Distance and points of contacts

How far away are you? How many miles to go? How long will it take? How many years has it been? Lets talk next Wednesday. When did you last meet? Should I measure in hours or years, centimeters or inches or just simply as the crow flies?

How do you determine distance? How do you measure it? What scale do you use: a tape measure, a yardstick, a minute, a year, a job, a dress, a party, a birth or a death?

When you think about distance it can mean so many different things. It can be the space between two points. Mark 2 dots on a piece of paper, then draw a line between them. Take out a ruler and measure the line. But is it 5 inches or 10 centimeters? How long did it take you to draw the line, 5 seconds or 5 minutes? You can say “She lives 100 miles away from me”. That is like the 2 points on the paper. But you can also say that your friend lives 2 hours away. Now the distance is about time. The scale is hours not miles, but its still about distance.

Twenty-three years ago I moved a relatively far distance away from New York City, the place that I had been wanting to live in since I was 10 years old. When I left New York City to move to Stockholm, Sweden, I crossed about 1,195 miles to get there. It took about 8 hours to do it and 6 years to decide. Before that, my only other move, had been when I left New Jersey and moved to New York, just a little over an hour’s drive time or about 50 miles. Both moves, whether it was a long journey to another country or just a short hop to a nearby state, meant leaving people I knew, behind. Hand-written letters or occasional, sometimes expensive telephone calls were the way to stay in touch at that time. Personal visits eventually got to be rare. A few of the people I moved away from continued with me through my life’s journey in spite of my moving away. Others became once a year Christmas cards till even they disappeared eventually. Distances were not easily crossed. The past stayed in the past. Memories of people I once knew became dimmer with time. But now, things have changed. And Facebook is the reason.

Unlike my younger 20-something friends whose huge lists consist mainly of people they know now, my list of Facebook friends tells a history of who I am and where I have been. It consists of people I know here in Sweden, as close as my neighbor in the apartment below me and as far as the outer suburbs of Stockholm or even other cities or towns. Also on the list are family members who have known me my whole life, friends gathered from each job Ive ever had, friends I shared time and talk with at Pratt, and friends from grammar school and high school. Some on the list, I talked to yesterday or met for dinner last weekend. Others I haven’t seen or spoken to in over 40 years.

With many of these friends, Facebook has become my main point of contact. Facebook has removed all concept of distance from all these points of contact. I know what people look like, who I never meet in person. Sometimes I feel like I know more about someone I haven’t seen in 40 years than I do about people here in Stockholm, in my life now. I know about the vacation plans of a friend who lives on the other side of the globe yet I don’t know what a friend I met for lunch last month will be doing. While listening to my friend across town complain about her teenage son sleeping long into the afternoon, I can tell her, “No, he’s awake. I just saw his status on Facebook that he wrote 25 minutes ago. He just hasn’t come downstairs yet.” I know more about my friend’s son than she does living in the same house.

And Facebook is so easy. I don’t have to put on my face or even get dressed in more than my bathrobe to socialize. I can make a joke about a friend’s cat or reminisce about childhood without setting foot outside my door. Even when I lived in New York City it was hard for my friends to get me to leave my apartment. Now in the days when the Yellow Pages have become obsolete, I can truly let my fingers do the walking. A few taps on the keyboard and I’ve shared a joke with someone a 7-hour plane ride away or across the street. For a lazy slug like me its just perfect.

And yet it feels very strange. I’m still not sure what to make of it. What is the etiquette for Facebook friends? If you start out as friends in real life then becoming Facebook friends is almost natural. But what if you get to know a person better through Facebook, can you then become friends in real life? Are you supposed to become real life friends? Do you invite Facebook friends to a party? Do you go to a Facebook friend’s party? When meeting in real life a FB friend, do you acknowledge the words, ideas, thoughts exchanged via FB or do you just pretend they weren’t written?

In a 1957 novel by Isaac Asimov, called The Naked Sun, he writes about a planet with a very sparse human population who live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communicating with friends is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). The viewing techniques are so well developed that you can take a walk or eat dinner with a friend who lives on the other side of the planet and not really notice that the wallpaper in their half of the room doesn’t match your own. There on Solaria, points of contact happen without needing any physical presence at all.

Is Facebook a little bit like that? A way to have points of contact over all sorts of different distances without the need to make the effort for any sort of real contact, person to person in the flesh?