The facebook question

Lately, I have been debating whether or not I should disable facebook. It is a game of vacillation that I am sure most of us have played at some point after joining the monolithic site. It really just comes down to this simple question: Does having facebook actually enable the development or maintenance of friendship?

For me, I think the answer is no. In the past month, three people that I have never met or heard of, and with whom I share no common friends, have friended me. I cannot tell you who these people are, how they found me, or what they decided was friend-worthy about me. Because I am not a facebook friend-purist, I accepted the friend requests, but I can promise you that I will never meet these people, and I will probably never even know why we are "friends."

For people that I already know, facebook does not help me maintain the bond of friendship. If you are really my friend, chances are that you will be able to contact me without writing on my "wall." It is likely that I will read a text sooner than I will check facebook. Or, how about sending me a good, old-fashioned email to stay in touch? Yes, it might take longer for you to write than a "what's up?" on my wall, but I can guarantee you that I will get to it as soon as I would a facebook message (if speed of transmittal is a concern), and a one-sentence, rhetorical question written in barely decipherable English on my wall does not a friendship make.

Then there is the mysterious phenomenon of facebook friending every person you have ever known from elementary school and on (and yes, I am guilty of this). Why do we feel an urge to "stay in touch" with people we knew only for a short while or people we will likely never see again--or even care to! I have the impression that we are, in general, unwilling or unable to rationalize the fact that just because you know what a person ate for a dinner, you are not necessarily "in the loop."  It is as if we equate quantity of vague, ubiquitous facebook statuses like "going to bed" and "waiting for the weekend" with quality of communication.

If these questions were only philosophically troubling, it is likely that I would not even consider leaving facebook. But, the fact is, facebook is beginning to depress me--or, rather, I find that after cruising the site, I feel depressed. I have been trying to figure out why, and I will offer some hypotheses, but I would be interested to hear some of your responses. Let me know if any of you have felt the same way.

One reason facebook may be bringing me down, I think, is that I have noted that many of my former classmates have been announcing engagements. Now, I thought a lot about this, and the reason that this makes me depressed is not because I too want to get married. I think that it is because I too would like something significant and congratulatory to include in one of my statuses. As it is, I feel that my achievements are meager and hardly worth commenting on. "I ate a new food today" or "I finally left the apartment in a last-ditch effort to dissipate an anxious and self-deprecating funk" just does not measure up with "I'm engaged to so and so!"

On this note, I think that facebook is inherently a competitive medium. People write little blurbs about themselves and keep others up to date with their latest goings on, but, in so doing, they are opening up their lives for comparison and competition. I am sure I am not the only one who has drawn conclusions about where I am in life versus where another person is in life from facebook profiles. And because we are safely sitting at our computers, we are free to inflate a little. So are other people. This just adds fuel to the competitive fire, and I am just not sure it's healthy.

This may have become more of a rant than I intended, but I think the facebook question is an interesting one, and I am sure that everyone has an opinion. So, chime in!