Ian On The Red Dot

I stumbled onto this post which was just beautiful. After reading it, I couldn’t help but think about my own childhood and teenage-hood and the friends which were part of those periods of my life. I’ve long lost contact with my childhood friends - those rascals-in-crime who I played ‘Crocodile’ with on the table-tennis table, catching at the playground, ‘Pepsi Cola 123′ at the lift landing, ‘Hantam-Bola’ at the void deck, ‘Police-and-thief’ using the whole HDB as the area, sliding down the hill in our estate with cardboard boxes and the female neighbors who convinced us guys to destroy our groins by playing ‘Zero-Point’.

I’ll especially never forget the friends who got caught together with me playing soccer at the void deck just before the PSLE and got caned together with me by the Principle.

Good times.

We never did manage to really keep in touch after my family moved when I entered Secondary School. Most of us didn’t have our own phones in the room and it wasn’t part of our culture to call and talk with each other. Actually, it never occurred to me until I was in upper secondary school that the phone could be used by people other than the parents. We were the sort of friends who went to school together, played soccer and ‘One-Leg’ together during recess and hung out a bit after school. Our gathering point was the playgrounds scattered across the estate.

Although we lived close together, it was never in our habit to regularly visit each other’s homes (hmmm, though I did visit some of them out of the blue). Our parents talked whenever they met at the playground or in the market, but I don’t remember my parents ever inviting any of my friends’ parents over. The only people who did ever come to our house were family, my parents’ friends or the neighbors on our floor and one floor down.

When I moved away, keeping in touch was over. We only managed to meet when we went back to the primary school for Teacher’s day. I can remember only one other time we met and that was before O-Levels.  I envy the kids now - they have handphones, icq, email, msn and so many other ways to keep in touch. We had none of those things then and being in a different part of Singapore as opposed to the same estate didn’t help matters.

I could of course have arranged to go out with them. But at that time, it never occurred to me that I could do that. Going out after school was never part of my life. Not that I never hung out with my secondary school friends. We did, but only at places near school and they were rarely arranged before hand. It was mostly a matter of school is over, there is some free time, shall we go bowl or watch a movie and rarely in Orchard. In fact, I can’t even remember going to Orchard to ‘hang out’ on a school day during my secondary school days except once in Sec three - it was my first date.

I only learned the concept of ‘hanging out’ in town when I hit JC. I mean, I only learned there were groups of people called ‘Far East Kids’ and ‘Centerpoint Kids’ after Cineleisure became the new IT place.

When I read the post, I started trying to find reasons why I lost most of my friends from those periods of my life which were really the best ones until about two years ago. There is probably a myriad of factors which all contributed to the lost.

But then I reminded myself not to dwell on what’s lost but what I have - my best friend. The funny thing is we never really talked to each other during the first year of upper secondary school. We were in the same class so we must have interacted but he was a real ninja until I got to know him as a friend rather then just a classmate.

He would come to class just before the bell rings, put his bag, go for assembly, attend lessons, go off for ECA once the bell rings. That’s it. Ninja.

I still remember the point when we became friends. It was after a bunch of speeches made by prefect wannabees when we were exiting the hall.

He turned to me and asked, ‘Who’s Wisely?’

A man with a cold sense of humor. A man after my own heart.

Like what marta wrote in her post, that was the moment that sticks. And life then was indeed simpler. We would spend time waiting for teachers to come into class discussing about everything. My friend was such an optimist that he was a perfect foil to my cynicism about the world.

And through everything that has happened in our lives, he has always been my lighthouse - the constant that always warns, guides and encourages.

Facebook as a piece of technology is amazing. As a site that purports to be a social utility that connects you with the people around you, it does just that. It is the ability to fulfill this purpose well that, to me, makes Facebook bad for friendships.

Firstly, weak ties have a place in society. Mark Granovetter in his book “The Strength of Weak Ties” explains how weak ties help spread information to individuals that are not accessible via strong ties.

The problem to me is that while Facebook becomes an effective tool to manage those connections with people that are weak ties, it also creates the danger of making more ties weak.

Take for example birthday wishes. It used to be that the only way to wish a person ‘Happy Birthday’ was to be physically with a person. Then there was mail, so now cards could be sent. Then there was the telephone, so a call just needed to be made. Then there was email. Then there was sms. It became progressively easier to show ‘we care’ as long as we made the effort to remember. Now, even the effort to remember is not needed as Facebook does it for you. Someone left a comment on an earlier post that seemed to indicate that the lessening of effort needed somehow results in the decrease in sincerity. I’m not sure if this is always the case. The message may be of a medium that is easier to use but that does not always make the message less sincere although it can be argued that the medium used is the message.

Granted then that using a medium that takes little effort on your part to communicate with your friends may not always be indicative of a lack of sincerity, how would Facebook be bad for friendships?

Before I go further, I would like to assert that the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe everyone on your social network by sites like Facebook increasingly blurs the distinction between what is an acquaintance and friend to generations that grew up with the Internet. I would like then to make another assertion - that such a distinction is actually important for the proper functioning of society and we are all worse off with the lost of that distinction.

The reason why Facebook is bad for friendships is the use of apps like ‘SuperPoke!’ and ‘Gifts’. ‘SuperPoke!’ is an application that allows you to specify ‘actions to be taken against a friend’. ‘Gifts’ allows you to give a virtual present to a friend which will result in an image representing the gift appearing on the friend’s profile. These applications allow you to do something to show the friend that you are aware of that individual in your online social network if not your life as well as a reminder to that friend that you are still around (i.e. keeping yourself in view). It is as much about the giver as it is about the given.

The problem of the use of such applications is that friendship becomes mediated by a form of media. When I was in Primary School, my friends were classmates and people that I played with after school. We were friends because we were being friends. We did stuff that friends did together. We stood by each other. We encouraged each other when exams came up…

When Friendster popularized online social networks, friends became a collector’s item. Granted that there were always those sort of people who just had to or seemed to know everyone and kept count in that ‘blackbook’, collecting friends became something everyone engaged in naturally by the use of online social networks. While not everyone took it to the extreme like those who seem to max out the number of friends they can have on an account, online social networks brought the concept of ‘having friends’ to the foreground of our consciousness.

Now, with Facebook and similar applications, we have reached a stage where it isn’t just about ‘having friends’ but ‘appearing to be friends’ not just to ourselves but to others in the network. Such applications then work against us. They reduce what could have possibly grown to strong ties to weak ties because little effort is made beyond connecting over applications like Facebook - it is just that easy. The sadder thing would be if existing friendships become reduced because instead of making the effort to meet up and really talk and spend time together, we put that off because being able to connect over Facebook deceives us by making us feel that the existing state of the friendship is healthy and that amount of interaction is sufficient.

Of course, it would probably not be superfluous to point out that I’m using a Timex definition of friendship in a digital age.

Friendship is being redefined by how we use technology. The question then is this - is that a good thing?