…but thats beside the point lol. just the fact that a friendship was lost because of what she wanted to perceive me as, ya know?
and friends keeping in touch on facebook, yes, it is true, it is awesome. i find that i talk to ruby online and there are so many things she doesnt know about me, and im like i feel like i told you this, oh WAIT you dont have facebook so you havent seen pictures of my apartment, my trip to the thai festival, or anything!! you dont even KNOW me anymore because you have no facebook. haha. but its kinda poopy that she has to join this network basically, so she can keep in touch with me and the rest of her friends. what happened to the phone? or letters? or the telegraph machine???? all lost, all lost…
May 13, 2008 at 3:51 pm |
I think it’s this polarizing effect of technology that people feel closer together (a la social networking sites) by introducing a digital space in which people (or their digital incarnations) can connect and interface. Reading status updates and blogs makes me feel like I know what’s going on in my friends’ lives. They’re like the digital equivalents of having a daily conversation. At the same time, because of the digital medium (as in material and as in mediation), people aren’t “really” connecting. How much can you know about someone if you don’t hear the intonations of their voice, their body movements and gestures? How much can you know about someone when their font is the same as everyone else’s? Though the internet is making the world smaller (so that you can communicate with people who live in various time zones or even countries, people who you may or may not know “I[n]R[eal]L[ife]“), it’s also separating those people who are actually geographically closer. I IM my cousin when he’s just upstairs, for example. Is it a matter of making the effort to contact someone privately? (Whether that be private message on facebook, email, text, handwritten letter, phone call, IRL face-to-face meeting?) Is that privacy of information or intimacy of friendship what’s missing? Or is it the medium itself, the material of communication and interaction?
May 21, 2008 at 3:36 pm |
I think the facebook is a wonderful tool when you have friends who are far away from you and they are happy, You get to know that they are well that they are happy, they have a new boyfriend they are going to spain whatever. But when people are unhappy, and they leave a depressing status note, you have to call them nothing else on there profile is going to inform you about what’s wrong with them.
When Caity first got hurt I heard about it on facebook, but presently after that I had to call people I had to hear it from some one who was really there.
I remember on “Friendster” The Wall was called something like Testimonials, and because of that name when folks wrote on the wall the wrote the most beautiful things, about how wonderful that person was, it was almost like a contest who could write the best thing on someone profile.
May 23, 2008 at 3:21 am |
I once posted a comment on a friend’s facebook wall. It was a personal in-joke. Someone read what I wrote on the newsfeed and was offended and then wrote me a message about it. I was offended that she took offense at something I wrote on someone else’s wall that had nothing to do with her but now I should perhaps rethink that. These are public places, would I have said the same thing had she been in the room? Maybe, sometimes I don’t censor myself in public, which is another interesting thing that I think is a result of reality television and internet culture, the private has become public. I have heard lovers’ quarrels in the UCSC quad or dudes talking about their penises in a cafe. I have openly discussed sex in a public place just like the gals of “Sex and the City”. Nonetheless, I turned off my facebook newsfeed, I think. I also regularly make sure my profile photo is cute.