Chilled Out Bearded Man

The sun came out finally where I live, which might explain why I have been running into old friends at a shocking rate lately. These are all friends I have not seen in at least four years. Its a pleasant experience each time it happens.

Which got me thinking about what Facebook is doing to this sort of encounter.

Facebook completely changes the dynamic similarly to how other technologies changed the system in the past.  When airplanes came out the world suddenly got smaller. You were able (if you could afford it) to travel thousands of miles in hours instead of days.  This meant that you could see your family on a regular basis even though you lived far away.

The telephone did for communication what the airplane did for transportation. Now you could instantatenously communicate with distant friends and family at a whim.

Star Trek Borg

But even with these technologies, there was still room for a wonderful phenomenon – reconnection. When you are far away you lose touch with certain friends or family. Then, when you see each other again, you experience a moment of extreme satisfaction. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder.” Sometimes time apart is good for the soul. It lets you breathe and it lets your brain reorganize localized events into your more globalized memory quadrants (I’m not a “brain” scientist), making the memories seem smaller but more important as a part of your precious past.

What is Facebook doing to the art of reconnection? We never lose touch with friends on Facebook. Their events are popping up on a daily basis. We scan through faces occasionally, almost as a game. We read our friends conversations with eachother.

Does Facebook leave us room to fall out of touch? Do we get to forget about friends for awhile and then to reconnect in a burst of remembering pleasure? I would say yes. Hal Niedzviecki (Author of The Peep Diaries) tells a story about throwing a Facebook party for all of his hundreds of Facebook friends. He received quite a few confirmations for his event, but only one person attended the party. This example and similar stories and experiences lead me to believe that there is still room for losing touch with friends.

Twitter is a quicker more constant ongoing conversation than Facebook, so you might think it completely removes the falling out of touch experience. But Twitter seems to be for constant communication with closer friends, or for “following” people you don’t necessarily want to have a two way conversation with. If I read all of Guy Kawasaki’s tweets I wouldn’t have time to read anything else and I would have to sleep far less than I do now.

So I would say that we are not in danger of staying in touch too much. We can only have actual communication with a limited number of people. We can still fall out of communication with friends even if we are electronically linked.

What will the next generation bring? Thats another question. Will we slowly move toward a Borg society, always connected, never losing touch with anyone? Will cell phones merge with Twitter and will our brains get integrated into Google’s Wave?

And also, how important is reconnection? Maybe we could do without it after all.