Recently, my close friend decided to go sabbatical on Twitter. No one knows precisely what is his reason. It might be right when he told me that he just wanted to spend his times reading more books. It might be right when I randomly guessed it was just a matter of wanting more uninterrupted thoughts, or a girl problem. But after that I thought of it somewhat differently. Perhaps he just felt - as I feel it, too - that this social network life has become meaningless. A fake simulacra that no longer incites happiness (in whatever form) to us. So, what do we make of this?
We live at a time when friendship and relationship entangled so strong with the World Wide Web. To it the meaning of relationship is understood and measured; be it your Facebook relationship status, the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, or whatever. After a while, it degrades into something that, as Leo Tolstoy on "War and Peace" has put it, it's just "…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant. …" We are friend with everyone, now. Some of us may not be changing from who we were before the intrusion of Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. But, some of us, when finally decided to become friends with everyone, forget how to be friends with anyone.
William Deresiewicz once wrote: "Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, its elective affinities were exceptional, even subversive, cutting across established lines of allegiance. David loved Jonathan despite the enmity of Saul; Achilles' bond with Patroclus outweighed his loyalty to the Greek cause. Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character—rooted in virtue, for Aristotle and Cicero, and dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and truth." And it was everywhere, back then, persisted to the 18th and 19th century. Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tennyson and Montaigne, Hawthorne and Melville. And even in fictional settings like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, or Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf. Friendship was once beautiful, and intellectually and spiritually rewarding.
And what to see from the online counterpart? Sure, some of us find greats friends out of strangers from it. But, most of the time it is just impersonal relationship stemmed from mutual affinities, be it shared ideology, football clubs, indie bands not many have heard, or those Korean stars. The image of the true friend - soul mate whom is difficult to find but dearly beloved, who shields and stands with us in our difficult times, who shares with us our commitment to moral virtues and mutual improvement - is faded. We want our friends to help us feel better about ourselves. We want them to unconditionally accept us, even though in reality we are laden with moral defects and irrational judgments. We care more about having fun and conflict-free relationship, even though in doing so we let our "friend" does something wrong and even help to make excuses about it.
Friendship has ceased as it is no longer about value and relationship, rather, a feeling; a feeling of connection - like that one time you hugged your dolls - and a feeling of being loved and praised by strangers. Online friendship has served as electronic, virtual beacon to hush away the darkness of our loneliness. We love to check in on Path and Foursquare rather than simply enjoying the moment and place. We stop having meaningful conversation, and replace it with tweets and statuses. We are yearning that there will be someone from our thousands friends and followers responding back to us, reaffirming our existence amongst the faceless crowds. We crave this online attention so much that some people even did horrible things to get it.
The BBM messages, likes, retweets, blog comments, and heated online debates (be it about football teams, politics, or religions - yes, I'm looking at you, religious zealots and militant atheists) have occupied the subcortex and nucleus accumbans in our brains. They become our modern drugs, and we are devolving to be "approval junkies". Some of us have become so addicted to it that it is almost impossible not to check our timelines even for a day. This is why smartphones and gadgets are heavily-sought after in this era.
On love, there are not so much differences. Today’s love is distributed and enjoyed, not only in the hearts of the lovers but also across the online fabrics. The moments we shared with our lovers and all the subsequent romance coming from neurochemical cocktails in our brains, left the trace of digital footprints amongst uncountable bits of internet data. As we increasingly live our social lives online, in a medium that records everything, the digital précis and the relationship itself overlap each others. And it happens so often that this online record becomes the relationship, just like what Baudillard afraid of.
To sever this bond is even more difficult, as every click leaves a trace. The information that you were once friends or lovers lives on, inasmuch the relationship has long gone and vanished. Our parents' generation overcame this easily: that box of photographs and love letters under the bed, the time-capsule of undulating emotions, existed only in one place. Burn them, and the words remain only in the memories of those they touched: subjective, unexploited, unadvertised, and destined to vanish. But all those Facebook statuses, flowery tweets, online poems and love stories on the blogs are absorbed and witnessed by strangers the moment we post them online. To erase these completely is almost impossible. Not to mention those who are skilled enough to hack or use Google cache can summon them again out of the blue.
This by no means that to have online lives is always bad. I've seen the internet caters to good things, like internet activisms and revolutions. I've seen artists and writers find their intellectual resources and audiences. I don't advocate us to make a new zeitgeist to reject internet completely and become Neo-Luddites. No. I just want to say that the online world has moved too quickly and disturbingly intrusive for you and me, in some fashions that not all of us realize. I, too, enjoy my online life as much as the adventures I have in real life. To quote John Freeman, "Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down."
We just need to appreciate the real life more, to find our true irreplaceable friends, and to fall quietly in love.
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