How do you tell who's a real friend and who's just a ‘Friend’ on the internet?
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Version 0 of 1. Many years ago – when I was just starting out as a writer – I interviewed the grand doyenne of consumer feminism, the late Helen Gurley Brown. After a fairly intimate hour-long conversation in her uptown New York offices, she said as we parted ways, in the most joyously pressing way: “And now we will be friends. Right?” I nodded my head in agreement and smiled, but also wondered what she meant exactly. Did she mean that we would now email occasionally or meet every so often to get manicures? I couldn’t imagine that she meant we would actually put in the time and commitment necessary to build a real friendship – one where I might call her on a day when my jeans feel too tight to hear, “Never mind those jeans, order a new pair in the next size up right now and be done with it.” (I imagine Helen might’ve say, “Darling, you have to stop eating so much chocolate, I have a marvelous fast for you!”) Yet, we had shared a lot of personal experiences in our conversation, and it felt like there was a mutual respect between us. Couldn’t that be enough? Could we be “friends”? I still struggle with the way in which the term “friend” is so loosely bandied about, both in media circles and other places in which power comes from access. But where Hollywood and politics, for instance, are industries essentially built on fiction and embellishment, journalism is an industry that is – or was – ostensibly founded upon and invested in real stories, people, relationships and, well, truth. Still, we all throw around the word “friend” to describe almost anyone with whom we’re vaguely acquainted and don’t already hate. It feels increasingly that “friends” are seen primarily as potential opportunities – and, if you’re not attuned to the cultural dilution of the word, you are likely to think people are actually your friends when they are not. What used to be limited to my professional life feels like it is spreading. I have friends on the internet, though social media increasingly feels like an adult high school purgatory complete with cool kid and loser kid lunch tables in the cafeteria. Facebook has all but co-opted and destroyed the term “friend”, allowing and encouraging us to measure the value of our friends in shares, mentions, retweets and Instagram likes, commoditizing who has the most followers. When my best friend and I first met as teenagers, we certainly snarled and hissed at each other in performative ways, and didn’t become actual friends until it was clear that neither one of us was going to back down – more importantly, that neither of us wanted anything from the other beyond the sheer challenge and joy of one another’s company. We weren’t auditioning or angling or trying to be the most clever for other people – we met one another head-on with intellect and humor and curiosity, and that allowed for parity and a basis from which to cultivate a real sense of solidarity. Plus, we saw each other almost every day during the summer we met scooping ice cream; ending our friendship had immediate consequences then, and would have deeper emotional ones now. But every time you enter the social media ring, you might find yourself starting from square one: muted in someone’s Facebook feed without your knowledge, or blocked on Twitter; ritualistically unfollowed on Tumblr or confronted with shared photos from a party you weren’t invited to with “friends”. Being eliminated from a friend’s life used to mean ignored phone calls and mutual, public recriminations to third parties; today, it’s as easy as untagging yourself from an ussie and clicking unfollow on Twitter. On the other side, you’re at even more of a loss when you click on the profile of a Twitter friend with whom you’d had a long and fruitful online discussion the day before and see a blank space where it used to say “FOLLOWS YOU”. Every time you log-in, wherever it may be, you could find yourself invisible to someone you thought was your friend, and found out was only a fair-weather follower. We live on the internet now. That whole idea about how we have to look up from our phones and digital devices to have real lives and experiences is over. There isn’t always a difference between emotion and emoticon. Our challenge now is to integrate our humanity into our online lives. I can think of little else in this world more paramount than friendship. I have long maintained that we, as human beings, are here to engage with each other in provocative, sometimes rigorously uncomfortable ways – it’s what keeps us breathing, thinking, evolving – and to build on that engagement to create lasting bonds. The internet can feel impermanent, but the people on it are not and the friendships you make don’t necessarily have to be. Friendship, even online, still has to be more than performing friendship for others. The girl who let you sit at the popular table in the cafeteria during middle school but never invited you over to her house wasn’t a real friend; similarly, the person who comments on your public Facebook posts but can’t find the time to reply to your DM isn’t actually a friend, despite what your Facebook security settings designate. You can and should make friends online, and be friends online – but you still have to be a friend. Or else you’re just a FriendTM. |