Facebook Friends
I visit my Facebook page occasionally. It is enjoyable to look at interesting posts and photos from friends. I have even connected with friends I no longer have any face-to-face communication with – old friends that I just looked up and connected with, or old friends that looked me up, or old friends that Facebook magically found and suggested for me as people I “may know.” OK, so now we’re Facebook friends. But it seems odd. It seems to go against the natural order of things. I thought of the movie Jurassic Park: “I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look; dinosaurs and man, two species separated by sixty-five million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?” Well, OK, I’m not reconnecting with dinosaurs, and the time frame is a bit off, but still, there is this sense of a forced connection, a sense that I’m reconnecting with a past in a way that heretofore was not possible and, therefore, unnatural or even dangerous. In the pre-Facebook era, we did not constantly see all of our friends. Invariably, we would lose contact with many of them. That was part of the natural order of things. We might wonder what those old friends are up to now, what they look like, where they are living, etc. etc. We could imagine. We could invent possibilities based on the memories we had. We could reminisce with friends about the old friends we used to know, and the memories would bring us joy and tears and laughter. And that was enough. We had our memories, sweetened by time, and gilded with romanticism and nostalgia. There was something to those conversations and memories we had. We no longer have the “script” for talking about old friends. As I look at the posts and photos on Facebook, posts and photos of people I once knew, it feels like I am abandoning any hope of missing them or ever becoming nostalgic about them. I get the feeling that Facebook is artificially maintaining friendships and replacing wonder with mundane reality. Gone is that wonderful moment when we could ask “I wonder what happened to so and so,” and let our minds wander back in time. The script is gone.