I can’t remember where I first came across the essay Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz, but I hadn’t set aside the time to read it until just recently. The essay is a bit verbose, but completely worth the read. It has had a serious impact on how I view my interactions with the people I might call friends without really thinking about it. What Deresiewicz’s essay really calls into question is the true value of Social Networks, and therein, I believe, is the truly important message of the article: Social Networks may provide a feeling of friendship, but the value of such relationships, if they can even be called that, is highly questionable.
| We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one… – Deresiewicz |
For those of you who have no intention of reading the article, allow me to summarize its concepts as best I can. Mr. Deresiewicz is lamenting what he seems to regard as the loss of true Friendship in the information-centric world of the Digital Age. He spends a great deal of time using history and classical literature to illustrate that Friendship, as a social construct, has attenuated in value through the duration of modern history.
Deresiewicz notes that “Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won.” To illustrate this point, he uses the relationship of David and Solomon, a relationship that David wrote “was more wondrous to me than the love of women.” He goes on to opine that early Christianity radically changed this friendship paradigm because “Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds” because the early patriarchs taught that “the heart should be turned to God.”
After experiencing a revival of depth in the Renaissance period that lasted through the 18th and 19th centuries (think Byron & Shelley or Wordsworth & Coleridge), the birth of Capitalism and the rise of consumer society began a new shift in the definition of friendship. Rather than forming friendships based on needs, the modern world places value on friendships rooted in commonality:
Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage.
The problem that Deresiewicz sees with this model of friendship is that it has all the permanence of the rest of a consumer society’s goods – since friendship has become elective, people can just as easily elect to stop being friends. The potential for friendships of great depth fell away in this model, because the ties that bound us were both easily broken, and easily acquired. He also notes that with the dawn of this equality-based model intimate personal friendships became taboo – see the poster on the left.
"...it's not gay if you don't make eye contact."
We save our fiercest energies for sex. Indeed, between the rise of Freudianism and the contemporaneous emergence of homosexuality to social visibility, we’ve taught ourselves to shun expressions of intense affection between friends—male friends in particular… For all the talk of “bromance” lately… the term is yet another device to manage the sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male friendships… At best, intense friendships are something we’re expected to grow out of.
Deresiewicz notes that one last friendship paradigm came into existence, and somewhat mitigated the loss of the intimate personal friendship, and lasted into the most recent century. The “group friendship” or “friendship circle” was of particular importance in the 17th and 18th centuries, and continues to hold some level of sway in contemporary times, but this model has paved the way to a rising model of “faux friendship” that Deresiewicz seems to find horrifying.
Deresiewicz seems to see the rise of the Social Network model that is rapidly gaining traction as almost a death knell for true Friendship. The intimate personal friendship, egalitarian friendship and even the ill-fated friendship circle have given way to a digital “simulacra” of friendships with all the permanence and depth of the 140-character tweets that so poignantly represent the Social Network craze.
Facebook seduces us, however, into … believ[ing] that by assembling a list, we have conjured a group. Visual juxtaposition creates the mirage of emotional proximity. “It’s like they’re all having a conversation,” a woman I know once said about her Facebook page, full of posts and comments from friends and friends of friends. “Except they’re not.”
…what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they’ve shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 “friends,” in what sense do we have any?
So where does that leave me and you? Should we stop tweeting? Quit updating our “status”? Should we suddenly feel alone and abandoned in the world? I don’t really think so. I think the lesson of this essay is to realize that knowing blurbs of facts about a person doesn’t make us friends. Knowing that right now, 500 miles from here, Jon is playing Farmville doesn’t mean that Jon is the kind of person I can count on, or would even want to have my back.
True friendship involves, at the very least, an ongoing investment of time, emotion and resources to which we must dedicate ourselves at a level that might feel uncomfortable or even frightening – that may earn us ridicule, or at least some strange looks. We must remember that true friends value both our strengths and weaknesses – and quite possibly even our quirks. We must remember that being a true friend isn’t always pleasant, or fun – sometimes it may be downright costly or painful.
We must remember that every moment on this earth may very well be our last, and commit to our friendships in such a way as to leave something behind more indelible and permanent than a MySpace page.
