Friends and Technology

The march of technology provides us with a level of interpersonal connection that was unheard of even ten years ago. The cell phone, the Internet and the marriage of the two in smart phones, like the CrackBerry and iPhone, have rapidly increased our ability to stay in touch with an ever increasing universe of friends. Do we have the time for all these other people? Are we ignoring our true friends and loved ones in the process by being connected to the others?

I got a kick out of a few of my old college buddies chasing me down on FaceBook and reminding me of the old good times had via faded photographs and dusted off stories. Should I be using my time to chat with them when I could be spending more time with my family, or actually visiting with friends? I now have a means to remain in some sort of contact with old college roommates and buddies and I believe I will continue to use my FaceBook account. As for Twitter, Tweets and text messages, they just don't do it for me. One hundred and forty characters a message. Go ahead, use it for telling me to bring milk home after work. I can see the use in that, but I don't need to know that someone else is bringing home milk to their family after work. If I am to be so informed, maybe they can pick up an extra container and drop it off at my house so I do not have to do it.

After all, this technology allows us to keep in touch with more people and we get to see small glimpses via photos, videos and messages about what they are doing with their lives. We become welcomed voyeurs into the lives of these remote peoples for we will rarely interact with them online and may never speak or meet with them offline.

Technology makes it possible to disrupt real friendships with this voyeuristic stream of inanity. Have we come to a time when new social networking might make you inattentive to your first social network: your family? How many times have we witnessed the overextended parent, head down, tapping away on their iPhone oblivious to what’s going on while they are supposedly “watching” their child play? I wonder how many children are competing for time and attention with the tiny people living in that smart phone. I wonder how many times a child has raised his head to seek out the loving approval of his parent only to see the glow of the LCD reflected in their eyes? No love for you today Junior, can’t you see I am busy taking the "What Type of Parent Are You?" quiz.

If you believe in evolutionary psychology, the theory of anthropologist Robin Dunbar called Dunbar’s Number states that the maximum number of healthy social relationships a person can maintain at any one time is approximately 150. You might not think these on-line relationships belong to your social relationships but they are taking up social and emotional space. You are chunking information about a person into your memory. A person who you went to high school with - not really a friend then or now – who just got back from a trip to Oshkosh, WI, pictures, video and text narrative freshly posted ½ hour after his return home. You can’t just turn that information off as it has been tagged all over your FaceBook wall like some repressed graffiti spray painted in neon orange. As you take this information in, it’s probably parked right next to the other random facts of your childhood like song lyrics or television commercials or the indelibly etched vision of this 13 year old guy naked in the gym locker next to yours. A comedian named John Bowman does a bit about how much stuff we can pack into our 50+ year old brains and the consensus is that there is not much room left. Pack, pack, pack…

I was just trying to find a picture of some boys in a locker room on Google to go along with this article but all I could find was gay pornography. I had to paint the gym shorts on a few of these kids using Photoshop.  I have to go someplace else!

At some point, you’re only storing a very small amount of data on a slew of people, which makes those relationships tenuous as best. The issue here is that you’re threatening the strength of all your relationships as you expand your reach. So you make a conscious effort to store more about ‘good’ friends and family, but I’m not sure we’re wired that way.

There is a reason why you lose touch with friends. The turning point comes when they aren’t really your friends anymore. Maybe we have outgrown them or our experience and wisdom requires us to seek others to whom we can more readily relate to. Recent research by Gerald Mollenhorst suggests that we replace half of our friends every seven years. I looked it up on Google; that’s what the Internet is really useful for (besides pornography). I question whether technology is inhibiting the natural shedding of friends necessary for us to move on, to establish new friends and evolve as a person. Maybe I need to get rid of my oldest, dearest friends to pick up one of my new “old” friends that I used to admire so much for making farting noises with his hands.