Falling in Touch

When you graduate from High School, you say goodbye to your friends, some of whom you've been with since kindergarten. You promise to stay in touch, and then you go off to college and your old friends recede into the past and pretty soon you don't think about them very much at all. Then you graduate from college and you promise to stay in touch with your friends...and eventually the same thing happens to them as your life changes again.

Staying in touch is more than an occasional phone call or email. It's the daily give and take, the casual remarks about insignificant things, the minutae that give texture to daily life. You might go to the same coffee shop every day and exchange pleasantries with a barista. The next time you see that barista, you can talk about something that recalls your previous visit, or you might point out something silly that you heard on the radio, which leads to a brief conversation on that topic.

Then you head home and tell your spouse about what the barista said. It's not important, it's just the rhythm of daily life. It's what you're thinking about today. Now imagine you get a phone call from an old high school buddy. He hasn't seen you in 20 years and he wants you to catch him up on everything since you last met. But all that you can think of is the conversation with the barista and whether you have an ironed shirt to wear to work in the morning. So you tell your buddy, "Not much, how about you?"

I always feel silly when that happens, which is one reason I stay away from alumni reunions. I just can't think of a thing to say. These are the things that make up life--in other words, "what's been happening." Grocery stores, working, getting to meetings, taking care of family, exercising, hobbies, books, computers. Those are the things that have been "happening." But you don't want to burden your buddy with all this mundane stuff because it's boring to anyone except the person it's happening to.

What always happens with me (and I hate this) is that I end up sounding like one of those Christmas "Family Updates" where I try to impress my old pal with how fascinating my life is. I'll tell about someplace I went on vacation, even though vacation comprises 2 weeks a year and the rest of the time it's mundane stuff.

Four years after the rest of the net discovered it, I finally got on Facebook earlier this year. I quickly found that lots of my high school and college pals were already there. Facebook has a place at the top of your home page that invites you to write a one-line status update: "What are you doing right now?" All your Facebook friends see what you write there, and likewise you see what they write about themselves.

These status updates are short, so you have to be brief: "Chillin," or "Standing in line at the movies," or "Ordering a coffee," are the kinds of things people post. It strikes me that this is the same kind of offhand comment that I might have made to the barista, or told Graham if he called me and asked me what I was up to. So in a real sense, Facebook is bringing friends with whom I'd lost touch back into the fringes of my life--that place where you have casual awareness of what others are doing. Facebook is letting me fall back in touch with them.

I wonder if the net generation that was born since 1990 will grow up and never lose touch with their friends. Maybe Facebook, MySpace, and their successors will bridge the gap between being a child living away from home at college and being a young adult fighting to find a way in the world. Maybe there will no longer be a need to ask "So what have you been up to for the last ten years?" There may never be a time when they aren't peripherally aware of what their whole social group is up to, what they think is important, what they discover about themselves and others. It's a strange thing to consider, but it seems like the precise sort of shift that leads to big changes in society.