Facebook and Chicken Soup

I’ve not been great about updating my blog lately, for which I was gently chided at home the other night, having not yet posted in the new year. Part of my laziness has been a complete oversaturation (and overnauseation) with all this Blagojevich nonsense, as well as a general malaise about the fact that nothing I ever say or do about anything will amount to a hill of extra-dark roast coffee beans.

But another part of the reason, I suppose, is that in the past couple months I’ve become enamored with Facebook, the online social networking site, for those of you who have been living under several rocks. I’m finding myself logging in, checking others’ status updates, updating my own status, uploading photos, playing whatever mind-numbing games happen to strike my fancy at the time, and making snarky comments about things my friends say, do and post.

Friends. That’s what Facebook is all about. You find people you know, add them as friends, they add you back, you look at their friend lists, find other people you know or remember from high school, grade school, the nursery at the hospital where you were born, or even in the premortal existence, add them, and voila—you have a social network: a group of friends. At least that’s what Facebook calls them.

I point to an article that was in the Chicago Tribune recently, one that was “posted” on Facebook by a couple of my “friends.” (I use quotation marks around the word friends, not because the people that posted it aren’t friends, per se, but because they’re in my social network of people that I added on Facebook). You can read the article yourself, but I quote the last few paragraphs here:

"And I wonder about the younger generations who are growing up intravenously connected to these networks. What happens as online nomenclature is woven into offline life? Will people be able to distinguish between a Facebook friend and one who will bring them chicken soup when they're sick? What will that mean for the way our society interacts—or doesn't—in the future?

The people I remain connected to through force of will are there to stay. Just because a friend from grade school and I could find each other's profiles and enjoy reconnecting for a brief moment in time doesn't mean there's anything more to be shared.

More than likely, we would occasionally check out each other's profiles, send off the hollow "Happy Birthday" when the system tells us to, and find ourselves no closer than before we encountered each other in cyberspace.

Convenient, yes, but hardly the kind of effort that yields real friendship."

A couple comments that I’ve read about this article seem to indicate the attitude that anyone who holds this kind of opinion is just kind of a “get-off-my-lawn” square who doesn’t understand the way people interact today. Being one that gets irked at people (younger than me, mostly—yeah, you, get off my lawn!) who are constantly tappity-tapping away on their cell phones sending text messages to people, I instinctively agreed with the article. So I ended up going into the whole Facebook thing rather slowly.

But once I got the hang of it, found a few “friends,” played a few games, uploaded a few pictures, shared a few memories, wow, I jumped in with both feet. I talked with people I hadn’t seen since high school graduation, since living with in the same dorms at college, since my old life in radio, people I’d spent the bulk of my summers with since I was four. It was fantastic! I had people add me that I didn’t think I was cool enough to have been friends with. They added me! My friend list exploded exponentially. I was popular!!

Or so it seemed.

I started to think about all the people that I was “friends” with, and whom, if anybody, I considered to be true chicken-soup-delivering friends. Then, one picture somebody posted really hit home with me. It was of a bunch of guys that I knew, posing for a snapshot at somebody’s house before some life-alteringly important high school dance. I had been involved with almost every single one of them in some sport or activity—most, I had played football with. And when you spray snot and sweat on each other and stink up locker room bathroom stalls together, you tend to get fairly friendly.

But I wasn’t in that picture. A group of about 15 guys that I knew fairly well for a number of years, and I hadn’t been invited to the party. Some were guys that I didn’t even think were part of that football-playing, cheerleader-dating group, but there they were. I was upset—20 goddamn years later—because I thought I belonged there. I was surprised that it affected me that much. Then I realized why.

You see, it served as a stark confirmation of a suspicion that I’ve always had—that those people weren’t really my friends. In my mind, if I were really considered a friend, somebody would have thought, ‘hey, let’s call Fata,’ especially in a group that big, somebody would (should?) have thought of me. I thought I was pretty popular then, as I was in a colossal number of different activities and sports, from football to French Club. But in subsequent years, I realized I really wasn’t actually popular, due, I guess, to the fact that I was in so many different groups, I didn’t belong to one of them. And that picture jolted me back to reality, shattering my illusion of newfound popularity. I didn’t get any more popular simply because a few people said they were glad to “see” me on Facebook 20 years later.

I make no secret of my rejection issues—my whole life, I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside of something or other looking in. (It’s why I can’t stand to be late—I’m afraid I’m not important enough for people to not start without or not leave behind). And Facebook forcing me to call these people “friends” reminded me of that.

The truth is, they were—and are now—acquaintances. I wasn’t invited to a little pre-dance party 20 years ago with people I thought I was kind of close with—what makes me think any of them would bring me chicken soup if I were sick, even if I lived close enough? Who would buy me several thousand beers and listen to me spill my guts if I were going through a rough time? Who would help me move? Who would give me a ride to or from an airport at 4 a.m.?

Who among them would I have told that our unborn son died in utero last year?

I have two people on my “friends” list I’ve never even met! One guy’s a news anchor in Peoria who added me for some reason, and another is a guy in Maryland or Delaware whose name I’ve never even heard before. But I accepted his friend request because, hey, he’s got something to do with something I’m interested in career-wise, I think. Pretty lame, huh? Think he’d pick me up at the airport if I ever flew out east?

That’s not to say Facebook is evil for making me call these people “friends.” I’m genuinely glad to have reconnected with all of them. And I’ve actually found a couple surprise actual friendships, based on similar interests, memories and post-school life events, so that’s been really great. But I wish there was some sort of option to post things for everybody to see, and then an option to post things you only want your real, live, in-the-now, actual friends to see. There is the option to make friends lists, to categorize people by how you know them: high school, college, work, church, etc. So there’s one list that I’ve got labeled “inside”—as in inside my inner circle. It’s not a very populous list. If you have to ask if you're on it, that should give you your answer.

Since Facebook is forcing me to call everybody “friends,” instead of acquaintances, I think as my own little nod to the importance of the “inside”-ers, I’ll change the name of that particular list to that which a true friend would deliver in a time of need:

Chicken Soup.

Postscript: If you read the article on the Tribune site, you’ll notice there is no byline. There is only an e-mail link to the author at the bottom. How do you e-mail chicken soup?

Post postscript: Wow, this entry became a lot more about me than about Facebook. Sorry. I could go on and on about my views on friendship, what kind of relationship might qualify as friendship and why, but I think I'll save that for another day, if at all.