If one thing can be said about Facebook, it's that it has made staying in contact with people infinitely easier. By merely sending a friend request one, through a news feed, can receive constant updates as to what is going on in a person's life. A person can literally spend months without having even a single IM chat with a person but still know everything that happened in those months.
It used to be that staying in touch with people actually required effort. If someone moved away, you would have to call them regularly and write often in order to find out what has happened in their lives. If you wanted to see people from your old high school you lost touch with you would have to go to a high school reunion. Now all you have to do is friend the people you want to stay in touch with, no need for a reunion. To learn about a person's interests, you had to engage them in lengthy conversation. Now, a quick glance at a person's Facebook page usually lets you get the gist of a person.
With all this in mind, it raises the question of what Facebook does to the value of friendship. Because staying in touch with people is now so effortless, does it cause us to view friendship more casually? Or since we can now so easily learn what a person is like, does it cause us to appreciate people more?
Either way, it'll be interesting to see how Facebook continues to affect human relationships. Assuming Facebook is still around then, we could friend a person now and still be Facebook friends with a person sixty years from now. You could watch sixty years of a person's life in the form of Facebook statuses while barely talking to them. I could almost see funerals in the future having a ritual where the most important Facebook statuses of their lives are read aloud.
Very important questions. And, you literally just made me post what I'm doing for Spring Break on Facebook because I thought my friends and family in Germany hadn't heard from me in a while... I think its a good thing that you can update many people at the same time. And I believe that as long as when you actually see people and still enjoy their company, it's all good.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Felix. Facebook makes updating everyone at the same time easier and it saves a lot of time. This is very important in our very fast paced world.
ReplyDeleteMy friends and I were weirdly enough talking about Facebook in the future a few weeks ago. I think it'll still be around and popular for when we are much older and it'll be a way to stay in touch with our high school and college friends rather than having to get their numbers and call them.
ReplyDelete