Face value: Desperate for the girl (Pt 2)

So if you're desperate for a friend (much less a girlfriend) what do you do? Zuckerberg's Facebook (in The Social Network this is portrayed as overt), seems to suggest that the way to get more friends, is to get more friends. And, according to Facebook, you get Friends because they want to know your status, and you want to know theirs.

Zuckerberg's (Facebook's) assumption is that we all want status. That we get and become friends to have status. And half of the friends that we have are those with whom we hope to "get lucky." Plain and simple, friends and friending are currency. You sell access to your status, in order to buy access to the status of others. In this way you may amass a fortune of friends.

Who cares right? Who cares if the desperate boy or girl thinks that amassing status by accruing friends might help him luck into a night (or two) of pleasure (I mean real, physical pleasurewithsomeone else)? Frankly, after thinking about it for a while, I didn't think it merited caring about much either. If this is the tune people want to dance to, then let them.

Then I read what economist J. Bradford DeLong thinks Zuckerberg's dream is for Facebook: to becomes the main portal through which people negotiate the web. Zuckerberg wants people to communicate, play, and shop through it (many already do). DeLong suggests that Facebook may take us back to a more "curated" search mechanism. That is, rather than the page rank and "relevant" connections algorithm of a Google search, we will rather go to our Facebook of friends to search for what we want through the curations of our friendship community. In essence, rather than Google's rank and relevance search, we will depend on a "what do my friends like" search. My assumption will become that my friends' tastes will most likely be like mine, so what they like, I will like (self-fulfilling prophecy). My friends and I will, together, filter (curate) our own searches to maintain our own comfortable spaces.

Is this so bad? I'm not sure. Will it narrow my tastes or expand them? I guess that will depend on my friends. What I'm wondering about in all of this is still the "What is a friend?" question. Facebook has altered the word and, perhaps with it our idea of this pretty fundamental human impulse. With Facebook we friend people, get friends, and get friended. In its context a friend has become mostly asset, or accumulation. Here befriending someone is a flippant, seemingly innocent thing we do by clicking. Many of us befriend people we don't know through Facebook - people we've never met, and may never meet. The accumulations that arise from these actions do not require the one thing fundamental to friendship in the "old-school" sense of the word: loyalty.

Has Facebook, by altering our use of the term, also affected the realness of our "loyalty" to one another? How can I express my loyalty for my friends? Does Facebook make me more, or less, likely to help out a friend in real space and time, if need be? Does Facebook make me more, or less, likely to "get the girl" for which I'm desperate? At the end of The Social Network Zuckerberg is portrayed as a wealthy, sad winner, without friends, and clicking refresh to see if the girl who ditched him in the opening scene, will accept his friend request. Despite the virtual success he's experienced, his desperation to be accepted by the person who has disagreed with him, rejected him, and from whom he hopes for some transcendent, redemptive loyalty, illustrates that common drive at the core of most of our beings. He wants to be friends with the girl that he touched, with whom he spoke and disagreed, with whom he ate dinner and drank beer. We want to be friends with real people, and real people friends require loyalty. They require us to accept them in spite of what we don't "like," and that we be accepted despite our failings.

Perhaps one day Facebook will be mature enough to make it possible to "Dislike" what a friend posts. Perhaps that will add some dimension to our interactions there. As it is now, Facebook ignores that vexing reality of friendship, that "opposites attract." Really, I doubt it, because this, and loyalty and disliking, are necessary elements of a more difficult reality: love.

Why care about any of this at all? I don't know. I guess it's just a latent concern for clarity, and a nagging doubt that it's even possible. Facebook is not about face value, and it's only about face value. Who I appear to be there is not exactly who I am. You can't really judge a book by its cover can you? Of course you can, but you're likely to be wrong.

So maybe I'll see you on YouTube?

Accept? Ignore? Like? Dislike?