Can Facebook Be Your Friend?

Those kinds of social juxtapositions can make you giddy. (Isn’t that what’s great about having a wedding, the chance to see all those different worlds collide?) But the constancy of those collisions―uncontrolled by seating arrangements, unlimited by the size of a catering hall―can also be uncomfortable, even baffling. Forget about the photos of boozy revelry that everyone worries a future boss might see. What if a prospective love interest sees the link to a Wham! fan page that someone sent you in an act of generosity but under the misguided presumption that your tastes hadn’t changed since eighth grade? As another friend puts it: “People on Facebook seem to perceive you as the person you were when they last knew you, as if the past 10 years hadn’t happened.”

In its early days, media pundits hailed Facebook as the social application of the future, and yet what it really does is change our relationship to the past. Facebook makes contact so casual that it allows people to leapfrog back instantly to a former you, one you thought you had left behind―maybe one you had worked hard to put firmly in the past. People reaching out via the site don’t need to know anything about how you’ve changed in order to be in touch with you. They type your name into the site and―ta-da! ―there you are.

My friend Joanna, who requested I not use her last name, recently accepted a friend request from someone she hadn’t seen since the sixth grade and found herself plunged into the social anxiety she had experienced at that age. Suddenly she had access to the online conversations of her classmates. How was it that everyone seemed to have stayed in such close touch? Why were they ignoring her comments? Why were they making fun of the fact that they had sung “The Rainbow Connection” at graduation, a memory Joanna had always considered sweet and lovely? “My memories are being invaded by other people’s memories,” she wrote me.

On Facebook, the past is no longer distant and blurry, a source for vague wonder and speculation. Just today an old boyfriend from my teenage years, someone I never thought I would hear from again, contacted me on Facebook. Out of the blue, in the middle of my workday, I found myself pulled into that familiar eddy of adolescent insecurity and infatuation, whether I was in the mood for it or not, just as Joanna had been placed squarely back in an emotional space she was certain she had left behind for good.

Shortly after accepting the Long-Ago Ex’s friendship, I was offered current pictures of him and his young son, details about where the family vacations, a photo of his wife. No longer would I have the option of musing on or imagining the Ex’s fate; on Facebook, practically every chapter of one’s life that has ended, for better or for worse, may be reissued with its own epilogue. Beautifully loose ends can be tied up, without warning, into something finite and sure. It makes you wonder: Whatever happened to…whatever happened to?

For some people, it’s that time-traveling component that makes the site worthwhile. “Facebook is my daily portal into my past,” my friend Jennifer DePreist wrote me when I asked her how she feels about the site. She says it connects her to her former self: the one who talked politics with her law-firm colleagues and traded arcane pop-culture trivia with her college friends―and who now still does, only via Facebook. I imagine that for someone as professionally accomplished as Jen, who has now turned her attention to her family, or for anyone who works at home, like my husband, Facebook provides an audience, a sense of collegiality. On it, you share that witty observation not with the one friend you’re e-mailing but with an extended community of peers, many of whom may chime in to let you know they noticed or were impressed or disagree.

Some of my friends, not to mention my husband, are forever changing what’s known as a status update. My husband’s status updates are tiny, jewel-like one-liners: “Alan Burdick to-did all he could to-do.” “Alan Burdick just tripped the fuse-box fantastic.” I read his and so many others’ witty or insightful weigh-ins and I find the challenge of updating my status utterly daunting: It’s not just a statement of being; it’s also a chance to show off, to amuse, or to inspire. Hence, even though I’m a writer, or maybe because I’m a writer: total paralysis.

For all my ambivalence about the site, I’ve noticed that for me―a perpetually pressed-for-time working mother―the website has considerable advantages that offset its less ideal aspects. The site provides a hyperspeed overview of the boldfaced concerns and activities of my extended friends and family: In less than 20 minutes of surfing, I can learn what’s weighing on their minds, where they will be vacationing, and what movie they’re raving about―probably more than I would glean from a month’s worth of cocktail parties, mommy-group meetings, and dinners out. I know these insights may not be as deep as the ones I would be getting in person, but they’re better than the general information whiteout I felt I was living in before I started using Facebook.