Less is not more; more is more

Human together: things i find odd about facebook relationships

metakat:

sometimes, out of nowhere, someone you haven’t spoken to in years, with whom you had the slightest bit of connection to and haven’t really interacted since, will suddenly reply to one of your status messages or comment on photos as the most natural, casual thing in the world. don’t get me wrong, i love this and i do this myself pretty much every day. but it’s just so very fucking odd. no coffee beforehand, no recent meeting, not even a ‘how are you’. i honestly love it. i love this absence of required niceties before you can even make a connection again. i love the casualness of facebook.

another thing which is odd is the way you sometimes see someone on the other side of the street with whom you are friends on facebook and you genuinely feel like you do not want to meet and sometimes it goes both ways and you get this mutual sense of respecting each others’ privacy. now, this may seem as a reason to unfriend the person online, but i disagree. people have different ways to interact and different ways to function together. it is just easier or more natural to communicate with some people online rather than face to face. furthermore, there are many different functionalities and roles people play on facebook towards each other. while i might not say hi or even nod to ‘film editor person X’, whenever i might need a ‘film editor person’, i know exactly who to ask. yeah we met once in a club, or went to grade school together and would never naturally interact, but ultimately, networking is networking.

i think that whatever you need from person X, will greatly modify the need for different degrees of niceties. i will always befriend any person on facebook whom i’ve met at least once, no matter how short the meeting was as long as it made some form of impact. there’s a huge difference between asking for a couch and offering a job/project/collaboration though.

i guess it’s the whole notion of kind of staying updated on people’s lives regardless of direct contact that makes all those niceties unnecessary. and i guess this makes true friendships even more dear.

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What she said.