Facing Up

At the end of ninth grade, I wandered the halls of my school halfheartedly gathering signatures in my yearbook. Some girls were intent on having everyone in the class sign theirs and would quickly corner you, waving brightly colored pens in your face. My school was small enough that everyone knew each other (at least superficially), but I did not relish having all these near strangers writing things in my book such as, “Have a gr8 summer! Nvr change.”

My best friend and I, comparing notes, soon discovered that “Never change” was the most popular inscription from people we barely knew. So we started writing “Never change” in their yearbooks. But we didn’t mean it—we did want them to change.

Such dynamics apply now to Facebook. What is different is that such “fake” or “teenage” behavior is on display for the entire world to see and judge. It is possible, for instance, to look at things that you wrote on someone’s wall as far back as seventh grade (or even earlier, depending on when you joined). I searched recently and unearthed plenty of mortifying exchanges with friends, acquaintances, and crushes.
But the availability of Facebook as a semi-permanent mirror has not prevented my generation from understanding superficiality or irony when it comes to relationships. I don’t have any trouble recognizing the insincerity of someone to whom I haven’t spoken for two years writing, “OMG your picture is cutee when do you get home let’s hang out!xo.” It is the same kind of falseness we see in the “friends” our parents greet with hugs and fake smiles in the grocery store or at dinner parties and who, like a lot of our “friends,” are often nowhere to be found during a crisis.

Figuring out who your real friends are has always been part of growing up. The superficial aspects of Facebook have led some of my friends to deactivate their accounts, either temporarily or permanently. One friend deactivated her account for months before realizing that she had isolated herself in a way that hurt her. She felt removed, both from friends at home as well as from new friends in college, who used Facebook to organize events and parties. She gradually returned to Facebook with a deactivated wall, meaning she only used it to RSVP to events and messages. So many of her friends complained that they couldn’t write on her wall that she reactivated her full account.

A less radical move—one I subscribe to—is clearing out your friend list, which essentially consists of “de-friending” people and removing their access to your page as well as your access to theirs. While I was out to dinner with her, a friend of mine from high school, now a junior in college, recognized someone she barely knew. They had spent time together at one point, or at least had been at the same parties, but now they never spoke. “I put a lot of people on limited profile recently [on Facebook],” she said, as we walked ...