It all began when emails slowly trickled into my inbox saying that close friends had joined a new ‘social utility’ and were inviting me to be their
‘friends’ in this brand new virtual world. I paid little attention, but then the invites came more frequently-from closer friends. So I did some reading about Facebook (after already having joined the miserable ‘Hi-5′, back in the day) to see if it would be more hassle than fun.
It seemed innocuous enough, and so I signed up and started adding my friends. At first, my good and close friends were in there and everything was right with the world. All the people who were close to me in real life were clustered around me in my virtual world-leaving notes on my wall and tagging me in photos. I was in. I was hooked.
Next, I started looking through my friends’ friends for people I knew, and I would add them to my friends list. Not acquaintances, but not close friends either. These people piled up until my friends list was full and long. My world was big and there was much choice in friends, and I was very happy with what I had done.
Then, it began. People from the deep dark recesses of my past began contacting me. People I hadn’t spoken to in five, ten, fifteen years. “How’s it going, man?” they would ask. Where do I begin? Suddenly, Facebook had become the equivalent of going to the grocery store in the town where you were raised, but haven’t lived in 20 years. You will invariably bump into your babysitter from when you were 6 who will recognize you and want to hear what’s happened in your life since. Sheer torture.
Darwin wrote a very famous book which very few people have actually read, but everyone thinks they know about. I have never read that book, but I’m about to use it to prove a point. Thank God this is the internet and not a scholarly paper. I’ve digressed. Darwin posed the idea of the survival of the fittest, where only creatures that can adapt to their environment will survive and all others will be cast to the fringes and left to die. Yup. That sounds about right.
Friendships are much the same way. There’s a natural progression to a friendship where people who have a lot in common become quite close. Over time, their tastes, interests or life circumstances will change and they will naturally drift apart. Through adaptation, we gravitate towards new friends with whom we have more in common, and the world continues to turn. This is the way mankind has been working since the beginning, and then Facebook comes along…
Now, we’re forced back into contact with people whom we lost contact with for sensible and viable reasons. [Of course I'm not referring to any of my Facebook friends here, I'm just running with an hypothesis] In defiance of the natural order of human interaction, I will have to interact with and respond to people whose lives run far from parallel with mine.
Some may argue that I should just be more selective about whom I add as a friend in Facebook, but as a narcissist, my priorities are clear. This is just something I will have to live with, and to which I will have to learn to adapt. In the meantime, feel free to add me a as friend in Facebook.
