Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
So wrote Shakespeare in Sonnet 116. And perhaps he’s right, for love. But ‘friendship’? A stranger beast these days.
I’ve always had some difficulties with the way Facebook uses the term ‘Friend’. A blunt instrument – a binary switch; you’re connected, and a friend. Or you’re not connected. And you’re not a friend, or not one anymore? Or rejected, or shunned? Hmm.
Real life relationships are so much more richly textured. You might be a very close friend, or someone who was a friend 25 years ago. We might have been associated by passion, by common interest, by calamity, or just by circumstance. We may interact daily, or every ten years. Sometimes that frequency will feel right, and sometimes it won’t. We may not actually like each other that much. We may have assymetry in our relationship. We may have odd incentives (keeping friends close, and enemies closer, and all that). There may be professional or family boundary issues (my kids?!) at play. We may value each other as contributers of content, of insight, as curators, or as members of networks.
And things may have changed. There may well have been tempests, and shaking.
In short, a hugely complicated, dynamic web of facts and emotions that the on-off ‘friend’ label cannot hope to represent with any subtlety. How then to navigate this complexity?
Setting out a Facebook friend ‘policy’ might help. I have to acknowledge that the ubiquity of Facebook now means, for me, that I want to have an active presence there again. I want to have a network which is a meaningful and current representation of my interactions.
One of the reasons that Twitter finally clicked for me was the lack of baggage around the follow/followed relationship. Connections were very much more about content, and less about emotional ties. That doesn’t mean friendships don’t form, and some of the above issues become more pertinent, but it’s generally less fraught. Less fraught is good.
So, I’m aiming for a Facebook network that conforms a little more closely to the principles of my Twitter one. No doubt with many exceptions, I’m aiming for a connection:
– if we have a currently active social relationship
– if we value each other’s content, at any level – and it’s content that works particularly well in Facebook’s world (family stuff and some types of event are good examples)
– if we’ve interacted within the last year or so on Facebook
– if you’re still an active user; in some ways a dormant or sporadic channel can be more problematic than one that isn’t there at all
– if our connection is deeper than solely a circumstantial one at some time in the distant past (if we knew each other only in a work setting, it may be that LinkedIn will be a more useful way to maintain contact)
Facebook’s increased ubiquity actually helps to address one of the early reasons for forming ‘friend’ connections. Some of my original Facebook contacts were very much there as bookmarks – using the service as an address book, effectively. Having lost childhood contacts after 30 years, there was some joy in at least knowing where they were, even if Friend Reuniting would never really be on the cards. But contact is easier to make now, when needed, without having to maintain a running commentary on each other’s lives.
My trust, generally, in Facebook is not high. I sense lots of downsides of massive transparency of the actual complexity of reality. I avoid putting up pictures and other content, and prefer to use other systems where the non-FB world can also join in (e.g. my Flickr presence). LinkedIn remains a standard for “professional” content and relationships.
I’ll probably change my mind from time to time, and certainly make loads of exceptions. But if you’re reading this because you think I don’t see you as a friend any more, be assured I very likely do. And do get in touch if you want to clear up confusion in that area. I’m pretty easy to find, via Google, or at p@ulclarke.com.