Carter Chill 2010

I saw a Facebook profile the other day that had 789 friends listed. Now I like people. They’re swell. I have made many great friends in my life.  I have friends all over the world, from Omaha, Nebraska to Mudanjiang, China.  There are friends from my youth, friends from work, and friends that have just come along out of the blue. My family are friends too. My wife is my best friend, which is a horrible cliché and a wonderful reality. My friends are a source of joy and I consider myself enriched as a result of having them. I am lucky to have so many.

But I don’t have 789 of them. That’s a shitload of friends. As a matter of fact 789 people is not just a shitload, it’s a statistically significant population. In a group that size, you get the bell curve. That means your group of friends is likely to reflect the essential demographics of the culture in general. Seven or eight friends can skew to the left or right. 789 friends split right down the middle. Yes. Someone in your group of friends watches Sarah Palin’s Alaska. I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you. But that’s what friends do.

With 789 friends you get the fringe as well.  7.8 of your friends have secret, dark  desires and keep rutabagas in their underwear drawer. 1.4 of your friends have an absorbed twin face peering out of the top of their skulls in a perpetual tormented silent scream. (Fun Hint: Look for big Hair). No one in your group of friends is going to be on American Idol. Interestingly, 80 of your friends think they should be. Did you know that 35 of your friends keep a loaded gun under their car seats? Six of your friends collect Star Wars memorabilia, and two are in the Klu Klux Klan. 135 of your friends need a good financial review by a certified professional, and a full 116 are cheating on their spouses. One of you has a vestigial prehensile tail. There is one thing, however, you all have in common: Facebook.

Without Facebook, no one would even know they had 789 friends. Facebook is the friend collector, a social vacuum cleaner that Hoovers up all of the flotsam and jetsam of our past and spews them out as wannabes. There are people I know and people I remember, people I forgot, that now I remember, people that know people I know, and people that know people that know people I know. There is also a whole other category of people that fall under the What the Fuck category.  Ex-wives. People who I ate graham crackers with in the third grade. A guy I fired ten years ago. There is one guy  on my potential friend list that I’m pretty sure beat me up in the eighth grade. You can kiss my round red ass Sparky.

Of course that’s how you get 789 friends. You have to shift the threshold of what is conventionally considered friendship. Facebook facilitates the phenomenon of friend acquistion as opposed to friend making. But essentially there is no harm in engaging people in a positive way, no matter if they are casual acquaintances or close family relationships. I can imagine that looking at that list and seeing 789 friendly faces (actually 689 faces, 78 ironic clipart icons, 16 NFL mascots, and 5 photos that Facebook hasn’t gotten around to sending to the police yet) can be very comforting, especially for those folks whose ankle monitoring makes it difficult to get out much. Facebook friending is a lot easier than real friending anyway.  Real friending is when your friend asks you to show up on a playoff Sunday for a U-Haul move to his new third floor apartment across town. Facebook friending is sending him a link to Allied Van Lines’ web site. Real friending is not hitting on your best friend’s girlfriend. Facebook friending is “Hey I didn’t know you dig kayaking?” Real friending requires honesty. Facebook friending is a PhD from the University of Nigeria. (Go Four One Niners!!).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hater. A Facebook IPO may have a market cap of 50 Billion dollars. Are you shitting me?  That’s a lot of pals named George. Mark Zuckerberg is 2010 Time Man of the Year, and Social Networking is the phenomenon that defines the first decade of the 21^st Century.  Let’s face it 9/11 is so, well…9/11. If 789 friends is possible why not 7890 friends. Or 789,000 friends. Who’s to say 9/11 would have ever happened if Osama Bin Laden had been able to reach out to new friends on the Farmville App. Growing sweet corn side by side is the same as reaching across that crazy little barrier called Jihad Death to All Western Infidels.  How about 789 MILLION friends?

I don’t think so. I’m not prepared to open the floodgates and allow” just anybody just so I can get my friend figure into six digits. (See above: eighth grade;beating). Hey if somebody manages to Facebook us all into world peace, cool. But frankly, I foresee some issues down the road which keeps me a little skeptical about Facebook’s long term viability. America is hopelessly addicted to the next big thing. We are the most cracked out buzz culture on the planet. When Apple introduces a new version of IPhone, the lines are filled with geeks talking on their IPhones. We are in search of the perfect upgrade. HD? Fuck you pal, I’m talking 3D. 3G? Of course you MUST mean 4G dahling.  I saw a church bulletin that read “Jesus 2.0 is Coming!”  Sure it’s Facebook today , but tomorrow it’s……..

DeathBook. With the baby boom aging, we’re not looking so much to make friends as we are to keep track of who’s left. I don’t want to be wasting money sending Christmas cards to a bunch of dead people. By the way last guy standing wins. That’s the real irony of 789 friends. See how close you can get it to 0.

I guess there is hope in the fact that social networking is such a phenomenon. Who would have guessed that the computer age would have so far spawned social networking as the technological high watermark. I would have liked to have seen a few more major diseases cured along the way, or a better ending to the Sopranos. But in an age where we seem to be awfully contentious in the media, I like the idea that we are cozying up to each other a little bit, even if the fence line we are sharing over is viral. When I posted pictures of my daughter’s wedding on Facebook, no one ranted about the liberal or conservative slant on the issue, but everybody did come to a consensus that the bride was beautiful. 

To be fair, I’m guessing the guy who beat me up in the eighth grade would too.