Shadee Malaklou has lots of friends — 1,295, according to her latest Facebook count. But who exactly can she count on?
Malaklou, 22, acknowledges that if she ran into some of her “friends” on the street, she might not remember their names.
When she went to Duke University, North Carolina, US, social life was so competitive that invitations were based only on online determinations of how hot a person was and whether her “friends” were cool.
Now that she is working at a Washington non-profit, Malaklou is planning to prune her “friends”.
But she plans to stay Facebook friends with professors who might be good for letters of recommendation to graduate school.
The word “friend” has long covered a broad range of relationships — roommates, army buddies, teammates, people you see once a year, car pool members and Britney fans.
But MySpace and other networking websites have made us rethink the boundaries and intensities of these relationships.
Never before in history has it been so easy to keep up with so many people with whom you otherwise would have lost contact.
Summer friendships, for example, have been transformed. The ritual of meeting again at the beach after a long winter was once marked by hours of catching up.
But not today. Networked people who haven’t seen each other for years know about the new boyfriend and what happened to the old one.
Now, after the initial squeals, conversations pick up in mid-sentence.
This is a world of “participatory surveillance”, says Anders Albrechtslund of Denmark’s Aalborg University.
Real online friends watch over each other. Others call it “empowering exhibitionism”, Albrechtslund says.
Too many requests
Life was once so simple. I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour, went the Friends theme song.
I’ll be there for you, ’cause you’re there for me too. But today when you join a social network, the first thing you start questioning is if you really want to embrace every “friend” request.
Do you really want every petitioner — no matter how unclear his identity or intent — to see your personal information?
There’s this girl at school “who won’t even say ‘hi’
in the hallway”, says a 16-year-old junior at a Washington DC high school.
This same aloof girl keeps asking to be a virtual “friend” on Facebook, no matter how often the answer is no.This junior struggles with the relationship dilemma.
Confusing questions
“Why would I want to be friends with this person? I occasionally smile at her. I guess it’s kind of really impersonal to me, if she’s not even going to say ‘hi’.
” The high schooler says she’s “selective in acceptance of friends” — she has “only” 131 on Facebook.
"But if she had a relationship blow-up, on the shoulders of how many could she cry?
“Probably like 20,” she says.
For two decades, online social networks have been touted as one of the finest flowerings of our new era.
But what is the strength of ties so weak as to barely exist? Who will lend you lunch money? Who will bail you out of jail?
A remote Wyoming cattle ranch was home to the internet pioneer John Perry Barlow when he was a boy in the 1950s.
In the 1980s, when he encountered the first settlers of online communities such as the Well, he felt like he was back in the small towns he once knew.
He revelled in the throngs “gossiping, complaining ... comforting and harassing each other, bartering, beginning and ending love affairs, praying for one another’s sick kids”, he once wrote.
He has since developed a more jaundiced view of the internet’s utopian promise to dissolve barriers between people — “the reason I got involved in that stuff” in the first place, he says.
Barlow hoped for “a distinctly 19th-century understanding of what community was.
Where it was not just bail you out of jail but stand behind you with a loaded gun — the Wyoming version”.
Instead, he sees people collecting and displaying enormous numbers of “friends” on MySpace, “for the same reason that elk grow antlers, I expect”.
Some encounters can be novel and strange. Jessica Smith, 23, remembers the time someone she had never heard of tried to “friend” her.
It happened when Smith was an undergraduate and had just started dating her boyfriend, Peter. It turned out the stranger was Peter’s ex.
“There was nothing friendly about this,” she says. “She only wanted to know about me.”
When Smith didn’t fall for this probe, “a friend of hers friended me. Like that would trick me. It was weird. Really creepy.”
Before social networks, “she wouldn’t have called me or written me a letter”.
We’re inventing Friends Next every day.
“For most people, when they thought of their close friends, it was people with whom they would share personal things,” says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
“What’s changing now is that people who are not in the other person’s physical life meet in this very new kind of space. It is leaving room for hybrid forms.”
The weirdness of Friends Next is that it comes at you like a melodrama: “Is he married yet?” or “Is he still straight?”
It’s entertainment
“Facebook is entertainment,” says Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist who studies social networks at Harvard, the US.
“Instead of watching soap operas, they’re watching soap operas of people they sort of know.”
Losing friends in this new world is as fraught as making them.
“Real-world friendships are not usually intentionally ended,” Adams says.
“On Facebook, decisive action has to be taken.” Defriending confirms that a friendship is over.
"The best soap operas occur when a couple breaks up. Change your profile from “In a Relationship” to “Single”, and little press releases blast out to all your “friends”.
"E-mailing and tongue-wagging ensues.
"It’s futile to try to erase traces of Friends Next. “The digital trails of the friendship last forever,” Albrechtslund says.
Its evidence is stored on servers, beyond the control of the persons involved.
The real thing
So in Friends Next, what matters? Is good company enough? Is it trust? Or loyalty? Or self-sacrifice?
“Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport,” Jay Leno said.
“The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren’t bad; they’re just acquaintances.”
While Facebook will allow you as many as 5,000 “friends”, realities impose far more significant limits.
No matter how thick your constant communication is, sooner or later, you may have to decide who will be your bridesmaid.
No matter how easily you can get Facebook on your iPhone, sooner or later, you may have to decide who will be the godfather to your child.
And no matter how extensive your profile, someday, someone is going to have to decide who will be your pallbearers.
Identity: Collapsing personalities
You know all those separate lives you lead?
When you’re not being the FTC lawyer or the hair-metal-band freak, you’re the wife of a glassblower and a mother of two, who likes to spend every vacation she can on the black-sand beaches of Dominica?
Forget about keeping those lives neatly partitioned in Friends Next.
“It’s the post-modern nightmare — to have all of your selves collide,” says Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, the United States, who edits Personal Relationships, the journal of the International Association for Relationship Research.
In the agrarian age, you wouldn’t even have developed those various personalities.
In Friends Next, you can’t escape them.
“If you really welcome all your friends from all the different aspects of your life, and they interact with each other and communicate in ways that everyone can read, you are held accountable for the person you are in all these groups, instead of just one of them,” Adams says.
This became dramatically clear in September 2003 in a site called Friendster.
Two 16-year-old students approached a young San Francisco teacher with a question: Why do you do drugs?
So reports danah boyd, a PhD candidate at the University of California, who has become renowned for her research on online social networks and who insists on rendering her name without capital letters.
The teacher’s profile was nothing controversial. But she had a lot of friends who were devotees of the Burning Man — an annual festival in the Nevada Desert that attracts people experimenting with community, artwork, self-expression and clothing-optional revelry.
“The drug reference came not from her profile but from those of her friends, some of whom had signalled drug use [and attendance at the Burning Man],” boyd writes.
In Friends Next, all your lives collapse.
“You can be friends with someone you know well and don’t like. It’s a love-to-hate-type relation,” says university student Susannah Clark.
“I agreed to be one person’s friend because he was so psychotic I was scared of what would happen if I said no,” writes blogger Dan Kaufman.
— By Joel Garreau/Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
