My Internet consultant, who is forty-something years old, signed me up on Facebook. He said that I needed to understand how communication takes place between young folk in the modern era. He also thought that I should assemble some Facebook friends.
He himself concedes that in Facebook years he is an oldster. "You’re on Facebook?" say his astonished junior colleagues and employees, not shy to hint that he’s a bit long in the tooth for an activity so totally ‘with it’ as social networking. Hey, what about ancient me? A generation and an electronic revolution older, I allow my pre-Cambrian self to be Facebookized.
It’s a new world. A "Facebook Friend" is not to be confused with a real friend. In the traditional universe (mine), relationships were either intense or diffuse. You can enjoy a few important relationships or spread yourself over many — say, twenty or thirty — that are superficial. It’s taken me a lifetime to acquire and sustain a very small number of genuine, intense friendships. But young people seem to diffuse their emotional attachments, as I discovered by browsing the Facebook site. They form networks of three or four hundred or eight hundred fellow Facebookers. No doubt but that these young folks possess memories far more retentive and perspicuous than mine — but what can it mean to have relationships that number in the hundreds? "Facebook Friend" can signify nothing more than someone whose path has crossed your own sometime, somewhere.
Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to be in instant communication with a more-or-less compatible cohort. I must say, however, that there are practical limits to the grandparental Facebookish experience. Real friends of my own years not only suffer from limited computer literacy but are natively grumpy and therefore indifferent to social networking. They’re basically Internet hermits. When I stumble upon the page of coevals who are Facebookers (perhaps, like me, because a young friend or grand-daughter took pity on their Facebooklessness), what generally appears — along with a generic subsitution for an actual photograph, which they don’t have the skills to post — is a dispiriting message such as "Frank has no friends." As a result, almost all of my "Friends" are a generation or two younger than I — which makes me feel pseudo-youthful but also as though I’ve crashed the party but I’m not dancing.
I tried an experiment. I solicited (is that the word?) Friendship with Zoe, just entering our local university and whose father I’ve known since 1969. She has not "confirmed me." I also approached, timidly, Sam K., who’s in high school abroad. I’ve been good friends with his grandparents for most of a lifetime. Sam also declined to confirm me. ("Confirm" — the proper Facebook locution — seems both too religious and too ‘rite of passage’ for me.) I also tried Rebecca M., a junior in college — no confirmation. Is it possible that these young people don’t want one of Gramp’s friends to know who’s writing what on whose Wall?
There seems to be some sort of competition among Facebookers to acquire the most Friends. I’m as competitive as the next guy, but, handicapped by my years, I’m stuck at thirty-five Friends, which is absolutely zip zilch in the galaxy of Facebook amical achievement. Moreover, I must confess that one of those thirty-five Friends is a 6" foam donkey named Lefty who is the miniature mascot of a Democratic consulting firm. Zooming ahead, Lefty has left me to choke on his donkey-dust. The donkey has one hundred and twenty-four Friends, all of them, no doubt, intimate.
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