In 2005, there was tremendous buzz all around about a new website that was going to make all things possible. It was called Facebook. It had been available at Harvard University the previous year. Now it was being rolled out to all .edu addresses. Just to demonstrate how crazy this became, universities and colleges at the time experienced a wave of new matriculations based solely on the hope of getting a Facebook account.
Later that year, Facebook opened up to the general public and the madness was on. Anyone could connect with anyone else who had an account. You posted on it and everyone could read what you posted. It felt like a new world simply because nothing on this scale had ever been done before. It made users feel important, special, and heard.
Connecting with someone meant accepting a friend request. Yes, the site appropriated one of the oldest words in the English language and oldest institutions in the history of man. A new form of friendship was born. You would be friends with people you did not know. Kind of crazy, but such were the times.
There was a limit, however: You could only have 5,000 friends. I personally made the most of it and accepted every request. Soon enough, I had 5,000 friends. It felt good. I could reach them all with updates on travel, food, thoughts on all things including politics, and I would build my personal network ... for what purpose, it was never clear, but no one much cared. Everyone wanted to try out the new toy.
That was now 20 years ago. The enthusiasm is gone, obviously. Yes, there are some valuable groups and Facebook Marketplace remains a wonderful digital thrift store and actually the only reason to maintain one’s account. The algorithm gradually changed to emphasize small viral videos and to deploy advertising. The intimacy was lost. Otherwise, people learned over time that the form of friendship the platform had proposed was a shibboleth.
In retrospect, it seems incredible that a company could persuade multitudes of people to publicly post the content of their lives with information that would be seen as private in any other time, invite billions of people to spy, and that this content would become the main attraction upon which to sell advertising. It seems implausible. Somehow, it worked.
For a while, people talked about the greatness of “Facebook birthdays.” The company figured out that it could use data it normally demanded for purposes of age verification and reconstitute them as a birthday wish. It would then push that out daily to people with an invitation to wish so-and-so a happy birthday.
People would compete for the most birthday wishes as a form of validating their own popularity. Then Facebook realized that its users imagined themselves to be opening up influencer businesses through their accounts.
“You are on a roll,” the messages read. “Respond to comments to keep engagement growing.”
Once again, this is an amazing thing, a company urging people to post for free so that the company can sell the content to advertisers. Seems like a crazy idea, but once the popular fear of missing out kicked in, the scheme took hold.
I hardly know anyone these days who does not regret posting all that gibberish for years. Now they resent what they had been enticed to do in the name of getting famous and earning friends. Many people have thought to restrict who sees their stuff and otherwise cut it out with the birthday thing. Many others would gladly do so if the user platform was easier to use, but it is not: After years of iterations, it is now a convoluted mess.
I knew someone who worked there for a time and described it as the grimmest job he ever held. He was surrounded by petty people and doing nothing but coming up with ways to keep people from posting what they really thought. Again, there is still a reason to keep the account: the brilliant marketplace, which has taken the guesswork out of local buying. That’s not exactly the use for which the company was founded.
This whole story is really about the rise and fall of digital friendship. It seemed like a thing until it was not. We should not suggest that it achieved nothing. Even now, extended families use it to keep up to date on activities about which they would otherwise not know. That said, the elaborate promise of replacing physical friendship with digital friendship collapsed. Rightly so.
The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown years taught us how sanitized and unrewarding digital communication truly is. It works in a pinch, but it is not the real thing. Think about your own friend circle. Lucky people have about six to 12 people whom they are happy to call real friends. This is not 5,000. It is half a dozen.
You see them every few days, weeks, or months. You come to trust each other through physical communication. When problems arise, you are incentivized to solve them as soon as possible because the friendship itself is valuable to you. You call each other when there are problems such as car issues, sickness in the family, or other favors you need. You invite each other to parties and reciprocate dinners and birthday celebrations.
In other words, the form of friendship we are rediscovering in our time is pretty much like friendship has always been. It was only briefly interrupted with a crazy promise that a stranger with an account on a digital platform could be a friend. Such a person cannot and will never be a friend.
In fact, Facebook should give back the word friend to the English language so that it can mean again what it has always meant. It is about kindness, love, and mutual obligation. It is essential to life, so much so that there ought to be a rule against ever seeing the term corrupted in this way again.
It took a wild and woolly experiment with something else to remind us all of what really matters: real people, real experiences, and real connections. I stopped answering friend requests from that other platform years ago. “Unfriend me” if you like, because let’s face it: You were never a real friend.
