Have you ever noticed how many friends you have on Facebook?
As of today, I have 1,123. Do I know this many people? Probably, and then some.
Do I know them know them? Of course not.
Facebook hit the University of South Carolina the spring of
my freshman year. Back then, you had to have a .edu address, and your school
had to be a part of the facebook network. Just writing that makes me feel
ancient. It was a big deal as we learned to navigate what was appropriate to
post and what wasn’t. Thank goodness the rise of digital photography was a
little behind my college days on facebook.
Since then, I’ve used facebook to stay in touch with a
somewhat vast network of friends and acquaintances that I’ve met around the
country and world. While I admit, I sometimes feel irritated by the content
some people post, I enjoy the glimpse into their lives the social platform
offers. How else would I know so and so got engaged, and so and so is pregnant,
etc. These things, while trivial, help me feel connected to friends I no longer
see every day, or even every year. I can keep up with them and all that’s going
on in their lives, so when we do meet, we can pick up where we left off.
Mikel is an acquaintance from law school who also happens to
be a facebook friend. While we maybe only spoke briefly once or twice during
school, we inevitably became friends through the ‘book. This spring, Mikel
launched a journey to meet (in person) his facebook friends: We’re Friends,Right?
I just love this idea and the extreme courage it takes to attempt
something like this. Instead of jumping on the trend to defriend people he
didn’t know on his friend list, Mikel is traveling the country and Minnesota to
actively trying to meet and get to know his “friends.”
We met for coffee at Spyhouse in NE, one of my
favorite local coffee shops. Sidenote – I love meeting people for coffee but I
never actually drink coffee. I’m a tea or cocoa girl. But you just can’t say
you are meeting someone for tea. It just sounds so pretentious. I digress.
While we began the meeting as strangers, our conversation
flowed from one topic to another easily. Mikel genuinely wanted to learn more
about me, even asking me about the nonprofit I’ve started and what I’ve been up
to since law school. I think because we shared a bond of UST School of Law, we
knew on a certain level, we had something in common. It felt a lot like my
consultant days for Kappa when I’d meet hundreds of women where the only connection
we had at first was our sorority.
We discovered we share a love of Seattle, and that he did
his basic training at Fort Jackson, which is in Columbia, South Carolina, where
I went to undergrad. Small world, huh? While it could be the start of a beautiful relationship, it
was fun just getting to know someone a little better, to withhold judgment and
really try to get to connect without a screen in between.
***
The thing with facebook (and Instagram, and twitter, etc.)
is that it’s easy to forget the people behind their profiles are real. That
they are humans with real feelings and dreams and troubles and struggles. I admire Mikel for getting out behind the computer screen and getting to know his
facebook friends instead of simply defriending them. As his journey continues,
he hopes he’ll continue to find the humanity within people, to remember that
most likely they are good people, despite some of the annoying things on
facebook. I get the feeling that the major life moments like graduation,
engagements, marriages, babies, etc. are the type of posts he might stray away
from…maybe not. I happen to enjoy them. I’ll like a newborn photo if it has a
chance of letting that new mama/old friend from another time, that in her
moment of joy, I’m thinking of her and her family. Why not? What do I have to
lose?
Do you have a love/hate relationship with Facebook?
xoxo,
P.S. Have you ever been out and recognized someone but you
couldn’t remember how you know them? Until you realize you don’t and you’ve
only seen them in photos on facebook? Yeah, I have…awkward.
