William Deresiewicz has written a long, lovely essay on friendship for The Chronicle Review, ranging from "Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus" all the way through present-day palhood. It's a fascinating read. Unfortunately, its conclusion -- that social networking means the death of genuine friendship -- is pretty specious for a piece that's otherwise so well-considered. "The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration," writes Deresiewicz. "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?" Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back up, my figurative friend. If you're going to automatically equate Facebook "friendship" and genuine companionship, then actually, the Facebook phenomenon does need some more elaboration.
At this writing, I have 658 Facebook friends. Without doing a proper audit of that list, I'd estimate that maybe 100 of them are people I've actually met, around 30 are people I would still call "friends" in any other context, and perhaps a dozen are good friends -- people I talk to on the phone, over e-mail and (geography permitting) in person, on a regular basis. Then there's my husband, all three of my siblings, a niece and two nephews -- people I wouldn't introduce as my "friends" in real life any more than the old classmate who unfriended me for being adamantly pro-choice. But somehow, this circumstance in which I have 658 "friends" while having only 30ish actual friends causes me no cognitive dissonance, much less despair for the future of human interaction.
I can handle an argument that social networking is sapping the word "friend" of its meaning. But then, as Deresiewicz himself acknowledges, that word has changed meaning many times throughout history. " Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won." Then along came Christianity, which "discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God... In medieval society, friendship entailed specific expectations and obligations, often formalized in oaths." The Renaissance brought back friendship based in "truth and virtue, again, above all," which basically lasted through the 19th century, and changes in commercial relationships cemented it: "Capitalism, said Hume and Smith, by making economic relations impersonal, allowed for private relationships based on nothing other than affection and affinity." Later, "as industrialization uprooted people from extended families and traditional communities and packed them into urban centers, friendship emerged to salve the anonymity and rootlessness of modern life." So, eventually, did the trend toward delaying marriage and away from close-knit, multigenerational family units: "We have yet to find a satisfactory name for that period of life, now typically a decade but often a great deal longer, between the end of adolescence and the making of definitive life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is absolutely central to it." And that brings us pretty much up to the present day -- so, why is friendship at risk again?
Because we no longer expect friends to be our soulmates, apparently.
That glib neologism "bff," which plays at a lifelong avowal, bespeaks an ironic awareness of the mobility of our connections: Best friends forever may not be on speaking terms by this time next month. 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, though even Oprah was forced to defend her relationship with her closest friend—and have rewritten historical friendships, like Achilles' with Patroclus, as sexual. For all the talk of "bromance" lately (or "man dates"), the term is yet another device to manage the sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male friendships—whether in the friends themselves or in the people around them—and the typical bromance plot instructs the callow bonds of youth to give way to mature heterosexual relationships. At best, intense friendships are something we're expected to grow out of.
Instead, we have groups of friends we're not all that close to individually, which means that having hundreds of Facebook friends you've never even met is only the logical next step in the slow death of Platonic companionship.
For all Deresiewicz's writing talent and experience, he's getting a lot of words mixed up here. First, he confuses "Facebook friend" and "friend." Newsflash: People only end up with hundreds or thousands of "friends" on social networking sites because nobody really thinks they mean the same thing. The folks who are on my list because they read my writing on Salon are never going to call me to give them a ride home from the bar, or visit them at the hospital, or invite me over for a holiday dinner -- if for no other reason than they don't have my phone number, seeing as how we are not actually friends, and no one is the least bit confused about this.
But more troublingly, I think Deresiewicz is using the word "we" -- meaning all internet-savvy westerners -- when the words he's really looking for are "some men." He's absolutely right about the shallowness of "bromance" as its typically presented in pop culture, the way emotional reservation is held up as a masculine virtue, and the sexual anxiety that means a guy can't express affection toward a pal unless he follows it up with "no homo." But those things don't damage the whole concept of friendship as we know it -- they damage some men's ability to form close, non-sexual relationships. And I would hardly be the first feminist to say that sucks. In fact, much has been written about how rigid gender roles force boys and men to squelch their feelings and keep their emotional distance from anyone they don't plan on marrying (and even then, they're expected to publicly roll their eyes at any expectation of intimacy that doesn't lead directly to a blow job). Meanwhile, much has also been written about the strength and value of female friendship bonds, especially as family ties became less binding over time.
In a recent essay on motherhood -- which explores, among other things, the changing nature of modern family and friendships for women of the "creative class" -- Sandra Tsing Loh describes her sister as "a fearsomely strong figure, who, if I were left for dead in a pile of leaves at the bottom of a 15-foot hole, would be the first to run to the edge and fashion a rope of her own hair to haul me out," and then suggests, "As a philosophical midlife exercise, you should make your own list of rescuers -- that list may surprise or depress you." For me, it did neither. After my husband, I thought of half a dozen female friends who would get on the first plane to wherever that hole was and MacGyver up whatever device was needed to get me out of it. And I'd do the same for them, of course.
As it happens, we're all Facebook "friends," but that has exactly nothing to do with it. Years of love, loyalty, hard conversations, emotional vulnerability and just showing up are what make us, if not each other's classical soulmates, then at least each other's hypothetical rescuers. Social networking doesn't prevent anyone from maintaining that type of meaningful real-world relationship alongside hundreds of superficial connections -- but the myth that real men don't have feelings or need emotional support like some kind of girls sure can prevent them from developing anything deeper than a fleeting bromance.
I'd say more about that, but now I have to go get on a plane to visit my BFF. I guess it's possible that in this crazy modern world, I'll have a new one of those in a month, but since this one's been around for about 20 years, I don't hesitate to use the term unironically. I do wish everyone could have that kind of friendship -- but I really don't think it's Facebook that's stopping them.
I sit at my computer and wait for Barbara, who once poured yogurt on my head in front of the entire field hockey team, to tell me the details of her breakup with her current boyfriend. While I wait, I chat with Alison, who, years ago, stole my pants during gym and cut a hole in the crotch area, and who needs advice on how to sleep-train her baby. Still, while all this is going on, I play online Scrabble with Rachel, who, when I was 12, told everyone I had faked getting my period for attention.
I am someone with a life. I have a career, a son, a husband, an active volunteer life, and many current and real-life friendships that need maintenance. I have a work deadline in three hours, plus dinner isn’t ready. The laundry remains unlaundered. Why, then, am I sitting at my computer, concerned to distraction over the activities of the people who were cruelest to me during my formative years?
They weren’t always horrible to me. I loved fifth and sixth grades. I had a clique of friends, complete with secret nicknames, passed notes, knowing looks, friendship bracelets, friendship pens, friendship songs. We moved through the school as a group and took turns slumber-partying at each other’s houses.
We traded the title "best friend" regularly among different pairings in our group. Nancy and Barbara had spent two weeks together in Nantucket over the summer, and though Nancy and I had been best friends prior to that, apparently they had decided that their time had come to be best friends. They made this announcement to me via conference call the week before school started. I took it OK; after all, I’d been meaning to get to know Amy better.
Late in sixth grade, something changed, and I wasn’t a part of it. One day, all my friends came in with matching training bras. “I didn’t know we were getting bras,” I said. They looked at each other, a shared glance I used to be on the comfy side of, and my heart sank with the unspoken answer: We weren’t. They were.
Seventh grade began, and I found out we had grown out of things like changing best friends. I met a girl named Emily who had transferred to our school. After a good day of getting to know her, I asked if she wanted to be best friends. “You’re such a loser,” she spat. I looked around one day, and my group of friends had wandered away. Adults like to generalize and say things like, “Aren’t kids cruel?” But we kids, the ones who are left out in the cold, have a role in what happens to us. Not necessarily a fair one, but the facts of our unpopularity are not mysterious. We get fat, we say the wrong thing, we wear outdated clothing. Me, I was too needy. Long after my friends stopped needing superlative titles to know how much they meant to each other, I still did.
I did not go quietly into that lonely and unpopular night. Each morning, I tried to assume a casual air of friendship. Big mistake. My efforts backfired, and my former friends’ apathy toward me turned to hatred. Soon, I was not just ignored at school. I was tripped as I came out of the shower. People made flatulent noises when I sat down in class. My locker was magic-markered with the word "loser." We are tempted to remember this behavior and make light of it. Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad, we said. But I remember it well. It was that bad.
Now, all these years later, there’s Facebook, allowing us to put the past to rest, to erase the mystery that used to be inherent in the subject of wondering whatever happened to those people you once knew.
After accumulating college friends and ex-boyfriends, as we all do when we join Facebook, I took a chance and looked up Barbara. With the nervousness that accompanied me on every bus trip to school following my fall from grace, I pressed the button that would send her a friend request. Immediately, I received confirmation: She had agreed, finally, to be my friend. Brave now, I found Alison, then Amy, then Nancy. I was euphoric. Here I am, back in the inner sanctum. I sort through their pictures, their posts, their lives. I cheer their triumphs, their babies’ birthdays, photos from their ski trips. I cobble together the story of how life has been since we knew each other, deliberately, forcefully forgetting how it was we parted.
I check their updates and their statuses with eagerness each day. Like an addict, I am euphoric when I am practicing my addiction, remorseful and self-hating when I’m not. I am shocked at how easily I have forgiven these people. I am filled with the warm light of acceptance; I am wrapped in the cozy blanket of belonging.
In my imagination, my old clique’s renewed friendship tells me that they know they were wrong, that they were just being cruel. They’re sorry, they say with every LOL or emoticon. We were wrong, they say when they press the "like" button on my status update. If I’m honest, I bet they don’t think about it. I bet they regard me as a name that is familiar -- a new person in their lives, more than an old one.
There is no way to go back in time and undo things -- not the insults, not the humiliations. We can pretend some events never happened, though we are always still a little plagued. But, sometimes, we can also find a way to make what happened in the past right. I’m not saying you can do that with everything that haunts your past. But some things, you can. Maybe the way women in the '90s took back the word "bitch," calling themselves and each other by the ugly slur so that it wouldn’t hold power when men said it, maybe that’s what I’m doing with my former friends.
Why do you need to be loved by people who rejected you a hundred years ago, asks my husband, though I have explained it. He believes I have Stockholm syndrome, that I have fallen in love with my torturers. I tell him that these are just old friends, that I’m over it, that it’s nice to be in touch with a piece of my past. But I’m not exactly over it, am I? What I am, though, is someone who has finally found a way to put my life’s ugliest social chapter to rest. Maybe I didn’t come by it the honest way -- through a true reckoning with my past, a fearless inventory of what happened that year and why I can't get over it. But who is to say that we shouldn’t try to find peace any way we can? Who says it always has to be so hard?
Whatever my intention was when I contacted my former friends, it’s different now. I no longer want validation; I no longer am testing the waters to see if they now find me worth their time. These women are not who I thought they’d be. They’re people having a hard time in the economy, people who are struggling through their days, their relationships. I don’t have enough in common with them to think that, had we not fallen out, our friendships would have survived. But here, now, I am someone who also struggles with these things. I have stretched across a social divide that was narrower than I thought, and I found community where I least expected it. Am I pathetic? Maybe. But what I also am, finally, is a popular seventh-grader. I think of my younger self, eating her lunch alone, wondering when this agony will be over. I wish I could tell her I haven't forgotten about her. I wish I could tell her I've made it OK.
I've done it lots of times. You've probably done it as well. Maybe you've even done it to me. People rarely own up to it, but it happens all time. That's why it's the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year: "unfriend."
The entry of "unfriend" into the lexicon comes right on time, just a few years behind the great friending gold rush of the late-mid-decade. Perhaps you too were seduced early on by the popularity race that is the amassing of names on MySpace and Facebook. Look at me, world! I know people! And not just that Tom guy, either!
So you'd meet somebody at a party, and the next thing you know, you were faced with the prospect of reading what they ate for dinner, how great the band they just saw was, and the adorable things their kids said from now until the end of time. You came to the quiet realization that you give even less of a rat's ass about the person you shared a locker with in fifth grade than you did back in fifth grade. And unlike the real world, where your epiphany about such a doomed relationship would lead to weeks of dodgy avoidance techniques, on the Web, you can make somebody go away with one lethal click.
"Unfriend" (and its dictionary-ignored but equally valid sibling "defriend") is a timely and crowd-pleasing choice. The last few years have been a bonanza of do-good, eco-bore terms from Oxford: 2008's "hypermiling," 2007's equally crunchy, dull "locavore," and 2006's snoozy "carbon neutral." "Unfriend," in contrast, is snappy, active and a little mean. It sets a misanthropic tone that's followed through by its runners-up.
A perusal of this year's other Oxford contenders says much about where we are as a culture in this final year of the decade, and it's not a pretty picture, America: "sexting," "hashtag," "zombie bank," "birther," "death panel," "tramp stamp" and "teabagger." (Disappointingly, only one G-rated definition is provided.) If this were the "$100,000 Pyramid," the category would be "Things that make me want to kill myself."
Oxford, by the way, isn't the only linguistic authority to elevate one word to rule them all. We still await a verdict from Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society, which both cruelly turned a blind eye to "hypermiling" in 2008 and opted for the grim "bailout" instead.
Strictly from an etymological point of view, "unfriend" is an interesting choice. Oxford's senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg notes on the Oxford University Press blog today that "Most 'un-' prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant) …. but 'unfriend' is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of 'friend' that is really not used."
But we all know unfriending when we see it in verby action -- when those Facebook numbers take a little dip after a few bad dates with Mr. Wrong or we broadcast our views on gay marriage and Jeff Dunham to the folks back home. Conversely, we all know what it's like to have someone write something idiotic on our wall and think, "Hiding your news feed just isn't enough." So for all you've done to streamline our online lives, we raise a tiny picture of a thumbs up and salute you, "unfriend." And if our affection for you ever wanes, don't worry, you'll figure it out soon enough.
Last year, a casual friend posted that he had a cold as his Facebook status update. Then the cold turned to pneumonia, pneumonia to sepsis and with horrifying suddenness, he was gone. Gone to his friends, gone to his family. But not gone on Facebook, where his still-active account gave the unintentionally cruel appearance of someone who was still here. True, I was grateful that his account hadn't been summarily wiped away, that this little corner of his online presence hadn't been as easily eradicated as his life had. Yet every time his name popped up on my friends list, every time FB suggested I challenge him in a game or compare people, the loss of him stabbed me anew. So I did the unthinkable: I quietly unfriended the dead man.
With over 300 million users worldwide and more piling in every day, it's inevitable that the Grim Reaper would be a frequent visitor to Facebook. But on Monday, in the midst of an unpopular rollout of a new home page, the social networking behemoth took a welcome step toward navigating that murky world between the finite nature of life and the perpetuity of the Web.
Citing a friend and colleague who'd been killed in a biking accident in the company's early days, Facebook director of security Max Kelly announced Monday that the site would be offering memorial pages for departed users. Now when an account is memorialized, its privacy settings are changed so that only existing friends can see the account, and contact information and other personal info – including status updates -- are removed. The deceased will also no longer show up in "suggestions," ending those uncomfortable directives to superpoke -- or worse, "reconnect" with -- somebody who's shuffled off their mortal coil. Friends, however, will still be able to write on the dead person's wall, to honor a birthday or post photos.
Online memorials are nothing new. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to remembering the dead, from MyDeathSpace to the Second Life-like Virtual Heaven. There are also countless more sites specific to individuals. (I once learned an old friend had died by Googling his name and getting directed to his tribute page.)
While Facebook's move toward memorial pages is a well-intentioned one, the announcement immediately raised questions. In his blog post, Kelly had invited "friends and family" to contact Facebook with their memorial requests but offered no insight into how the company will verify them. Once an account is memorialized, no one can log in to it, not even someone with the user's password. So how will FB assure that a spiteful ex won't get your account shut off if you don't log on for a few days? What if a mother asks that an account be memorialized but the person's spouse wishes to keep it active?
Facebook's Chimene Stewart told us via e-mail they're working on the security and the social issues. "When a friend or family member contacts us to request that an account be memorialized, we check the account to ensure that the user is no longer posting and scan recent posts by others to confirm that the user is deceased," she said. "When a person passes on, friends and family members often post remembrances or condolences on the deceased person's wall, so it's usually fairly easy to confirm that, in fact, the user has passed on." She added that, "If family members disagree about whether or not to memorialize an account, we currently opt to memorialize."
KTXL-TV station in Sacramento, Calif., meanwhile, noted yesterday another potential sticky wicket in the current proposal -- Facebook is a resource for journalists. What happens to once-public information about someone who, say, turns out to have been a murder suspect or to have died from a new virus, and how well and accurately will reporters be able to access it?
Finally, there's the simple issue that an inherently impersonal medium doesn't always do the best or most appropriate job of archiving human existence. Be careful what profile pic you post or what your friends write on your wall -- it might be your last enduring image.
Despite the problems and conflicts, however, the memorial option should offer a reasonably sensitive way to keep a person's memory alive while acknowledging there will be no more quizzes, no more Mafia Wars, no more vacation pictures or funny links. Had my friend's account been memorialized a year ago, I wouldn't have removed him. When I go to look at his page now, it just shows all the people he and I had in common -- people we loved and worked with and saw at weddings and New Year's -- and that his settings are private. And Facebook still asks if I'd like to send him a message or add him as my friend.
New data on the way Internet use breaks down by gender seems to confirm some long-held stereotypes. Marisa Taylor at the Wall Street Journal reports that women outnumber men 57 percent to 43 percent on Facebook and Twitter. We also make up nearly two-thirds of MySpace users. Brian Solis, who crunched the numbers, summarizes his findings in no uncertain terms: "The point of interest that's worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule."
The knee-jerk explanation for Solis' findings looks something like this: Ladies like to chat, share intimate details of their lives and keep in touch with friends they haven't seen in person since grade school. Menfolk don't have time for such social frivolity. (Or hey, maybe they're just too busy trolling the Web for porn.)
And perhaps there is some truth to that received wisdom: While the vast majority of young people I know are on Facebook, the few remaining holdouts are mostly guys. They call it a time suck, a forum for compulsive oversharing, a creepy place where people you hated in high school resurface out of nowhere, pretending to be your best friend.
But now that we know who isn't on Facebook, it's surprising to see who is: A recent study by Rapleaf, a "social-media-data company," found that "married women between the ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment of social-networking users." The WSJ doesn't speculate as to why this might be, but I have a theory. Now that even elementary school kids are well-versed in social media, moms I know have made it their business to have a presence on the sites. And while they may initially only be there to ensure their children's safety, many eventually learn to love the online communities for their own purposes, too.
But even if stereotypically "feminine" reasons -- socializing, parenting -- are drawing women to the sites, social media may still do great things to increase our power in the working world. Most people I know who use Twitter, for instance, are there for professional reasons. Plus, as the WSJ notes, women are also dominating Ning, a site that allows users to create their own social networks. We're neck and neck with men on YouTube and LinkedIn, too. So instead of just blabbering and mothering, our time spent on social media sites may help us hone real skills and make important professional connections. All things considered, we could actually be shattering those other pervasive gender stereotypes -- that ladies and technology don't mix, and that Internet geekdom is an overwhelmingly male domain.
The new data should also give women unprecedented power in the online marketplace: According to Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, "the future of social media is going to be all about the women." Hopefully, this realization about women's growing facility with technology will filter down to computer and video game manufacturers, who might consider this a good time to stop treating women as an exotic and hard-to-crack niche market, to be coddled, cooed at and condescended to.
“We are getting a divorce. It has been in the works for a while now,” Lauren, a 36-year-old mother of two who resides in a small town outside of Austin, wrote on her Facebook page at the beginning of July, about her husband of 13 years. (Lauren is not her real name.) She was commenting on a response -- a single, stunned “Huh?” -- to the change in her relationship status. “Lauren went from being ‘married’ to being ‘single,'” read the dry, cold, unsympathetic recitation of fact. The infamous little broken-heart icon, the fixture you hope that, like some medical alert bracelet, you will never have to wear, fluttered up to hang alongside it. This is how life’s big moments unfold on Facebook: Epic emotions are reduced to emoticons.
During the month that followed, as the marriage continued to unravel and her grief intensified, Lauren began chronicling her divorce via status updates. “Lauren would cry, but then he wins,” she wrote. “There isn’t enough Kleenex in the world.” “My house is a mess. My life is a mess.” “Lauren is facing the aftermath.” Her very private ex-husband-to-be soon grew enraged. “I would write that I was upset or what have you, and he would assume that every negative thing I wrote was about him,” Lauren told me. “I didn’t feel like I was overstepping any boundaries, but he did.” When she began to write about her new relationship, her husband finally lost it. “I wrote that I was ‘Going to pizza night and beyond,’” Lauren said, “and he was offended by it. I thought it was vague enough.” Lauren’s husband then warned her that he planned to "un-friend" her. “So," she said, "I did it first.” Call it “War of the Roses” on Facebook.
We have long known that social networking facilitates hooking up. But what about breaking up? Does processing -- and broadcasting -- our feelings from the real, private realm in a virtual, public realm like Facebook make ending a relationship, that most painful of human experiences, more or less difficult to endure? It depends. Do you like your arguments, your recriminations, your teary confessions, your rantings and ravings to remain intimate (if acrimonious) interactions between two people, or do you enjoy a communal narrative on which an online village weighs in? Unfortunately, even if the latter notion makes you shudder, it may be unavoidable, as Facebook is the theater where some of life’s most chaotic, catastrophic and bewildering moments are now being played out. Not even the rich or famous are immune: Chelsea Davy, ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry, made the demise of their five-year relationship official (and officially public) by changing her status to “single.” The quick, unceremonious execution of the Facebook breakup -- it's like ripping off a bandage.
This is hardly news to 20-somethings, who have been airing their adventures online for years. But now that the demographic of Facebook has shifted to include those in their 30s, and 40s, 50s and beyond -- there are 300 million active users, so many that the Facebook backlash has already begun -- dramatic Facebook breakups have turned into dramatic Facebook divorces.
The problem is, Facebook is still a lawless frontier. (Though lawyers, particularly divorce lawyers, have come to view the site as an "evidentiary gold mine," as a recent piece in Time magazine put it, and they regularly pan for nuggets in the opposing side’s pages.) There aren’t any definite principles, precepts or binding contracts between individuals, and its habitués are forced to improvise as they go along. An example: Earlier this year, in Lancashire, England, a man named Neil Brady announced the dissolution of his six-year marriage with a status update. Here was the online equivalent of Matt Damon breaking up with Minnie Driver on national television. And yet, in an inadvertent nod to how muddled our on- and off-line realities have become, his wife, Emma, who learned of the break from a friend, remarked, “What upset me the most was not the fact that Neil had written he had ended his marriage, but the comment from a girl in Canada who said: ‘You are better off out of it.’”
The bizarre truth is that your Facebook divorce will likely be more public than your actual one. You are stating, in front of perhaps hundreds of witnesses, that the relationship has run its course. It’s like taking out a full-page announcement in the Times. “For a long time I kept my status as ‘married. I didn’t want to change it,’” said Elizabeth, a hairdresser from Illinois, who discovered her martial-arts instructor husband was having an affair with the mother of one of his students -- and immediately updated her status to read, “Ladies, Don’t Ever Get Married." Elisabeth LaMotte, a family and couples therapist in Washington, D.C., who has been “observing the ways in which technology affects relationships for many, many years,” told me, “Facebook becomes a definite point of tension between couples, and the relationship status in particular. For people who were dating or married, how quickly the person changes their status back to single is a big deal. It’s like, 'we were just dating yesterday, and you changed your status so fast, and do I have to do that, too?' It’s very public and emotional.” Myriad issues of etiquette remain undecided. If, for instance, you’re breaking up or divorcing in the real world, at what point is it no longer heartless to change your status on Facebook to “single” or “it’s complicated”? Do you need to warn your significant other that his or her status is about to change in turn?
Watching friends and co-workers attempt to navigate this pothole-riddled terrain can be -- I’ll just cop to it -- fascinating. Keeping up with the messy lives of others has become a guilty pleasure not unlike reading about the spectacular implosion of the Gosselin marriage. In "The Peep Diaries," a book I wrote about in July, Hal Niedzvecki argues that we are witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life. Regular people are acting like mini-celebrities, announcing their every move in the way famous people once did in the gossip pages. Needless to say, that girl from junior high, the one with the boyfriend troubles who is a fixture on your Facebook feed, is often no more familiar than some starlet in a magazine. Stephanie Nelson, a family lawyer from Texas (she asked that her real name not be used), described reading the posts of a woman she hasn’t talked to since high school, whose regular updates narrate a custody battle with an ex-husband who has put their child in a mental institution, and florid fights with a current husband of only five months. “There’s part of me, the goodhearted lawyer in me, that thinks, you should keep this down,” Stephanie told me. "And part of me, the part that reads Us Weekly, is like, what happens next?”
Of course, not every spurned lover provides a blow-by-blow of their marital meltdown. To do so takes a peculiar mix of anger, candor and exhibitionism, maybe even a tinge of desperation. Reading some of the more dramatic updates in my own feed, it's hard not to wonder about the people behind them. Recently, in a late-night online procrastination session, I was sucked into the Facebook drama of an old high school classmate, whose smiley, strawberry-blond wife had been swapped out for photos of an attractive brunette woman in a variety of come-hither poses: in a coral bikini, in tank tops so tight they revealed her padded bra underneath. I felt transfixed, embarrassed for him, judgmental -- like a creepy neighbor peeking in their window at night. Stephanie, the Texas lawyer, described a similar tangle of curiosity and secondhand shame. Her former classmate "posted on Friday at 9 or 10 p.m., ‘He’s decided that he can’t stand me, he wants a divorce, we’ve only been married 5 months, I’m pregnant, he’s on the phone with his ex-wife right now, asking her to take him back.'" She continued, "This thing is happening to you, right, and you get on fricking Facebook? I would call my best friend crying, I would leave the house -- I don’t know what I would do -- but writing on Facebook would be the last thing on my mind.”
Who can know what prompts people to expose their most intimate moments on Facebook? For some, Facebook makes it possible to confess what might otherwise feel too personal. “A lot of times you don’t get to talk to people about that stuff,” says Elizabeth, the hairdresser from Illinois. “It can be hard to discuss in person.” For others, the billboard approach has its benefits. It’s like a dark take on the holiday circular -- a quick, pro forma way of notifying people about your life. “It cuts a lot of awkward conversations, because people already know I’ve gotten divorced,” said Chad Post (was ever there a more appropriate name?), a 30-ish man in Rochester, N.Y., who runs Open Letter, a small press that publishes literature in translation, and whose divorce is in the final stages. “I don’t want to call people up and dump a bunch of shit on them, but I don’t mind if they know my life got screwed up. There’s something passive about it. No one has to respond.” But when people do come forward, it creates a feeling of being supported (which can be especially comforting when friends and family live far away). “People e-mailed saying, ‘I’ve been through this; if you want to talk, great; sorry this is happening,” said Post. “That was the thing that made me feel better -- it was self-selecting. If I talked to any friend, he or she would have said similar things, but they would have felt obligated.”
But let's be honest, for people in a frantic or vulnerable state, the siren call of Facebook can be hard to resist. Freud would have loved the site, enabler of the id that it is. The aggrieved parties can spy, stalk, trash-talk, gossip about, even publicly shame each other by way of dueling wall posts -- everything you want to do in the real world but that would be way too obnoxious. Lauren, for example, “tagged” her ex-husband in a photo of their two boys and a coral snake -- she gave the snake her husband’s name. When he complained, she said, "I was not trying to imply that you were a snake; I just thought you’d want to see this photo of the snake our kids caught.” (Still, you have to wonder.) When you want to be permanently free of your ex (at least online), there is the strongest weapon in a Facebooker’s armamentarium: deleting them, the fabled “defriending.” Chad Post was expunged by his wife after he posted about chopping down trees in preparation to sell their house. “I wrote that I was probably not in the best mental state to be using a chain saw,” he told me. “My wife didn’t say anything, but then she defriended me. She just wasn’t there anymore. It was super-surreal in a 21st century-meets-third grade sort of way."
All of this is why lawyers both love and fear Facebook. “It's a great new way to get information, a really immediate way," said Laura Merritt, an Austin-based attorney, who last week taught a Web seminar sponsored by the Texas Bar Association, “From Lawbooks to Facebook: What Lawyers Need to Know about Social Networking Sites.” “It's part of your due diligence now: Do clients have an active online life, social networking sites, blogs, etc.?” Lawyers hope to excavate information on lifestyle, relationships (“persons of interest”), whereabouts -- mentions of affairs or parties, say; money spent on gifts, lavish purchases or trips; photos of a parent smoking or drinking. In a custody or settlement case, such information can be used to show financial resources, state of mind, even lack of fitness to parent. If, for instance, photos surface online of you and your new paramour toasting each other at a pricey restaurant, you could be found to have committed “marital waste” (spending marital funds on another person). And it’s difficult to testify to psychological damage or humiliation when you are trumpeting your post-breakup happiness in status updates. (Most divorce decrees also prohibit one parent from disparaging another in front of a child, and a judge may view writing about your former spouse on Facebook as public disparagement.) “[C]ourts have come a long way from regarding the Internet as a source of ‘voodoo information,’" John G. Browning, a Dallas-based attorney who co-taught the Web seminar, notes in an article in Voir Dire magazine. A 2008 poll conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 88 percent of members had seen a "dramatic increase" in the use of digital evidence. Increasingly, this evidence is proving pivotal: In a Louisiana case, sexually explicit boasts on the MySpace page of one woman's boyfriend convinced the court to award custody to her husband. It’s one thing to lose your head in an update; it’s something else to lose your children because of it.
Don’t think you’re in the clear because you’ve set your privacy settings to "high." In legal terms, information is treated as private when the person writing it had a “reasonable expectation” that it would remain so. But when you post on Facebook, you are aware, even if this awareness is submerged, that it may be viewed, not only by your own carefully curated collection of friends, but often by their friends -- indeed by anyone else they may allow to view their page. “By its very nature a social network makes information available for all to see. This means that there is no right to privacy,” writes William Jones IV, a Memphis divorce attorney, one of many lawyers on the Internet with ads and blogs that warn of the pitfalls of social networking. As Facebook’s own privacy policy reads, “Please keep in mind that if you disclose personal information in your profile or when posting comments, messages, photos, videos … this information may become publicly available." Facebook is not like Las Vegas: What happens there rarely stays there.
If you wrote it, a lawyer is sure to find it, even if you’ve gone back and deleted material you worried might be incriminating. Lawyers hire computer forensics experts who know how to extract material that has supposedly been erased from a hard drive, or that is lingering out there in the blogosphere. Often, the opposition is ordered to refrain from taking any “destructive action” -- thus the seemingly benign act of deletion becomes the “spoliation of evidence.” Many lawyers, in fact, advise clients not to get on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter at all during a divorce, and some firms require that clients suspend their accounts. “Those bunny ears at Halloween may have been harmless, but they can be used to paint a fairly nasty picture in court,” writes Jones, the Memphis divorce lawyer. If you do continue to social network during a divorce, you might want to act like a modern-day celebrity, not an old Hollywood one, and reveal nothing telling about yourself at all.
Still, beware. Facebook, like the weather, is impossible to control. ”It’s not like bitching about your ex-wife to your neighbor over the fence,” said Laura Merritt, “you just told 600 people, who might tell 600 people …” Find yourself a neighbor and a fence. After all, during a divorce, people need to vent -- non-disparagement clauses exist for a reason -- it’s only now, post-Facebook, that there exists a permanent digital footprint of that venting. As a law student wrote in “Social Media Law Student,” an online blog about the topic: “People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums, whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more. Social media networks are not to blame for sheer stupidity ... stupidity is now just easier to prove.”
Legal concerns aside, when any narrative is written down, experience does not decay over time. You are not left with your own memory of unrecorded moments but with a collection of status updates as indelible as photographs. The crying phase, the tearing-your-hair-out phase, the three-months-into-therapy phase: Each track is eternal, and can be eternally embarrassing. “In short, social networking sites have become the digital equivalent of what Jimmy Buffet once described as a ‘permanent reminder of a temporary feeling,’" writes John G. Browning in Voir Dire. How to explain these sentiments away in a later, cooler moment? It’s not as easy as calling up your sister to sheepishly admit that your beloved apologized and the situation has (once again) changed.
And in a relationship, change is often the only constant: “When he moved out,” Lauren said, “we would see each other for maybe 10 minutes without fighting, if we were lucky. Then he came here to do his laundry, and we talked for an hour and a half. It was the first lengthy conversations we’d been able to have. After that conversation he said, 'Maybe we’re ready to be Facebook friends again?'”
That (Digital) Holiday Glow
There’s Never a Steven Segal Around When You Need One
Conversation Snips from Car Ride to Staples
We Were De-Friended by Our Son!