Prior to returning home for my reunion, I did what any other classmate does to prepare for impromptu meetings with old acquaintances: I stalked them all on Facebook. I saw that one would be in Namibia and therefore absent, that one might be in labor, and that another had put on some unforgiving pounds and might require an extra serving of Beer Nuts. I laughed my way through photo albums of bachelor parties, graduations, and weddings and grew in disappointment when I discovered just how many of my contemporaries would not be supporting Barack Obama in the upcoming election. How John McCain cornered the market on some of these young white women is quite a mystery to me. By the time the reunion rolled around and I scanned the crowd to mingle, I’d realized that my Facebook findings had already told me everything a casual conversation would reveal. I stared and recounted to myself, “He’s in medical school, she is a horse trainer, she teaches middle school math, and he is an unemployed biochem graduate student.” Approaching these long absent classmates with some inoffensive anecdote, only to walk away knowing nothing more than I already did seemed like a lost cause, and the social anxiety sufferer within me sighed with relief as I nursed my pink lemonade and nacho plate.
When I did gain the courage to strike up conversation with the GHS graduates of ‘03, I had to concentrate harder on what information I knew about them through Facebook and what information I had found out from our very conversation. I would be humming along only to realize that I’d asked questions about a study abroad program in Chile and a vacation to New Orleans before recollecting that these queries came not from previous correspondences but from albums I’d looked at several times online. In a way, it accentuates the often spouted cliche that, “It feels like no time has passed at all,” since I’ve been there virtually every step of the way, through bad breakups, drunken nights out, changed political affiliations and even sexual orientations. With Facebook keeping an up to the minute tally of your identity, why bother stopping to refresh someone’s memory? Just refresh the page.
This omniscient knowledge can be startling, especially when you are on the receiving end. Recently, an old friend, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, stopped me and asked, “So how is your summer in Oberlin going with the boyfriend?” I hadn’t told this person I was spending the summer in Oberlin, nor that I was spending it a significant other. Slightly dazed, I soon realized that if I had volunteered this information on Facebook, I might as well have put it in the paper.
Though faced with less of a need to personally contact old friends, I now have access to people I never thought I would ever imagine thinking of again in my life. I may have sacrificed depth for breadth, but Facebook has still been a greater source of social connection than social apathy. Perhaps Facebook is just filling in the banal gaps we’d all just rather have people know than ask about. How luxurious to just click a button and come out of the closet or end a six year relationship without anyone pestering you about it. In the meantime, I may try to get the best of both worlds by using this as my “current status” message: “Just call me.”
