[Reader-list] On Facebook and Faux Friendship

[Taha Mehmood]

http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/

December 6, 2009
Faux Friendship

By William Deresiewicz

"…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one
was distant. …"
—War and Peace

"Families are gone, and friends are going the same way."
—In Treatment

We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at
all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in
recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in
terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all
measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer
to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are
each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg
their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings,
released from competition for parental resources that in traditional
society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now
treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and
even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking
those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a
first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves
whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain
has put it, we're friends with everyone now.

Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The
Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social
space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens,
are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When
they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content?
If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't
the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its
future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're
stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation.
They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they
didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal
friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems
inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we
would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves
today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only
people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it
means.

How did we come to this pass? The idea of friendship in ancient times
could not have been more different. Achilles and Patroclus, David and
Jonathan, Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus: Far from being ordinary and
universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and
hard-won. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, its
elective affinities were exceptional, even subversive, cutting across
established lines of allegiance. David loved Jonathan despite the
enmity of Saul; Achilles' bond with Patroclus outweighed his loyalty
to the Greek cause. Friendship was a high calling, demanding
extraordinary qualities of character—rooted in virtue, for Aristotle
and Cicero, and dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and truth. And
because it was seen as superior to marriage and at least equal in
value to sexual love, its expression often reached an erotic
intensity. Jonathan's love, David sang, "was more wondrous to me than
the love of women." Achilles and Patroclus were not lovers—the men
shared a tent, but they shared their beds with concubines—they were
something greater. Achilles refused to live without his friend, just
as Nisus died to avenge Euryalus, and Damon offered himself in place
of Pythias.

The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. Christian
thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be
turned to God. Within monastic communities, particular attachments
were seen as threats to group cohesion. In medieval society,
friendship entailed specific expectations and obligations, often
formalized in oaths. Lords and vassals employed the language of
friendship. "Standing surety"—guaranteeing a loan, as in The Merchant
of Venice—was a chief institution of early modern friendship.
Godparenthood functioned in Roman Catholic society (and, in many
places, still functions) as a form of alliance between families, a
relationship not between godparent and godchild, but godparent and
parent. In medieval England, godparents were "godsibs"; in Latin
America, they are "compadres," co-fathers, a word we have taken as
synonymous with friendship itself.
Enlarge Photo The New Friendship 2


The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other
ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Truth and virtue, again,
above all: "Those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act
of friendship," wrote Montaigne, "for to undertake to wound and offend
a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him." His bond
with Étienne, he avowed, stood higher not only than marriage and
erotic attachment, but also than filial, fraternal, and homosexual
love. "So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship,
that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries." The
highly structured and, as it were, economic nature of medieval
friendship explains why true friendship was held to be so rare in
classical and neoclassical thought: precisely because relations in
traditional societies were dominated by interest. Thus the "true
friend" stood against the self-interested "flatterer" or "false
friend," as Shakespeare sets Horatio—"more an antique Roman than a
Dane"—against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Sancho Panza begins as Don
Quixote's dependent and ends as his friend; by the close of their
journey, he has come to understand that friendship itself has become
the reward he was always seeking.

Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted
through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships
of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau.
Words­worth addressed his magnum opus to his "dear Friend" Coleridge.
Tennyson lamented Hallam—"My friend … My Arthur … Dear as the mother
to the son"—in the poem that became his masterpiece. Speaking of his
first encounter with Hawthorne, Melville was unashamed to write that
"a man of deep and noble nature has seized me." But meanwhile, the
growth of commercial society was shifting the very grounds of personal
life toward the conditions essential for the emergence of modern
friendship. Capitalism, said Hume and Smith, by making economic
relations impersonal, allowed for private relationships based on
nothing other than affection and affinity. We don't know the people
who make the things we buy and don't need to know the people who sell
them. The ones we do know—neighbors, fellow parishioners, people we
knew in high school or college, parents of our children's friends—have
no bearing on our economic life. One teaches at a school in the
suburbs, another works for a business across town, a third lives on
the opposite side of the country. We are nothing to one another but
what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.

Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality
and inter-involvement. We are citizens now, not subjects, bound
together directly rather than through allegiance to a monarch. But
what is to bind us emotionally, make us something more than an
aggregate of political monads? One answer was nationalism, but another
grew out of the 18th-century notion of social sympathy: friendship, or
at least, friendliness, as the affective substructure of modern
society. It is no accident that "fraternity" made a third with liberty
and equality as the watchwords of the French Revolution. Wordsworth in
Britain and Whitman in America made visions of universal friendship
central to their democratic vistas. For Mary Wollstonecraft, the
mother of feminism, friendship was to be the key term of a
renegotiated sexual contract, a new domestic democracy.

Now we can see why friendship has become the characteristically modern
relationship. Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike
traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in
individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist
independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice.
Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of
friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage.
Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose
them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in
freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but
friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs
toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of
possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal,
improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever
we want, however we want, for as long as we want.

Social changes play into the question as well. As industrialization
uprooted people from extended families and traditional communities and
packed them into urban centers, friendship emerged to salve the
anonymity and rootlessness of modern life. The process is virtually
instinctive now: You graduate from college, move to New York or L.A.,
and assemble the gang that takes you through your 20s. Only it's not
just your 20s anymore. The transformations of family life over the
last few decades have made friendship more important still. Between
the rise of divorce and the growth of single parenthood, adults in
contemporary households often no longer have spouses, let alone a
traditional extended family, to turn to for support. Children, let
loose by the weakening of parental authority and supervision, spin out
of orbit at ever-earlier ages. Both look to friends to replace the
older structures. Friends may be "the family we choose," as the modern
proverb has it, but for many of us there is no choice but to make our
friends our family, since our other families—the ones we come from or
the ones we try to start—have fallen apart. When all the marriages are
over, friends are the people we come back to. And even those who grow
up in a stable family and end up creating another one pass more and
more time between the two. We have yet to find a satisfactory name for
that period of life, now typically a decade but often a great deal
longer, between the end of adolescence and the making of definitive
life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is
absolutely central to it.

Inevitably, the classical ideal has faded. The image of the one true
friend, a soul mate rare to find but dearly beloved, has completely
disappeared from our culture. We have our better or lesser friends,
even our best friends, but no one in a very long time has talked about
friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did. That glib neologism
"bff," which plays at a lifelong avowal, bespeaks an ironic awareness
of the mobility of our connections: Best friends forever may not be on
speaking terms by this time next month. We save our fiercest energies
for sex. Indeed, between the rise of Freudianism and the
contemporaneous emergence of homosexuality to social visibility, we've
taught ourselves to shun expressions of intense affection between
friends—male friends in particular, though even Oprah was forced to
defend her relationship with her closest friend—and have rewritten
historical friendships, like Achilles' with Patroclus, as sexual. For
all the talk of "bromance" lately (or "man dates"), the term is yet
another device to manage the sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male
friendships—whether in the friends themselves or in the people around
them—and the typical bromance plot instructs the callow bonds of youth
to give way to mature heterosexual relationships. At best, intense
friendships are something we're expected to grow out of.

As for the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment to
virtue and mutual improvement, that, too, has been lost. We have
ceased to believe that a friend's highest purpose is to summon us to
the good by offering moral advice and correction. We practice,
instead, the nonjudgmental friendship of unconditional acceptance and
support—"therapeutic" friendship, in Robert N. Bellah's scornful term.
We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we
suppose, by taking our side—validating our feelings, supporting our
decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white
lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can
to keep the boat steady. We're busy people; we want our friendships
fun and friction-free.

Yet even as friendship became universal and the classical ideal lost
its force, a new kind of idealism arose, a new repository for some of
friendship's deepest needs: the group friendship or friendship circle.
Companies of superior spirits go back at least as far as Pythagoras
and Plato and achieved new importance in the salons and coffeehouses
of the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Romantic age gave them a fresh
impetus and emphasis. The idea of friendship became central to their
self-conception, whether in Words­worth's circle or the "small band of
true friends" who witness Emma's marriage in Austen. And the notion of
superiority acquired a utopian cast, so that the circle was seen—not
least because of its very emphasis on friendship—as the harbinger of a
more advanced age. The same was true, a century later, of the
Bloomsbury Group, two of whose members, Woolf and Forster, produced
novel upon novel about friendship. It was the latter who famously
enunciated the group's political creed. "If I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend," he wrote, "I hope I
should have the guts to betray my country." Modernism was the great
age of the coterie, and like the legendary friendships of antiquity,
modernist friendship circles—bohemian, artistic, transgressive—set
their face against existing structures and norms. Friendship becomes,
on this account, a kind of alternative society, a refuge from the
values of the larger, fallen world.

The belief that the most significant part of an individual's emotional
life properly takes place not within the family but within a group of
friends began to expand beyond the artistic coterie and become general
during the last half of the 20th century. The Romantic-Bloomsburyan
prophecy of society as a set of friendship circles was, to a great
extent, realized. Mary McCarthy offered an early and tart view of the
desirability of such a situation in The Group; Barry Levinson, a
later, kinder one in Diner. Both works remind us that the ubiquity of
group friendship owes a great deal to the rise of youth culture.
Indeed, modernity associates friendship itself with youth, a time of
life it likewise regards as standing apart from false adult values.
"The dear peculiar bond of youth," Byron called friendship, inverting
the classical belief that its true practice demands maturity and
wisdom. With modernity's elevation of youth to supreme status as the
most vital and authentic period of life, friendship became the object
of intense emotion in two contradictory but often simultaneous
directions. We have sought to prolong youth indefinitely by holding
fast to our youthful friendships, and we have mourned the loss of
youth through an unremitting nostalgia for those friendships. One of
the most striking things about the way the 20th century understood
friendship was the tendency to view it through the filter of memory,
as if it could be recognized only after its loss, and as if that loss
were inevitable.

The culture of group friendship reached its apogee in the 1960s. Two
of the counterculture's most salient and ideologically charged social
forms were the commune—a community of friends in self-imagined retreat
from a heartlessly corporatized society—and the rock'n'roll "band"
(not "group" or "combo"), its name evoking Shakespeare's "band of
brothers" and Robin Hood's band of Merry Men, its great exemplar the
Beatles. Communes, bands, and other 60s friendship groups (including
Woodstock, the apotheosis of both the commune and the rock concert)
were celebrated as joyous, creative places of eternal youth—havens
from the adult world. To go through life within one was the era's
utopian dream; it is no wonder the Beatles' break-up was received as a
generational tragedy. It is also no wonder that 60s group friendship
began to generate its own nostalgia as the baby boom began to hit its
30s. The Big Chill, in 1983, depicted boomers attempting to recapture
the magic of a late-60s friendship circle. ("In a cold world," the
movie's tagline reads, "you need your friends to keep you warm.")
Thirtysomething, taking a step further, certified group friendship as
the new adult norm. Most of the characters in those productions,
though, were married. It was only in the 1990s that a new generation,
remaining single well past 30, found its own images of group
friendship in Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and, of course, Friends. By
that point, however, the notion of friendship as a redoubt of moral
resistance, a shelter from normative pressures and incubator of social
ideals, had disappeared. Your friends didn't shield you from the
mainstream, they were the mainstream.

And so we return to Facebook. With the social-networking sites of the
new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in
2004—the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the
social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that
of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise—and
promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they
are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not
in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're
simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and
information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the
New York Mets.

I remember realizing a few years ago that most of the members of what
I thought of as my "circle" didn't actually know one another. One I'd
met in graduate school, another at a job, one in Boston, another in
Brooklyn, one lived in Minneapolis now, another in Israel, so that I
was ultimately able to enumerate some 14 people, none of whom had ever
met any of the others. To imagine that they added up to a circle, an
embracing and encircling structure, was a belief, I realized, that
violated the laws of feeling as well as geometry. They were a set of
points, and I was wandering somewhere among them. Facebook seduces us,
however, into exactly that illusion, inviting us to believe that by
assembling a list, we have conjured a group. Visual juxtaposition
creates the mirage of emotional proximity. "It's like they're all
having a conversation," a woman I know once said about her Facebook
page, full of posts and comments from friends and friends of friends.
"Except they're not."

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a
feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs
privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves,
rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with
dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the
traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we
had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no
matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the
Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of
readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have,
instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the
feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective
experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance
as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have
"friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook
page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual
connection, just a sense.

What purpose do all those wall posts and status updates serve? On the
first beautiful weekend of spring this year, a friend posted this
update from Central Park: "[So-and-so] is in the Park with the rest of
the City." The first question that comes to mind is, if you're
enjoying a beautiful day in the park, why don't you give your iPhone a
rest? But the more important one is, why did you need to tell us that?
We have always shared our little private observations and moments of
feeling—it's part of what friendship's about, part of the way we
remain present in one another's lives—but things are different now.
Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one
friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group,
later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific
people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who
they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your
degree of mutual intimacy. "Reach out and touch someone" meant someone
in particular, someone you were actually thinking about. It meant
having a conversation. Now we're just broadcasting our stream of
consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at
once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by
answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as
individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as
individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind
of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle,
but to a cloud.

It's amazing how fast things have changed. Not only don't we have
Wordsworth and Coleridge anymore, we don't even have Jerry and George.
Today, Ross and Chandler would be writing on each other's walls.
Carrie and the girls would be posting status updates, and if they did
manage to find the time for lunch, they'd be too busy checking their
BlackBerrys to have a real conversation. Sex and Friends went off the
air just five years ago, and already we live in a different world.
Friendship (like activism) has been smoothly integrated into our new
electronic lifestyles. We're too busy to spare our friends more time
than it takes to send a text. We're too busy, sending texts. And what
happens when we do find the time to get together? I asked a woman I
know whether her teenage daughters and their friends still have the
kind of intense friendships that kids once did. Yes, she said, but
they go about them differently. They still stay up talking in their
rooms, but they're also online with three other friends, and texting
with another three. Video chatting is more intimate, in theory, than
speaking on the phone, but not if you're doing it with four people at
once. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A
study found that one American in four reported having no close
confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and
there's little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it
have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the
lonelier we get.

The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing
our individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. The
most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are
willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public. "hola
cutie-pie! i'm in town on wednesday. lunch?" "Julie, I'm so glad we're
back in touch. xoxox." "Sorry for not calling, am going through a
tough time right now." Have these people forgotten how to use e-mail,
or do they actually prefer to stage the emotional equivalent of a
public grope? I can understand "[So-and-so] is in the Park with the
rest of the City," but I am incapable of comprehending this kind of
exhibitionism. Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that the value of
friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the
secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate
world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery
they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. There's something
faintly obscene about performing that intimacy in front of everyone
you know, as if its real purpose were to show what a deep person you
are. Are we really so hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we
have friends?

But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect,
far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently
moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel
connected to the friends I'd left behind. But now I find the opposite
is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady
stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and
unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely
because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we
exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical
quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their
best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read
about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.

As for getting back in touch with old friends—yes, when they're people
you really love, it's a miracle. But most of the time, they're not.
They're someone you knew for a summer in camp, or a midlevel friend
from high school. They don't matter to you as individuals anymore,
certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they
made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your
life, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out
of that texture—read about their brats, look at pictures of their
vacation—and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin
the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep
subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your
18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should not know
them.

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now
be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in
the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of
memory. Carlton Fisk has remarked that he's watched the videotape of
his famous World Series home run only a few times, lest it overwrite
his own recollection of the event. Proust knew that memory is a
skittish creature that peeks from its hole only when it isn't being
sought. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this—all of them modes
of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the
heart, where it belongs.

Finally, the new social-networking Web sites have falsified our
understanding of intimacy itself, and with it, our understanding of
ourselves. The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace
profile or "25 Random Things About Me" can tell us more about someone
than even a good friend might be aware of is based on desiccated
notions about what knowing another person means: First, that intimacy
is confessional—an idea both peculiarly American and peculiarly young,
perhaps because both types of people tend to travel among strangers,
and so believe in the instant disgorging of the self as the quickest
route to familiarity. Second, that identity is reducible to
information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid
thing you did in seventh grade. Third, that it is reducible, in
particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web
sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget
that we're all conducting market research on ourselves. Far worse is
that Facebook amplifies our longstanding tendency to see ourselves
("I'm a Skin Bracer man!") in just those terms. We wear T-shirts that
proclaim our brand loyalty, pique ourselves on owning a Mac, and now
put up lists of our favorite songs. "15 movies in 15 minutes. Rule:
Don't take too long to think about it."

So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture.
But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and
why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to
mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character.
This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the
dark humor of a third. Yet even those are just descriptions, and no
more specify the individuals uniquely than to say that one has red
hair, another is tall. To understand what they really look like, you
would have to see a picture. And to understand who they really are,
you would have to hear about the things they've done. Character,
revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In
order to know people, you have to listen to their stories.

But that is precisely what the Facebook page does not leave room for,
or 500 friends, time for. Literally does not leave room for. E-mail,
with its rapid-fire etiquette and scrolling format, already trimmed
the letter down to a certain acceptable maximum, perhaps a thousand
words. Now, with Facebook, the box is shrinking even more, leaving
perhaps a third of that length as the conventional limit for a
message, far less for a comment. (And we all know the deal on
Twitter.) The 10-page missive has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon
to be followed, it seems, by the three-hour conversation. Each evolved
as a space for telling stories, an act that cannot usefully be
accomplished in much less. Posting information is like pornography, a
slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love:
probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is
intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety,
skill—and it teaches them all, too.

They call them social-networking sites for a reason. Networking once
meant something specific: climbing the jungle gym of professional
contacts in order to advance your career. The truth is that Hume and
Smith were not completely right. Commercial society did not eliminate
the self-interested aspects of making friends and influencing people,
it just changed the way we went about it. Now, in the age of the
entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed
onto this template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science
describes a networking event at a West Coast university: "There do not
seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do
dyads appear, except fleetingly." No solitude, no friendship, no space
for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the
author assures us, "face time" is valued in this "community" as a
"high-bandwidth interaction," offering "unusual capacity for
interruption, repair, feedback and learning." Actual human contact,
rendered "unusual" and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We
have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into
machines. The face of friendship in the new century.

William Deresiewicz writes essays and reviews for a variety of
publications. His essay, "The End of Solitude," ran in the Review in
January.