I’m not the most popular person on Facebook. With a more than a couple hundred friends, however, I feel like I’m popular enough. I get updates on the activities of my gradeschool, high school, college, and beyond buddies with whom I’ve lost touch. I’ve reconnected with people I hadn’t spoken to in years, some of whom were best friends. And, of course, there are those friends with whom I’ve maintained contact. Facebook is just another way to share my life with them and vice versa.
Obviously, I value having this tool, especially where I live right now. I just asked for a recipe for fennel and received a variety of awesome responses from some very random of contacts. It’s a great addition to our lives.
Being as far away from my friends as I am, I have lost contact with some really genuine friends. This, of course, is a normal byproduct of moving. In some ways, Facebook is great in that it enables me to stay in touch with these wonderful people. On the other hand, what about those people with whom I’d been making an effort to maintain a relationship, via phone or otherwise? Do we start drifting into the category of “Facebook Friend”, only sending quick messages on birthdays and holidays? Do we no longer maintain our phone calls and instead become just one of the many acquaintances in our network?
I have a few friends that I’ve spoken to over the years, and with whom I truly want to maintain a relationship. Some I don’t worry about losing- Facebook just enhances our relationship. For others, where the friendship is stronger than many but not so strong as to withstand the slow drift into Facebook Friend status, I’m conflicted. I want to maintain my relationships with these people. I want to be able to utilize Facebook to help keep these relationships strong. Unfortunately, social networking is a bit more lazy and exponentially less personal than a phone call. I wonder if, by contacting these people on Facebook, I’m taking the more personal communication out of the equation, and thus dooming the friendship altogether.
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