efriends

There is this guy who joined my department as a post-doc the year I graduated. He's a very interesting and multifaceted person, having pursued a very cool parallel career that he still keeps in touch with. Anyway, I don't work with him, so I only meet him once a year, and he had floated to the periphery of my world.

Until we linked up on Facebook. Now I can know pretty much what he chooses to reveal. (He was in Israel as a keynote speaker this week, is hoarse now, and must clear out his physical inbox.) One such status update a few weeks back struck me as funny and ironic, so I messaged him saying so. Two days later, we met for the first time in a year, at our annual conference.

It was late in the evening and a crowd of people were gathered around the bar in the hotel lobby. A large group of people all with ties to my alma mater had commandeered a couch and some armchairs, and we sat around together, catching up. This guy appeared and plonked down next to me. The first thing he said was -- "So, we should be able to use Facebook to study something." I looked at him. I wasn't so sure what. He said, "There's an awful lot of data that can be collected there." I said, "Yeah, but what will it tell you? Apart from who has how many friends, and who uses how many applications?" He persisted, "There has to be *something*." I agreed there could be something, but I just wasn't sure what. It sounded to me a lot like what one would hear during the internet craze of the late 90s. "The internet will change everything," a lot of people said. "How?" I would hear my academic hero ask. "What will they do that's different? Not faster, or more conveniently, or more efficiently... *different*. How will behavior change?"

I never heard a good answer to that question. People would say - "Oh, but you can buy groceries online." But, until the boom collapsed, they never got the point that that's not *different*. People still buy groceries, and they buy the same stuff as before -- they're just going to a different sort of store, but they're doing the same thing (just as the folks in Indian metropolises today are now going to the department stores in malls instead of the sabziwalas). So that's what the whole "let's research Facebook" idea sounded like to me. I just didn't see what people were doing *different* thanks to Facebook (except perhaps pretending to throw sheep at each other). So that conversation didn't go anywhere.

But then I had the strangest experience today, which, when I reflected on it, brought it all back to me. A blogger I have known and liked for a while now, but only recently well enough to exchange emails and chat with, initiated this conversation. It started off innocuously enough, with said person popping up to ask me what my latest status message meant. I explained. Abruptly, s/he shifted gears. "Do you live in a house?" "Do you have pets?" "You're sounding like one of those people who call you up," I said, "Hi! I'm calling from the State of Massachusetts." "What is the one thing you cook that you refer to as your speciality?" ("I'm trying to fill in a mental picture.") "Have you met a lot of bloggers or did you know a ton beforehand?" The questions just kept coming.

It was really interesting. I was working on the side, but kept answering them as they flew at me -- all sorts of questions from all sorts of angles. "When you were in college were you insufferable? Have you ever dressed in drag? Do you worry about losing your mind? " "Where do you get these questions from?" I asked. "Making them up as we go along." Finally, after an exhilarating ride, I answered "What was your worst hangover" with a story that said person approved of as "very good", and I was off the hook.

Something like this had never happened to me before. But I'd had so much to do during the day that I couldn't reflect on it till dinnertime. Which is when the Facebook conversation came back to me. Think about the process of making friends, I thought. You see someone - they do or say something you like, or you do or say something they like, and the other person reciprocates. You get into a conversation; you reveal certain things about yourself. If these things are not repulsive to the other person, they maintain contact. Similarly for you. You interact repeatedly, usually in various different settings -- you meet for coffee, you go to a bar, you have lunch, you call each other up (heck you even add them on Facebook). All the while, you get to know a little bit more about the person -- from the things they say, the way they talk, the jokes they crack, the stuff they order, the way they look suspiciously at the wait-staff. You share confidences -- each personal datum revealed elicits one in return, bonds are built. That's how friendships grow.

And how different this internet business can be. You can have a blog for nearly two years. You can read someone else's blog for large parts of that period. You can interact almost daily on this forum, on your blog, their blog, other people's blogs. Yet what you reveal is very constrained, what they reveal is as controlled, and the medium of communication is unitary, and restrictive. So when, after all these presses of the reload button you find that you feel as if the other person is your friend, you also find - that in some sense of the word - you "know" this person not at all.

And yet, you feel as if you are friends.

Now, is *that* different?