We remember each other very vividly, or sometimes have trouble matching a name to a face. We’ve stayed in touch, or rediscovered old friends we thought we would never hear from again. Sometimes we strike up a new friendship that, for one reason or another, we never pursued back in the day. Occasionally, we welcome new friends into our social circle. Sometimes we even meet, to disappointment or unexpected pleasure. But most of all, we end up re-creating the community–at least in part–that we thought we had left behind forever.
Social scientists, I’m sure, will stay busy for years analyzing the impact of Facebook. In an article in The New York Times, Clive Thompson wrote about the “incessant online contact” of social networking sites:
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
This seems valid enough: those short status updates might not seem immediately significant, but they do reveal a person’s interests, intelligence, hopes, dreams, fears. In some ways you learn things about your friends (old and new) that wouldn’t otherwise be revealed in ordinary conversation. Sometimes you learn things you don’t want to know, although this happens more rarely than one might think. Most of all, you learn that you are part of a community–in some cases, a community that you didn’t even know existed.
Personally, I’ve come to view Facebook as sort of a lifeline to home. Living five hundred miles away, it oftentimes makes me feel a little less…lonely. And just like the Counting Crows song, “Someday I won’t be so lonely…and I’ll walk on water every chance I get.”
