I Hate My Friends: Interpreting facebook

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. ... There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.” –Daniel Plainview (Daniel-Day Lewis) in P.T. Anderson’s excellent There Will Be Blood

Friend: (noun) a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.

I was recently having a discussion with a colleague at work about whether facebook was for ‘stalkers’ or ‘narcissists.’ In a micro sense, this debate is significant, in a macro sense it is probably one of the least important implications of social networking.

I have 156 friends on facebook, I’ve been friends with people who share my last name, people I’ve attended elementary school with, ex-girlfriends’ siblings and people who I am friends with on other websites. Of those 156 people, I possess 13 of their phone numbers, 12%.

The most common rationale I hear repeatedly in defense of facebook is that it helps us keep in touch with each other. This seems savvy, and I’m sure that in some cases its even true, yet I don’t think that is the reason most people are friends on facebook.

We are changing the definition of what a ‘friend’ is.

Do I share a bond of mutual affection with these 156 souls? The short answer is no. What does this say about our generation?

Well I think I know what it says about me, and I think that though most wouldn’t admit it, we all desire the same thing from facebook; we want to see others fail, though we are ashamed to admit that we enjoy the more lurid things in life.

But in this desire to see failure (which is all about perception, really), we are challenging an even larger, time-tested truth, which is this: people are meant to go away.

There is no legitimate reason that I should know what is going on with someone I haven’t seen since high school graduation, after all, I haven’t seen them for a reason: We aren’t friends. Yet now, thanks to facebook, we are... and I struggle to come to terms with what that really means.

There is nothing, beyond a callow desire to see people fail on a more personal level than was previously possible, that gives facebook any redeemable, intrinsic value. And this is what troubles me most, because before facebook, those desires could rarely be met in any meaningful way and we were better off for it.

Here’s an example: Let’s say an acquaintance from high school breaks up with his girlfriend, I’ll probably never hear about it. If I do, it’ll be from (mostly likely) at best a tertiary source that won’t have any specific knowledge beyond the breakup happening and maybe some suspect gossip about why it went down. If I do even consider this beyond the cursory nature I’d consider anything, it’d probably be on a very basic, meaningless level. Then, assuming I was out, I’d get drunk and probably forget that I was even told.

However, let’s say this person is my ‘friend’ on facebook. All of the sudden, I am informed that they are now single. I can go to their page (potentially) and see how they feel about on their status update, check out pictures of the formally happy couple, read their wall correspondence and a myriad of other things. This is impossible to resist.

The problem with all of this information is that none of it is good information, it’s information overload, and it’s very easy to get hung up on. We are making the basic mistake of lionizing more information as opposed to better information, and the fact is that quantity is never better than quality. We aren’t supposed to know.

Trying to be objective, I can hear people saying that I am making something out of nothing, I’ve considered this argument, but I don’t think it is so. Here’s why:

A lot of people have been hung up on the famous (or I suppose in Europe, royalty), we’ve been conditioned to follow these famous people through media, we make the agreement that we care about them and they are important. This is all well and good, and in most people this desire for knowledge about the famous ends with reading US Weekly or checking out PerezHilton. We don’t pay it much thought after that.

But with facebook, we are all celebrities. Through facebook we are informed about every aspect of a person’s life that they are willing to share, we read about them, see what others are saying about them, look at pictures of them drunk and, most importantly, hope that they fail. How is this any different they being a celebophile?

When someone tells you they are a “facebook stalker,” this is what they mean.

And why is this bad? Because it dehumanizes people, the chance to make a meaningful connection is there, yet time and time again, people choose not to make it. I can only imagine that these kinds of interactions will begin to play themselves out in person as well. How many times have you gotten a friend request from someone from your past without any other correspondence? This person wants to know your dirty laundry, they want to watch you fail.

But, when everyone is a star, then no one is a star, which is the essential conundrum that faces facebook users; in a world that thrives on drama, where is the humanity? When all of the things that we love are right there for everyone else to make a value judgment on, how do we make real connections and when do those things stop mattering?

Have you ever talked with someone before and asked a question, but already knew the answer because of facebook, it gives you a slightly creepy sensation. You shouldn’t possess this information but you do. Maybe, sometimes you are even asking a question that you already know the answer to, so you can in turn ask a question that you couldn’t have asked if you didn’t know the information. There is something very wrong with all of this.

Sensory overload will be the end of us all… stay out of the light.