reflecting on my time on Face book

I think I hate facebook. Not that I am going to stop using it right away, I am too compulsive for that, but I think that facebook may be a huge waste of time and, what is worse, my be enabling character flaws that need acceptance and validation.

Years ago, I remember it clearly, my high school debate coach told the class how much he loved college. Most of us scoffed at him. How could college be better than high school? At the time high school seemed like the greatest place on earth. I had never felt closer to any group of friends, never had the same sense of purpose that I had shared with so many, the disdain for authority, the yearning to explore my sexuality and the driven desire to purposefully feel boredom for everything life had to offer. My god, it was beautiful.

I went to a small liberal arts college. My freshman class was slightly more than one hundred students. My graduating class four years later was barely seventy. I knew virtually every one of them by name, and certainly all of them by sight. We all took the same classes, we dinned at the same time, we threw extravagant parties on the weekends and cloistered together in the evening to read Joyce and Plato, the Bible and Kant. We cried together, slept together, laughed together, and by the end of four years I wanted to see few, if any of these people ever again, not through any fault of theirs, but because I am a solitary person whose boundaries and been sorely tested by the system.

Face book is a funny place. The most interesting thing about it, I think, is that I can look at the friends I have there and can draw demographic lines around those periods in my life when I made the most friends: high school, college, and now in the present, as we have recently joined a church and become members of the community.

The oddest thing, I think, is how Face book seems to accentuate the nature (or perhaps the origins) of these friendships. When I was in college, I spent most of my time locked away in my dorm room reading the thousands of pages of homework I had been assigned each week. In reality, when I did see my fellow classmates, it was in class, or while standing in line at the dining hall, in the coffee shop, or walking back to my dorm room. I saw these people and they saw me. We would mutter salutations, exchange a few pleasantries about our lives, occasionally make insights, and then we would disappear into our studies.

Truth be told that while I did not miss these people at first. I grew to remember them nostalgically, and with incredible fondness. The lives we shared were incredibly close and the opportunity for friendships like those I forged in high school will never come again. When I joined Face book and began to discover so many of the old familiar names and faces, I was incredibly excited to discover them again, twenty years later, in cyberspace.

Only here is the thing. I see them now on Face book, a line in their status update, a glimpse at their lives as they answer the questionnaires in memes and on applications, I see them in the dining hall and on the way back to the dorm room. They are present in my life, but in an odd quirk of fate, that presence is strangely similar to the one we shared so many years ago. The nostalgia fades, and I am left wondering how much time do I give to these people? How close am I to them? How honest am I about the nature of these relationships. What is a friend?

Now that the friendships are back, the past seems to glimmer a little less brightly. I am no longer separated from these individuals by time and space. The nostalgia is gone and I find myself wondering, am I better for it?

Postscript:
Lying in bed last night I was telling J. about what I had written. I think I was afraid that I was going to offend someone by telling him or her that I thought of many of my face book friends as mere acquaintances.

“Why do you still use Face book then?”
“I don’t know, because I am compulsive, I can’t stop.”
She thought about this for a minute “What do you get out of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I suppose I enjoy the little connections I make, posting a humorous status message and then seeing how people will respond”
“Yeah” she said noncommittally.

I fell asleep still thinking about it. In the morning, I slumbered into the living room. The laptop was still open, I tapped the enter key and brought it back to life. The draft of the post was still there. “Oh yeah’ I thought “That.” My impulse was to delete the whole thing. Better gone than to insult every one I ever knew.

I thought about nostalgia. Was I glorifying it? Was nostalgia really all that? Or was it instead a way of prettying up memories of the past to make them more digestible? The truth about College was that I was really too busy to form many deep or lasting friendships, but that the friendships I had formed were real and lasting. Also, there is something to shared experience that bonds people together. There weren’t many other people that understood my college experience like those people that had been there with me. They understood the nuances, the music the fashion, the… well you get the idea.

The more I think about it this morning the more I am beginning to think that Face book, while probably still a huge waste of time, isn’t as bad as I first thought. If anything it has given me a second chance to connect with no less than three different groups of people that I really missed, and many of whom, because of our circumstances in the past, missed opportunities to become close friends. I think about the people I have reencountered just in the last year and am amazed at how quickly these friendships have blossomed.

I think again about my conversation with J. last night.

“Why do you keep doing it?”

Friendship, and the possibility of even greater friendship.