Is Facebook Ruining Human Friendships?

Zadie Smith has an eloquent essay in The New York Review of Books on *The Social Network *(the movie) and the societal impact of Facebook. She's not optimistic. Her writing is so lovely that I can't resist quoting a big chunk:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

I am the last person who should be defending Facebook, as I don't really get the platform. Like Smith, I am easily annoyed by the social banalities encouraged by the software, by all those birthday wishes and ALLCAPS acronyms. Nevertheless, I think it's worth putting this new medium of interaction in perspective. Last year, I wrote about the social network research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who have looked at the impact of Facebook on "real life". If we spend hours tracking people online, responding to photos and updates, do we have fewer 3-D friends? Or maybe Facebook makes us more popular? How does this new social tool influence our social lives? The conclusion of the scientists was anticlimactic, if only because it suggests that human nature is a perdurable thing, and that even Mark Zuckerberg can't budge it very much:

Once upon a time, social interaction was bounded by space; we met only in person. But then communication became mediated by technology. From telegraph to telephone to email to Twitter, each innovation fed the same anxieties, as people worried that traditional forms of community were being destroyed. The telephone was ruining family life; we're neglecting our real friends for our so-called friends on Facebook.

But does technology actually change the nature of the social network? Or does it simply extend it? It has long been recognized, for instance, that the human capacity for close friendship is remarkably consistent. People from cultures throughout the world report between four and seven bosom buddies, or people we regularly confide in.

On Facebook, though, the average user has approximately 110 "friends," which has led some scientists to speculate that the Web is altering the very nature of human networks. For the first time in history, we can keep track of hundreds of people. The computer, they say, is helping to compensate for the limitations of the brain.

But Christakis and Fowler were skeptical of such claims. They knew that social habits are stubborn things. So they persuaded a university to let them analyze the Facebook pages of its students, devising a clever way to distinguish between casual friends and deeper emotional connections. After analyzing thousands of photos, the scientists found that, on average, each student had 6.6 close friends in their online network. In other words, nothing has really changed; even the most fervent Facebook users still maintain only a limited circle of intimates.

"On Facebook, you've got a few close friends and lots of people you barely know," Fowler says. "Because the cost of information transmission is so low"—that is, the site makes it easy to communicate—"we end up staying in touch with more acquaintances. But that doesn't mean we have more friends."

It also doesn't mean, of course, that heavy Facebook users have less friends, or that our "real" friends have been devalued. In the end, even the most obsessive Facebook users still look...just like the rest of us.

I'm reminded here of Virginia Woolf's famous critique of the 19th century novel. Woolf argued that the eminent novelists of her time - “Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy” - were too caught up in the irrelevant details of life to notice what really mattered, which was the interior of the mind, the universal characteristics of thought. “They [the old novelists] have looked at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage," Woolf wrote. "But never at life, never at human nature." The end result, Woolf argued, is that these writers had confused their description of particulars with a deeper grasp of character and motivation - they assumed that a person could be deciphered by spending a few sentences on their coat, or their dialect, or the way they smelled in the morning. But those particulars, Woolf insisted, were a limited prism through which to understand the world.

While I'm sympathetic to many of Smith's critiques of Facebook - the site is easy to eviscerate - I think she's making a similar mistake, and is obsessing over the incidental details of the technology (the upholstery of the carriage, so to speak) while ignoring what really matters, which is that underlying need to connect with other people. Technology has an impact. Facebook is a fascinating and perplexing phenomenon. But I have enough faith in our relationships to know that they won't be obliterated by a few ads on a website. When Facebook is over, when we've moved on to a new social technology with a new way of monetizing our connections in exchange for free storage space, what will remain is what always remains: human nature.

PS. For more (and better!) takes on Smith, see Pavlus and Madrigal.