Via Flickr
Best friends, close friends, work friends, family friends, facebook friends, school friends, uni friends penfriends and special friends. What (or who) is a friend these days? How do you define a friend? Do you have a flist?
Back in the days when life was simple friends were people you could call even if you had nothing much to say, or pop round to visit for no reason at all. All the address details for every friend you had could be found in a small indexed notebook you carried in your handbag or kept on your desk. The master list of family contacts could be found beside the phone. Of course in those days the phone was wired to the wall and the whole family could probably listen in on every conversation. The majority of your friends lived in your neighbourhood or the same town. If you moved somewhere new the single mandatory activity required to maintain that friendship was the sending of a card at Christmas. The more organised would send letters and arrange visits but as long as you got and received a Christmas card, nothing more was required.
Children were children and parents were parents. Sometimes as the child grew to adulthood the child/parent relationship would become a friendship. Parents didn’t have to ask their children to friend them. The parent who befriended their child’s friends got only the edited view of their child’s friendship world. Social networking sites like facebook are not only changing the definition of friend but the nature of your friendships. Over a lifetime you gain and lose friends, the groups you belong to, the time and effort you expend, where you work and where you live all change the makeup of your group of friends. Technology now gives us a way to never lose friends and I find that kind of scary. Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Twitter and the like allow you to maintain an ambient friendship with everyone you’ve ever met – as long as you friend them or follow them. You no longer have to have any contact with them to find out what they’ve been up to. You can read their status updates and they yours.
Unless they *gasp* unfriend you, you need never lose touch. You can maintain contact with potentially thousands of people with no effort. So why would you do this? Sure, you don’t really need to know that your friend had sushi for lunch, or should have gone to bed earlier or is bored and watching tele. On the other hand it is useful to know if an out of town friend is visiting nearby or someone has a job vacancy of interest or maybe has read a really interesting article and shared it. If you have a question, throwing it out to the wild, to your friends and followers can get you quicker answers than the yellow pages.
Sometimes though you can just have too much of a friend. In the real world you just see a little less of them, don’t email as often. But what if you don’t want to see their daily excitement on the progress of their toddler, or the blow by blow details of their kitchen renovations. How can you take a break from all of this. If you unfriend them they’ll know, they’ll see your photo disappear from their friends list, the number reduce by one. Some will contact you and want to know why. On Windows Messenger you can be on-line but appear offline. It’s great for days when you don’t feel that chatty. You can hide and make contact on your terms. What some of the other sites need is a way to pause the friending. Your friends need not know that you’re taking a break from their ‘ambient friendship’. It gives you a chance to take a breath an re-evaluate how much you want or need that friendship. If it turns out you were just having a grumpy phase you can un-pause the friendship and they need never know.
So all this turns me back to my address book. I still have one somewhere but I’ve long since stopped updating it. There was always the fear I might lose it but I was never so unlucky. For a while I actually had a text file equivalent on my PC. But now I’ve let go of the need to have a single address file. My phone probably has the greatest number of contact, friends and acquaintances on it but I’m comfortable with different lists and details sitting in different places. Facebook, Linkedin, webmail, work email, cell phone, work phone, twitter and my battered old address book all have different subsets of my friends world but I seldom lack the contact details I need when and where I need them. And I no longer need to carry around the indexed notebook in my handbag.
