Social media makes catching up easier
Visiting my hometown, years ago, I ran into a girl I knew at a coffee shop. After we said hi, she told me about something that had happened to her that day — an air-popped tale that with some rehearsal and exaggeration would make a solid party anecdote — and we laughed, and we said goodbye. We didn’t ask about each other’s jobs or new cities or romantic statuses; we didn’t rehash any old stories or gossip about mutual friends or “catch up” in any of the typical ways. It was a dream. Ignoring the facts of life, and going straight to the “stuff” of life instead, was everything I wanted from the interaction, and what I want from most interactions with friends.
Before that day, I barely remembered her, but now I think of her often, warmly, and as a living testament to the possibilities of acquaintanceship, or friendship that has moved from the first string to second or third. This happened before everyone I’ve ever met was online so much that they couldn’t have a coffee-shop conversation without pawing their phone.
But it’s become, for me, a demonstration and model of why social media is so great for non-best-friends: we can be in each other’s lives so much more naturally and constructively without having to endure the catch-up, the always-artificial review of what we’ve been doing — which is, itself, an in-the-moment reminder that we’re not actually that close.
A more recent example: Last week, I saw a friend — someone I really like, with whom I have many overlapping Venn slices — after maybe a year, maybe more, and because we are all over each other’s social media, we could actually talk: about themes in our friendships and families, about what we’re reading, about the wellness industry and its critiques.
Instead of spending an hour or two trying and probably failing to transmit some of the details and textures of our lives right now, we already knew: the steady, quotidian details of our lives are available, pretty much every day, on Instagram and Twitter. Without it, we’d be doing the work of catching up, sharing headlines, without much content, without building on what we already have.
This is increasingly difficult the further we all get from our twenties, when time glittered and stretched ahead of us. Friendship needs attention and consistency, which is why so many crash and burn when you stop seeing each other casually and constantly.
(Sometimes, being immersed in friends’ social media backfires, like when you happen upon someone you know and they’re so excited to tell you about whatever’s been happening and you end up saying, “I know, I saw!” and “Yeah! I know! I saw!” ad nauseam.) Everyone who was born before maybe 1990 knows why social media, as it relates to actual, IRL friendship, from the first-tiers through vague acquaintances, can be a problem.
We’ve all experienced the second-hand embarrassment of seeing the people we know, all of these awkward, unsure, imperfect jewels of humanity, learning Instagram performance in real time; we’ve all experienced the first-hand embarrassment of doing it ourselves.
Then, there’s the problem of division, of political memes and lifestyle esthetics showing you who from your past you probably wouldn’t like anymore.
Mostly, it’s the spectre of potential replacement: the main argument against social media, when it comes to friendship, is that it makes investing in online relationships more appealing than keeping up with people in real time. But we still need people, and real time.
And, yeah. When I see friends (first-string, second-string, acquaintances, whatever) after long periods of work-related seclusion, and I’m often reminded how much I want to see someone after watching their Instastory, or seeing them post on Twitter — I am stunned by the comforting, enlivening varieties of speech and language and tone, and of gesture, and of their clothes and incidentals, and how much more I get from pressing against their cold skin and winter coats, and from the serendipity and haphazardry of being together.
Online relationships don’t take away from that, really, as much as they make it more possible.