I have a confession to make. When I was ten years old I kept a secret list of all my friends, purely in order to satisfy myself that I had enough of them. I have reasonably vivid recollections of afternoons spent hidden in the sleepout at the back of the house, pouring over the list, adding, deleting, rewriting. I doubt the names changed that often – it was pretty much just a list of classmates, with the odd enemy dropping off temporarily for having uttered a mildly heinous playground remark – but looking back on it now the act of rewriting the list from time to time, tallying up my social bounty, satisfied an increasingly hungry ten year old ego rather well.
Jump forward fifteen years or so and that young ego fluffing had morphed into the somewhat unhealthy addiction of maintaining a robust and growing social stock. Meeting and making friends at university became particularly easy, thanks to beer’s delicious lubrication of social interaction and the fact that everyone you met spent most of their social hours orbiting the same square mile you did. But upon leaving the decadence of tertiary years we all spread out to flats around the fringes of Auckland, and keeping tabs on that buddy list meant Saturday evenings spent dribbling carbon over the streets of the city, driving from party to party to party.
Another five years ahead and I found myself in London, learning very slowly the exhausting lesson that crossing the city three times in an evening was just not possible if you wanted to keep sane. For the first time in my life I had reached a point where I had too many friends, gulp. But, lo, coming into view, from the bowels of Harvard, came an unlikely saviour in the form of FaceBook. I’d resisted the blue and white beast for over a year, sticking to the vain hope that I’d be able to maintain all those relationships without the assistance of computer code, thank you very much. Resisted and resisted, and then relented, dragged through the new account screen with a few last weak kicks of the feet.
And then suddenly I had my fix. Months of difficulty keeping up with expats in London became blissfully easy, thousands of miles of distance from mates back in AK vanished, years and years of absence from those old university drinking buddies wiped from memory. I jabbed in the FaceBook needle and the fix started flowing. Hourly, half-hourly, quarter-hourly trips to facebook.com to keep a twitching eye on what rambling thoughts were going through the minds of all those long-lost acquaintances, scanning photos of work colleagues making fools of themselves at parties, checking up on just how grown-up those cousins back home were getting. And, to the side – just there, under the surface – feeling that addictive itch satisfyingly scratched with how plump my list of FaceBook pals was getting. More pals, more alerts, more photos, more pals, more, more, more. Ahh, delicious…
And then one day I got one of those friend requests we’ve all had – some woman from work whom I’d barely spoken to asked to be my friend. Well, asked everyone in her address book I suspect. The party soured at once – requests that I’d once relished receiving and adding to my social plunderchest started leaving a dirty bile in my mouth. But, like an addict, I couldn’t say no. Kept clicking ‘accept’, increasing my haul, adding to theirs. And now those quarter-hourly visits to facebook.com were becoming increasingly dissatisfying. I didn’t want to know what half the people on that list were thinking, didn’t care what parties they were going to, didn’t give a damn where they were and what they were doing. Sure, I knew them all and had nothing against them – if I saw them in the street or at a party I’d always enjoy catching up on what they’d been up to lately. But did I need to know every day? Every fifteen minutes? Shit no, my mind can only handle so much. My eloquent Australian flatmate summed it up for me, “It’s ShitBook mate”. It was, and the party was over. I quit, cold turkey, ditched it, vowing never to return.
And almost a year later I hear three things in the space of a fortnight. A friend is engaged, a baby named, a mate has a puppy – all second hand, from other people who keep me in the loop on all things ShitBook. These are the people and the kinds of things I do want to keep a lazy eye on, and living hundreds or thousands of miles away from these buddies makes it bloody hard. So…you win, ShitBook.
And I’m back, plugged into the social IV, taking delicious hits from the friendshipbong once more. But this time with a difference. Trying to sign up for a new account on Sat’dee morning, I found that despite last year’s efforts my old account hadn’t been deleted and was still bloody on there – along with all of those people I just didn’t feel a desire to keep day-by-day tabs on anymore. So I found a new addiction – deleting friends. A lusty flurry of an hour or so had me trimming more than a hundred from my account, whittling it down to a more satisfying core.
So now ShitBook works for me. Well, I think so… I’m still wary of how often I’m checking in, how much stuff comes dribbling down that line. My new addiction is to ruthless management of a trickle of updates, photos that I actually find I want to know. So now I browse with a twitchy, itchy trigger finger hovering over that ‘delete friend’ button, ready to cull at any moment…no pressure…
[If you're reading this and you find that I've suddenly disappeared from your FaceBook list, don't despair! Think of all the things we'll have to talk about if we should meet up again a year or two from now, now that we don't know what each other is doing every minute of the day! And, let's be honest, you didn't really want to know who I was doing what with and where last night did you?]
ha ha.. I’m watching you.. did you find the cat yet?