The Worrisome Tick of Growing Old with FaceBook
Sometime this May, I will step into a noisy bar or chintzy hotel space in New York City for my 10-year high school reunion. I'll scan faces to see how they've aged, glance at ring fingers and listen as former classmates talk about where they work, live, travel, who they date and which old friends they've kept up with.
But much of this will likely come across as old news, thanks to that other thing celebrating its 10-year anniversary: Facebook.
The social network launched at Harvard in February 2004. Five months later, one of my high school classmates attended an orientation at Harvard and returned with news of TheFacebook. He sent out a mass email urging much of our graduating class to put their newly acquired college email addresses to use and join. As with so many life-altering decisions I've made since, this one only required the distracted click of a button.
I joined Facebook July 19, 2004. Within days, I was connected to dozens of people from high school; within weeks, I was connected to dozens of new classmates from college.
Though I didn't realize it at the time, I had joined the ranks of the generation that never completely loses touch.
As of this writing, I am still "Facebook friends" with three people from my college orientation group, a student from an introductory Italian class I dropped freshman year, a guy I never actually met who was assigned to live with me before I changed my mind, and a classmate I talked to for 15 minutes on a layover in 2007. I'm also connected to two ex-girlfriends, a handful of high school crushes who never panned out, a guy who asked me out in a bar one night, and the first friend I made in preschool who has spent much of the past decade on Facebook sharing religious quotes and vegetarian recipes.
Before Facebook, it required a deliberate effort to hold on to these weaker relationships. Now it requires a deliberate effort to get rid of them. Before Facebook, it required a deliberate effort to hold on to these weaker relationships. Now it requires a deliberate effort to get rid of them. It may not take much, technically — just scroll through a list and click "unfriend" — but it is an unnatural and severe action: You must make a conscious choice to delete a person from your life. Perhaps this is why so many people I know find themselves with "relationships" that have existed longer online than they did offline.
Based on my (admittedly very limited) perspective, Facebook's users seem to be divided into two groups: younger users who are forever connected to people from the past, and older users who are given a powerful tool to reconnect with those they've long since lost touch with.
If you are younger than 30, there's a good chance you joined Facebook while still in high school or college. Whether you intended to or not, the social network made it possible to peripherally follow the general life trajectories of a staggering number of people you've crossed paths with. You may not hang out with the majority of your hundreds of Facebook friends, but you know many of their storylines. You may not call or text these people, but every once in awhile, you Like a status update, get a notification that you've both been tagged in an old picture or maybe even write the customary "Happy Birthday!!" message on their Facebook profile pages. You keep the relationship just warm enough that it still has a pulse, however faint. You keep it just warm enough that it's easier to resurrect at any time.
If you are more than a few years on the other side of 30, Facebook likely means something much different, at least at first. It's where you rediscover old friends, coworkers and estranged family members. It's where you scan a few profile pictures to see what happened to old drinking buddies and forgotten flames. It's where, feeling bold or simply energized by the service, you might send a message just to say hello and reestablish contact. The magic of Facebook for this older group, as I've heard over and over again from parents and colleagues, is that it reopens a window to the past, though the thrill is often short-lived because these relationships have been dormant too long.
The magic — or the curse — of Facebook for my generation is that the window never shuts.
Those of us in this younger group face questions that tend to go unspoken: What does it mean to go through life without fully detaching from the past? What does it mean to go through life without fully detaching from the past? What is the emotional impact of being able to digitally eavesdrop on and compare yourself to the many people you've known? And what happens when you extend the shelf life of a relationship well beyond its normal expiration date? Does that make our lives richer or more complicated?
Many scientific studies about Facebook have examined how it impacts government, self-esteem, dating and academia (the last of which includes a study with the irresistible title: "Too much face and not enough books.") In fact, one website called Facebook in the Social Sciences has collected hundreds of these studies. For the most part, though, there is not much research looking at the longterm impact Facebook has on the lives of its users, in part because it's still a relatively new phenomenon, and in part because these studies are difficult to conduct. That doesn't mean researchers haven't considered these questions.
"With real-life friendships, you can neglect something and it sort of decays until it's gone. That's absolutely not true with Facebook," says Samuel Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the people behind the website collecting all the research on Facebook. "I think it's good and bad."
The good, as he and other researchers we spoke with noted, is that it creates a larger, more effective network of contacts that you can tap for information about jobs, apartments, vacations and more. "Maybe that person you knew for a week could be exactly the person you need when you're trying to find someone who knows about this programming language or a trip to Buenos Aires," Gosling says. These connections can provide a solution to problems, or at the very least, a sounding board for them.
The downside, some researchers argue, is that these everlasting connections bind us in the past and make it difficult to fully reinvent ourselves. More than that, the peripheral contact with old acquaintances can cause us to second-guess the present.
"You are only seeing part of peoples' lives on Facebook, and most people pretty regularly acknowledge that they only show the good parts," says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me. As a result, she says this can create a "warped perception" of their lives and of your own, if you judge your progress based on the updates they share.
At its best, Facebook can serve as a support group; at its worst, it feels more like a badly timed laugh track. At its best, Facebook can serve as a support group; at its worst, it feels more like a badly timed laugh track.
In my own experience, I don't believe Facebook has locked me in place or restrained my ability to grow, but it has paved a road for the past to creep up unexpectedly. More times than I can count, a former journalism classmate shares a brilliant article they've written or a new job they just got that inevitably make me question my own professional progress. Then there are moments like when my high school girlfriend shared news — and pictures — of her getting engaged. To another woman. Who happens to be a rabbi. For the next week I couldn't shake the thought that my first girlfriend had managed to settle down with a nice Jewish girl before I did.
Yet, there have been plenty of poignant moments when the past comes roaring back on Facebook, not to undermine you, but to provide comfort, feedback, humor and relief. Late last year, I shared a link on Facebook to a blog post I wrote about my mom's battle with cancer. In the days that followed, I received thoughtful Facebook messages and comments from a number of people I've known over the years opening up about their own experiences with the disease and, for some who'd known me in high school, their memories of meeting my mom. I found I drew far more strength from these words from old contacts who had once known me, however briefly, than I did from complete strangers online who also responded to the story.
On rare occasions, Facebook has facilitated even more meaningful experiences. This past summer, I posted a joke on Facebook about one of the candidates running for mayor of New York. A high school classmate who had spent much of the previous decade overseas with the U.S. army happened to see the post, comment on it and spark a back-and-forth exchange that led to us meeting at a bar a few weeks later and having a four-hour conversation. This did not cause us to become best buddies again — the number of friendships I've brought back to life because of Facebook sits in that murky territory between 0 and 1 — but these meetings usually make life better, not worse.
"Facebook provides so many kinds of legitimate, low ways of doing all the initial ground work and testing for potential interest that is quite hard to do otherwise," Gosling says, referring to Likes, comments and other subtle interactions less stressful than calling someone out of the blue. He made this comment in reference to people he's surveyed who use Facebook to carry on affairs with old flames — another possible complication of the social network — but it also holds true for reconnecting with old friends.
Sometime this May, I will step into a noisy bar or chintzy hotel space for my 10-year high school reunion, not because I'm being forced to, but because I do feel a stronger connection to my class than my dad did. By the time he was my age, my dad had moved away from home, married and lost touch with almost everyone from his high school. After all, what relevance did these people, who he hadn't seen or spoken to at all in a decade, have on his life then? Was it really worth undertaking the daunting task of trying to rebuild these ties?
I am not much more social than my dad. Mild-to-moderate introversion seems to run in our family. But whenever he and I talk, it's clear that my old relationships are decaying at a much slower pace than his did. There is certainly a distance between my former classmates, as one would expect after years apart, but largely because of Facebook, the distance seems easier to bridge.
Earlier this month, the same classmate who had served in the army shared on Facebook that he was about to start his first day at Columbia University. Nearly 10 years after graduating high school, he was finally going to college. Within hours, it seemed our entire graduating class had come together in that post to Like it and congratulate him in the comments. I recognized many of the faces of those who responded, even if some of the names had changed over the years. I couldn't help but feel some sense of community, as though we were all in an auditorium cheering for the same thing.
Every day is a high school reunion on Facebook — for better and for worse.
Comments