We were talking a little while ago about the extent to which going away to college does or doesn't provide an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I came across an article today in the New York Times Magazine proposing that social networking sites might actually make this more difficult, since it's harder for, say, a Facebook user to make a clean break with his high school buddies.
I quote liberally from a passage that resonated strongly with me:
As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?As Sean rightly pointed out, the pressure of one's past can be shut out from the present just by unplugging from one's old friends. I think the reason why in practice nobody ever does this is because, unlike friends who fade away in the real world just because you fail to contact them, Facebook friends hang around until you take the affirmative step of un-friending them. Nobody wants to have to take a step to affirmatively sever a social tie, except in extraordinary circumstances.
So is the mythos of college as a place for self-reinvention totally contingent upon the inconvenience of keeping up with one's old friends? And do social networking sites disrupt that inconvenience to such an extent that self-reinvention becomes too onerous to consider?
For the record, some of us have no qualms about un-friending people on Facebook. I wouldn't be surprised if I've un-friended more people than I currently have friended. In fact, I rather enjoy "[affirmatively severing social ties]". Remember Dorothy?
ReplyDeleteWell alright, let's see how this works. This morning I unfriended about 3/4 of my friend list. All of them were people who I have known at one point or another, to whom, despite our presumed closeness at one time, I've always felt weird making privy to my inmost thoughts. Gone are some high school girfriends and college crushes. Gone are some of my former best friends who I've just grown apart from. Gone are some people who always wish me a happy birthday, and to whom I never return the favor.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been nicer, though, if these friendships had been allowed to die of natural causes rather than because I clicked through my list as follows: "Don't care about you, don't care about you, REALLY don't care about you..."
I've done some friend-cleansing before, but never at this level of intensity. One thing I've found is that some portion of these guys are likely to re-send me a friend invitation within the next week or so. I don't know whether to think of this as pathetic. I mean, maybe they have legitimately forgotten that we were Facebook friends before, and now they've found me again for the first time.
Wow, Ryan. You might have outdone even me. It's a little awkward when people resend friend invitations, but on the bright side, Chi Chi is the only person that has sent me more than two.
ReplyDeleteI think you can also take some solace in the plausible deniability. The site works more efficiently if you are only friends with the people you want regular news feed updates from. You can always claim that it's not that you didn't want to be friends with them, but that you get more out of the site when you only focus on the friends you have regular communication with.
I guess I probably followed through on this because, through my own thinkings on the subject, and now through the independent corroboration of the NYTM, I've become a true believer that it's positively liberating to cast off the past. If a person factually no longer matters to me, how is it a benefit rather than a burden to have him or her taking up a part of my digital-social orbit?
ReplyDeleteI did keep a couple of folks who are admittedly cheats on my part: a friend from middle school who frequently calls on me, but who I follow with very little interest; and a not terribly close friend-of-a-friend who always posts interersting items to my newsfeed. Strictly speaking, I probably should have canned them too.
I don't really keep mine to a minimum. As a general rule, I keep most people if I like them, unless I get annoyed with how many times they show up on my feed. Sometimes I keep people if I'm proud to know them. For example, I collect valedictorian friends, with a few exceptions. I keep people from my past if I consider them important enough. I'm friends with Julia, and I've talked to her maybe once in the last four years. I guess what I mean to say is that I don't just try to ditch the past indiscriminately. I try to keep the good, and eschew the rest. As long as you're finding value in those friends you kept, it makes sense to keep them.
ReplyDeleteHaving now taken a few more days to think about it, my philosophy has crystallized thusly: I want Facebook to streamline my social interactions; I don't want it to pressure me into additional ones. So if I wouldn't feel comfortable walking up and starting a conversation with X, then X shouldn't be getting status updates on me. And personally, my threshold of social awkwardness is pretty low, so a relatively short time apart can send me ducking down odd aisles in the grocery store to avoid former acquaintances. I ditched practically everyone I've ever known, because I would take pains to avoid ever seeing practically everyone I've ever known ever again, if somebody would just forewarn me as they approached.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.qwantz.com/archive/000650.html
ReplyDeleteYo, I've been remiss, I'll try to manage a comment tonight.
ReplyDelete