Giga-Friends
The year is 1996. The Clintons are in office. The Spice Girls and Oasis top the music charts. The Nintendo 64 is released and very soon no one can walk around without having heard of the world’s latest and greatest phenomenon: The Tamagotchi. The Tamagotchi, or some may know it as the Giga-Pet, was a small egg-shaped device with a tiny screen that displayed a virtual pet that you had to feed, play with and ultimately nuture in order for them to grow and flourish. I guess there was some sort of “ending” to the whole process, such as they met other pet friends and went off on their own, but I never saw it. Like most fads it died off pretty much as quickly as it came leaving thousands if not millions of virtual animals to starve to death while pleading in a dark corner of a room for their owners to feed them.
Little did we know that while that fad may have died off the idea behind it actually took shape in a much more contemporary and frightening fashion. The Giga-Friend. No, you didn’t miss something and in fact you probably have one if not tens or hundreds. That’s right. Your Facebook friends. Facebook and social networking sites alike have replaced these arcane devices with something a little more real if only slightly. Real people!
These days instead of having to press a button to feed or play with our virtual pets we get on our computers and nudge, or wink, or bump, or ping our virtual friends from the comfort of our chairs. Technology is there to improve our lives, right? So, why waste our actual, precious time talking to and committing face-time to real flesh-and-blood humans when we can just reach over and nudge them to let them know we care. Or, if we are feeling really generous we can spare four to five of our brain cells and compose a short message to send to them. Of course, we don’t have all the time in the world, so don’t bother writing whole words. No, instead, make sure you can abbreviate any and all words down to an acronym if possible. If they don’t know what it means then maybe they shouldn’t even be your friend. They need to get with it! Don’t they know you have other “friends” to compose short messages to?
Wait a second! What’s that? Your cell phone’s ringing. Ok, check who it is? Oh, it’s him?! How dare he have the arrogance to think you (YOU!) are actually going to bother using your face muscles to move your lips and talk to him. It’s ok, just silence the phone and place it back down. Well, now that you’re up you might as well run down to Starbucks. You’re going to need that extra energy to come home and finish composing short messages and nudging people. With any luck some of them might have nudged you back by the time you get home. Of course, if you had one of those damn iPhones you could check on the way there and back, but we’ll worry about that later. For now we can text message some people on our way.
Is this scenario really that far off from the truth? I think not. Most people who have succumbed to this primitive form of communicating just do it without even thinking about it, so to them it’s just one little activity after another, and as long as I nudge you and you nudge me then our friendship is still in tact. But, is it really that bad? Is it really that big of a deal?
I would have agreed that it was acceptable if it wasn’t for the fact that this system of communication has come to replace actual relationships between humans rather than augmenting them. This system inherently stresses numbers and therefore the old quantity over quality dynamic is quickly put into place. We get caught up in increasing our numbers without regard to the fact that there’s only so much time in a day, real friends are hard to come by and take a lot of real work to establish and maintain. Everyone should be offended if they think someone who nudges them on a daily basis or sends them a text message considers them a friend. No one holds anyone to any expectation. While I myself am guilty of going to the other extreme and expecting too much out of people, it seems most people have swayed the other way around, not expecting anything from anyone. What a sad world that must be to live in. How can you expect to count on someone when you expect nothing from them? It’s completely illogical.
Eventually, you wake up and realize that you have no true friends and no one you can trust. Your ability to communicate with someone in the flesh is diminished and soon the only reason you talk to new people is to get them to accept you as a friend on Facebook where you can then add them to a long list of people you can ping at your leisure instead of offering to meet with them. From there you can ping and nudge to your heart’s content until someday when Facebook becomes irrelevant you can purge your contact list without the slightest hesitation keeping only a few of your closest “friends” for the next, new social community. The others? Well, they will wither and die in their own digital dark corners just as your Giga-Pet did all those years ago.
I had a Tamagotchi that whined for months before I had to euthanize the little guy (remove the battery.) This is, ironically, one of the best features of today’s modern friendships. When I am done with a person, I need only to “unfriend” them. About a month ago, I did some cleaning up on my Facebook list and removed probably 50 people that I knew arbitrarily through school or whatever. I’m happy with my list now. It might be an inane activity, but there’s a few casual relationships that I’ve managed to maintain through Facebook that would otherwise be lost entirely. If nothing else, they’ve been helpful business/career connections. To their credit, I doubt my bitchy Tamagotchi would have given me a very good recommendation.
I guess that’s kind of my point. Keeping people around, not for “friendship”, but to use them when it’s convenient and then discard them when they have served their purpose. This doesn’t seem to bother most people as it does me.
Incidentally, I think I am rather inept at personal, intimate relationships, so Facebook for me is a sort of bridge, or band-aid if you will, for that short-coming. Granted, Facebook is part of a larger picture, which is the ease at which we can publish our ideas, work, etc. Obviously, sharing content appeals to me, since it’s a lot easier to do than say, 10 years ago.
I’ll definitely admit you make a good point in that social networking sites and even formats such the instant message (or text message) seems to enable people to be more honest then they usually would, or at least more bold. This can, of course, be a bad thing sometimes, but I have definitely witnessed situations where people can talk to me on an IM, or through a text message, but we can’t seem to maintain the same camaraderie in person or on the phone. I’m not sure what that means, but I do know that techonology as such has allowed people to say things they normally would have never said. Good or bad.
To your other point, I would say that I enjoy and support those websites and technologies that do enable us to share our work and our thoughts, such as Flickr and the blogging format, but when the system is structured in such a way as Facebook or Myspace is, it is setting itself up to to “fail” in that regard. While some people may use those sites to share their serious thoughts and work, most people do not. To them it’s just an online water cooler that they can check and respond to all day while they’re supposed to be working. It might be a subtle difference, but it is a significant one.