Relationships and Facebook

Relationships and friendships are no longer confined to, or defined by, one’s location. The parameters of communities aren’t the edges of towns, or the ends of neighborhoods anymore; but instead, the parameters of communities are countries, and continents. Through social networking and the Internet, the way in which we establish, develop, and maintain relationships has drastically changed.

When we were kids, if a friend moved to a different city it was, to an extent, a death sentence for the friendship. Now, when a friend moves, it’s far from a death sentence. Instead, it extends the reach of one’s own personal network. One of the main points addressed by Daniel Miller in Tales from Facebook is how Facebook has updated our ability to preserve relationships that would otherwise cease to be. “Its importance lies in its perceived and actual ability to reconstruct relationships, especially within families and with absent friends that had been gradually fading away due to the attrition of other aspects of modern life such as increasing mobility.” Facebook’s main ability is to connect people, and maintain those connections. Without engaging in consistent conversation, one can still stay up to date with friends through status updates, wall posts, and pictures.

While maintaining relationships is an essential part of Facebook, one of the driving forces behind why Facebook became so popular was the ability for people to display their relationships (and to a mildly unrelated extent, their thoughts, statuses, and pictures). In these clips from The Social Network, the idea of the “Relationship Status” is born. In this first clip, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg asks him about a girl in his class and whether or not she has a boyfriend, which puts the idea in Mark’s head. In the second clip, Mark essentially describes the social dynamics behind college, and more broadly, humanity. Are people having sex? Are people dating?

Part of the appeal of Facebook, and social media, is the ability to preserve relationships. But, more so than that, a major factor in the popularity of social networks is that it plays to our inherent curiosity about other people. “The evidence in this book suggests that the main impact of Facebook are on aspects of those relationships such as dating, feelings of isolation and boredom, gossip, maintaining long-distance relationships, sharing of news and other rather similar unremarkable activities.” The key words in this entire quote are unremarkable activities. So much of what takes place on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, is unremarkable. Yet, our natural interest in other people causes us to believe that this activity is in fact remarkable and interesting. While Facebook has done wonders in our ability to develop and sustain relationships, at its core it’s pulled out the human characteristic of curiosity, and curiosity is what will ultimately keep people coming back to Facebook.