Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.
Interesting that Sarah sees this as a perk of Facebook. This is actually one of the things that has started to irritate me about it. We all have real friends, and then we have acquaintances - people who form part of our daily lives and who we get along with, but who we aren’t especially close to. Pre-social networking (at least up to the late 90s when I graduated high school), if you moved or changed schools or jobs or phone numbers, it took work to keep up a relationship. For friends, you made the effort. Things like email reduced the effort, but there was still an element of intention there. You had to intentionally add someone to the “To:” field. For acquaintances, you didn’t make the effort, you lost touch and the relationship died a natural death.
Facebook makes it easy to keep those acquaintance relationships alive. Now I’m constantly being informed of my acquaintances birthdays, marriages, divorces, job changes, and other life events. Even if I don’t comment or “Like” them, I still expend energy reading them and thinking about them. No matter how easy Facebook makes it, it’s still time spent on people that I don’t really care that much about. Which leaves me less time and mental energy to spend on the relationships I do care about. At least once a day I read a post from a former classmate and think “I feel nothing about this person’s engagement. If this was 1985, we would never have bothered keeping in touch. That would probably have been better”.
BUT of course I’m still on it, because I want those sweet, sweet party invites.
