Language and Social Interaction

Two recent articles, one in the most recent Wired, "I'll Be There 4 U" (apparently renamed to "Scott Brown on Facebook Friendonomics" in the online edition) by Scott Brown, the second appearing in the 20 October New Yorker, "Thumbspeak" by Louis Menand, deal with social networks and language, respectively. Brown's complaint is that with the advent of social networking, namely Facebook, it is increasingly harder to let old friends go by the wayside. He writes:

Third, and most grave, we've lost our right to lose touch. "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature," Emerson wrote, not bothering to add, "and like most things natural, friendship is biodegradable." We scrawl "Friends Forever" in yearbooks, but we quietly realize, with relief, that some bonds are meant to be shed, like snakeskin or a Showtime subscription. It's nature's way of allowing you to change, adapt, evolve, or devolve as you wish—and freeing you from the exhaustion of multifront friend maintenance. Fine, you can "Remove Friend," but what kind of asshole actually does that? Deletion is scary—and, we're told, unnecessary in the Petabyte Age. That's what made good old-fashioned losing touch so wonderful—friendships, like long-forgotten photos and mixtapes, would distort and slowly whistle into oblivion, quite naturally, nothing personal. It was sweet and sad and, though you'd rarely admit it, necessary.

He ends with the statement, "I've never lost a Friend, you see, and I'm starting to worry I never will."

Menand's thesis regards text messaging, specifically, and the evolution of language more broadly. He makes a point late in the article, that "People don't like to have to perform the amount of self-presentation that is required in a personal encounter. They don't want to deal with the facial expressions, the body language, the obligation to be witty or interesting." This idea hits at the heart of Brown's problem with not losing friends. When interactions between real friends come down to 160 bytes of text, distinguising them from Facebook Friends becomes increasingly difficult. One cannot then delete a friend from Facebook, lest he or she delete a friend in real life.