“Why am I not on your Top 8?”
I don’t rank my friends offline, so why should I start now – on the Web? Ranking family and friends is just asking for trouble and drama I can live without. My mother used to laugh at the wedding announcements in the Society pages of the local paper: “…and afterwards, there will be a small reception for three hundred of the couple’s closest friends.” Who has three hundred friends, let alone close friends??
My mom divided the world up something like this:
Family: These are the folks you let inside the personal bubble. People you love. People you hug. People you let in, even when you’re so mad at them you can’t see straight. Parents, siblings, spouse, children, and grandchildren, maybe a niece or nephew.
Friends: These are the people you might have chosen as family, if you’d been given a vote. Friends are fun people. You may not joyfully pull them into the personal bubble for a bear hug, but certainly, you would choose to invite them over to your house for dinner or drinks. Maybe even both. You wouldn’t kick them out of your house, because they know better than to overstay their welcome in the first place. Friends never need to be told, “It’s time to go home now.” They can sense it. Sometimes, it’s almost as if they can even read your mind.
Friendly acquaintances: Smile, nod, make pleasant small talk with these people, but they have not yet earned their way into the bubble. In fact, there should be a “five foot”rule, but most of them are sensible enough to know that. These are nice people who are not terribly close to you, but have not (yet!) done you wrong.
Acquaintances: Smile, nod, and move on. You might also call this bunch “people I vaguely recall being introduced to, once, who have not yet managed to get my hackles up.”
Strangers: Another big bucket of folks that could include “people I simply haven’t met yet” (as in, most of the folks in Tibet) or the “folks we don’t take candy from and probably wouldn’t toss a Band-Aid at if they were bleeding in the gutter.” (Out of basic human decency and according to Emily Post’s rules of etiquette, you should always call 911, at your earliest convenience, when someone is bleeding in a gutter.)
This whole notion of “friend” as a verb would have struck her as being terribly odd. But the fact is, for the last twenty-some years, some of my best friends are what my mother would have called “friendly, online acquaintances.” Well, she would no doubt have called them all strangers, but would have accepted that they were my “strange online friends” and split the difference. Before you take exception to being called “strange,” know that my mom didn’t use a computer at all until she discovered Prodigy and online sweepstakes. Her hobby (“winning things”) took on a whole new dimension. But we were all still a little strange, wanting to chat with each other by tapping on a keyboard. It’s not an insult, though. She once gave me a keychain that said, “I like you. You’re weird.” Now you know I come by it naturally, and can stop questioning why I like you.
In looking through my Facebook “Friends” I realized what a strange mix of people I now call “friends.” Some are family – in the literal sense of the word. Others, well… Years ago, I was telling a coworker how “I was talking with a bunch of my friends last night, and—“
“I thought you said you didn’t go out last night?”
“I didn’t. I was in a chat room. On the PC.”
“Wait, these are just people on the computer? I thought you were talking to real people!”
Gee, thanks. What does that make me? I think I’m actually “friends” with this person now, on Facebook, but maybe I’m just imagining them.
They’re real enough. But I have to laugh. There’s Monique, who was my best friend – my “real” best friend – in 9th Grade. We lost touch that year, and didn’t get reacquainted until our daughters were nearly grown. I found her on MySpace.
Then there’s Jace, who’s been a good friend for nearly twenty years. And we still haven’t met face to face. We don’t talk as often as we did when our daughters were small, but we reach out and say “hi” and can pretty much pick up the conversation where we left off, even if we “left off” a year or more ago. That’s how it is with some friends – we’ve settled into a comfortable silence, but we rap on the inside of each other’s monitor screens now and then. Poke.
There are the “March Moms,” some of whom I’ve met offline and some I haven’t, but we’ve been friends – the kind you’d choose as family if you got a vote – for over fourteen years now. (And most of them don’t even read my blog. Go figure!)
There are lots of “friends” that my mom would have called “friendly acquaintances.” We exchange hellos and comments on each others’ blogs, but never really connect. A few were suggested to us by mutual friends, and we may yet form a bond that doesn’t yet exist today. Now and then, something clicks and we end up laughing, joking, carrying the conversation around the Internet like an inside joke, and chattering away in GTalk or email.
I admit to being baffled by the folks who send out “Friend” requests but never even say, “Hello.” I don’t know who these people are, let alone why they “friended” me. I think some of them may be fans, which is flattering, but it is such an alien notion to me that I hesitate to think it. I certainly don’t want to hurt or offend or put any of them on the spot by saying, “Um, okay, sure – but WHY?” when deciding whether to accept their gesture of “friendship.” At least one of them follows me from site to site, “friending” me wherever I show up in his contacts. But he never speaks, and that seems so terribly odd. (I hasten to add that we do have mutual “friends” and he doesn’t give off the creepy stalker vibes, so I just find it strange – not alarming.)
For a few, it’s just about the numbers. There are folks who just follow or subscribe long enough to see if you are nice enough to indiscriminately follow everyone back. While reciprocity is a nice thing, the Internet has given it a whole new meaning – and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. These people don’t want to make connections, they want numbers – BIG numbers. Like 1e9. They’re easy enough to spot on Twitter – they’re the ones who follow you, then the minute you follow them back, they drop you like a hot potato. (They usually have the self-proclaimed title “guru” – or their avatar looks like a pin-up girl, even if their name is Bruce. Their followed-to-following ratio makes them look like terrible snobs. These are the “A-list wannabes” for the most part. The real so-called “A-listers” – the famous or infamous popular people these folks think they’re emulating – really do follow back if you have anything interesting to say and aren’t just toadying up to get on their list-of-folks-to-follow.) Maybe we need a new term, like “meaningful reciprocity.” When someone truly does you a kindness, do them one in return – or “pay it forward.” But don’t think that you have to jump through every little hoop that rolls across your path. You’re not a circus dog, and real friends won’t treat you like one.
On the whole, though, I agree with Will Rogers, who said, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” I think he would have liked the Internet.
Holly Jahangiri has decades of experience in tech writing, freelancing, fiction, poetry, and editing. Writer, wife, and mother, Holly is the creator of Trockle and instigator of the Puppy-Guppy Rebellion.
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