A couple of weeks ago I got into a fight with a dear friend of mine.  A verbal altercation; harsh words were exchanged and we narrowly avoided fistacuffs.  I told her I didn’t use facebook to regularly communicate with people I considered friends.  She commented that for her, it was easy to maintain lots of relationships with lots of people using facebook. 

I don’t have lots of relationships with lots of people.  I used to have a bunch of social obligations with some groups that I’ve since discontinued (although I hope to be asked back to Jamison Koehler’s poker game). I have lots of ‘friends’ on facebook (because I am a voyeur and want to see what other people are wearing/doing/saying/ and I’m lame and agree to friend everyone) and I’m active on some listservs. I don’t post on people’s walls and I don’t comment on pictures with any regularity. I look at the cute kiddie photos and think, oh, that’s nice. It’s a ton of effort to actually write out what I’m thinking and honestly, I type much slower than I think so by the time I get the words onto the computer screen, the feeling is gone. And who wants a has been feeling as a comment on the cute kiddie picture?

Facebook has taught me that I am a fairly private person (aside from posting pictures of my embryos on here) and also, that I have never considered that friendship should be easy.  In fact, I like the complicated nature of my true friendships.  Most of my good friends don’t live nearby and it takes some effort to get in touch.  When we do connect we speak to each other as if a moment hasn’t passed between us.  My bff lives in Baltimore, but we talk on the phone almost every day.  If we can’t do that we’ll find each other via email or IM.  It’s not hard.  It’s just not that easy.
 
Everything has gone public.  All of it.  We’ve lost the sense of the private, the personal.  We post our plans on each other’s walls, we out each other on listservs, we lose anonymity on blogs.  I have friends that don’t email, and certainly don’t use the telephone.   I miss the old days.  I’m not talking about picking up a pen and paper and writing a snail mail letter (GASP!) that would just be ridiculous.  It would be nice, though, to not have to look at a public forum to find out that a friend had a baby or got a new job, got married or got divorced.  Aren’t those things you are supposed to tell ME, not 400 of your closest friends?  Friendships are too easy these days, too cheap.  Everyone gets the same treatment, the same information and the same insight into your life, regardless of how long you’ve known them or how much they contribute to your world.

I don’t judge the folks that use facebook to get by.  I understand being busy and using it as a means to an end.  This blog gets pushed to facebook and that friend that I mention here reads it and comments and I love her for it.  But, I’d love her if she came to notguiltynoway to read it too.

Its a facebook world.  But I just might buy some stamps in revolt.