Do you remember getting a letter in the mail as a kid? Coming home from school and seeing a letter addressed to “Christopher Webster” was probably the most exciting thing that could happen to third-grade me. I would tear it open frantically and leave the envelope looking like something that a mastiff had sunk its teeth into. The letter would probably just be a Hallmark birthday card from an aunt or uncle, and it would probably have a grand total of 10 handwritten words on it, but it was to me! It was for no one else’s eyes unless I, supreme overlord of the letter, decreed that some other being was worthy of viewing it.
That “ownership” of a message is a powerful feeling. It’s similar to the feeling of keeping a secret with someone. Personal communication to someone you care about is special in part because only the sender and the recipient get to see the message. Imagine trying to be close with someone while only being able to send them messages that would go to hundreds or thousands of other people. It would be impossible to call that relationship intimate or personal.
Part of the reason for this connectedness is the fact that in order for someone to send a message to me, they had to be thinking, “You know what? Chris should really know about this.” And when I get the message, I (perhaps unconsciously) realize that, and it makes our friendship that much closer.
Social media robs us of this connectedness. Tweeting my thoughts about the current election cycle or posting pictures on Facebook from my recent vacation carry an implicit message that I’m fine with hundreds of people seeing my posts.
The even more alienating component of this effect is the fact that everyone who sees my post knows that hundreds of other people can see it just the same. That “birthday card” feeling is nowhere to be found on a Facebook News Feed. Similarly, posting in such a public manner ensures that everyone knows I wasn’t thinking of a specific person when I thought of my brilliant Trump burn or when I took a video of my cat doing a back-flip. Instead, I just thought, “Everyone will like this!”
As of a Pew Research survey from 2011, 67 percent of people use social media to “keep in touch” with their friends. I think the term “keep in touch” is being grossly misused in this context. To me, “keeping in touch” does not mean occasionally scrolling through Twitter and clicking favorite on a friend’s funny tweet while lightly exhaling through the nose. Nor does it mean liking graduation pictures on Facebook, or if you’re really feeling sentimental, commenting, “GRATS.”
This version of “keeping in touch” is a sorry facsimile of actually knowing what someone is doing and knowing who they are as a person. We pretend we know people from their 140 character statuses and their 10 second Snapchat stories, but we’re only catching a fraction of their lives.
This is what I’ve decided to call the “dilution of friendship.” By this, I mean that instead of having several deep relationships with a small group of people, we dilute our friendships into a wide, thin band across the internet. We catch shallow glimpses of others and they of us, and we all lose out because of it.
This may all seem over-dramatic, and in a way, it is. Just because we share aspects of our life on social media doesn’t prevent us from forming meaningful connections with others around us. I don’t think humanity is going to exclusively know each other through a News Feed on Facebook or that millennials will never be able to communicate properly face-to-face. Every social media website has some sort of private messaging feature that’s fantastic for sharing things with just a few people.
So maybe the next time you go to post a picture to your wall or your Snapchat story, think, “Who do I really want to see this?” And then, when you only send it to a few people, you can rest assured that the minute they get that notification, they’re going to feel just like that third grader with the birthday card.
