By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
I REALIZED that the whole thing was getting out of hand when my wife started asking me why I didn’t want to be her “friend.”
   
Not to get into personal matters too deeply, I had always sort of
thought my wife was, is and will be my friend — my best friend, the one
with whom I shared all, ’til death do us part.
    After 34 years of
marriage, five kids and now three grandchildren in common, after all of
which we are still living in the same house and on speaking terms,
you’d think the whole “friendship” thing would have been established to
everyone’s satisfaction long ago.
    But not in the age of Facebook.
   
Call me a mossback, but I admit it: I don’t get Facebook. It’s not that
I ain’t hep! Blogging is second nature to me. Almost everything else
about the Internet, from Google to e-commerce, I do as though I’ve
always done them. I’ve essentially been instant-messaging since the
early ’80s.
    But Facebook foxes me. It doesn’t make sense. I
don’t understand why information flows the way it does on that site or
is structured the way it is; I have trouble obtaining the simplest
information from it. I can’t get a footing in all those little snatches
of messages in various type sizes with little pictures and all; as soon
as I step into my Home page, I slip and fall as though I’d stepped into
a roomful of marbles, and my attention slides right off the screen. I
need gray, continuous type, one clearly expressed thought following
logically upon another, to hold my consciousness — which is why the two
papers I’m most likely to read other than my own are The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
   
But most of all, I don’t get the whole “friends” concept. Mind you, I’m
not the world’s most sociable guy. There’s family. There’s co-workers.
There’s sources. There are nice people I see at church or at Rotary.
But friends? Not so much. We’re not encouraged to have “friends” in my
business. I’ve been the recipient of disapproving remarks from
colleagues on the rare occasions I’ve called someone a “friend” in a
column. It’s considered unprofessional.
    But ever since I set up
a Facebook account (I did it when my youngest daughter’s boyfriend died
last year, and I’d heard his sister had set up a page where a lot of
people had said nice things about him), I’ve had this steady trickle of
e-mails saying:

   
Sometimes these are people I know, usually professionally. I started
out confirming them, just to keep open the lines of communication — but
I’ve started to hold back. Some are people whose names are only vaguely
familiar, although I generally recognize them when I go to their pages.
Then I have a dilemma — should I snub this person who has asked me to
be his or her “friend,” or potentially compromise myself by declaring
to the world that this person is a “friend”? (This category includes a
lot of people, usually younger ones, who work in politics
professionally.)
    Yeah, I get it that the site is using the word
“friend” to describe a range of relationships much broader than the
original meaning, but I’m still not sure what to do, because I still
place value upon the word.
    Finally, some are members of my
immediate family. First, there were my own children. I approve those,
of course, although “friend” seems an absurdly inadequate way to define
the relationship. Then my wife signed up. A few days later, she said
our youngest had expressed dismay that her mother had not yet named her
as a “friend”! Well, we smiled over this. How silly. She knows how much
we love her.
    Next thing I knew, my wife was asking how much longer I was going to go without confirming that she
was my friend. OK, OK, I took care of that. I now see that all but one
of my children are my friends on “Facebook,” but I am not going to bug
the one holdout about it, because that’s his business. (To the extent
that anyone has personal business in a Facebook world. I don’t want to
give away one of the reasons why I think my wife likes the site, but
kids will post stuff on their Facebook site they would never tell their
parents directly, which to me remains inexplicable.)
    It’s
probably good to have my wife on there, though, on account of the total
strangers asking me to be their “friends.” The very first person who
asked to be my “friend” was an attractive lady (which I knew from the
glamour shot) who lives in Germany and is married. I “confirmed” the
friendship just so I could send her a message asking, as delicately as
I could, whether we were acquainted. She said we were not. OK. Whatever.
   
That was over a year ago, and I still don’t understand what’s going on.
But I am feeling the pull of this complicated web of relationships, and
it is not always pleasant. At first, it’s nice to make contact with a
friend — a friend in the old sense — you haven’t seen in 20 years, and
that leads to “friend” requests from people who were close to both of
you back then, and on and on. But as the thing spreads in a viral
manner — which seems to be the point — it all becomes rather cumbersome.
   
So I don’t get Facebook. I’m told that Barack Obama does, though, which
is good to know. I read a piece in Foreign Affairs last week (see how
hopeless I am?) that in this century, the world’s most dominant power
will be the one with the most “connectedness,” and “the United States
has a clear and sustainable edge” in that department.
    So I’m glad to know that somebody gets it. But I don’t.

For a site that makes sense to me, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

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