With nowhere to hide, Google-age friendship will tear us apart

Your fingers hovered over the slot, clutching the 10p piece, anticipating the sharp, impatient beeps. But even as you dialled, using the payphone on the wall outside the gents’, you knew the call was futile. If your friend was coming she wouldn’t be at home; if she was at home, she wasn’t coming. As the smoke of strangers’ cigarettes saturated your clothes, you knew the evening was ruined. 

Friendship once meant jeopardy. Friends would regularly lose each other, sometimes for ever. You met someone at a party, then misplaced his scribbled phone number — left it in your jeans in the wash, drunkenly thrown away with your ticket as you ricocheted off the night bus — and that was it. Or a longstanding friend moved schools  or houses, you omitted to exchange details, and you never saw him  again. Friendships were as fragile as memory.

Now no one is ever lost, let alone for ever. No one spends an entire afternoon failing to meet a friend at the Notting Hill Carnival, or a night hunting for a Cricklewood party in the rain. It scarcely matters if you botch your goodbyes: there are no goodbyes, not the terminal kind, since if you want to, and even if you don’t, you will all meet up later in the egosphere.

Yet although we can never go missing ourselves, something else has been lost, something to do with honesty. The frank, motiveless exchange of confidences with a person you trust has become an exotic rarity.

These days everyone has hundreds of friends, with all of whom we indiscriminately share everything, while sharing nothing in the old, private way. That is what friendship used to mean, a bond defined partly by its exclusiveness: us against the rest. Tensions or fall-outs are now marked not by screaming bust-ups but by silent, sterile unlikings and unfollowings, the deletion of phone numbers from electronic address books, all the recrimination visited on miniature avatars rather than breathing people.

Our friendships are hollowing out. They are so much easier to service now, just the odd, curt text message or reply-all email. Physical meetings are less central, and less sacrosanct, the negotiability of the details somehow making them more likely to be cancelled altogether. Phone calls, previously a disembodied second best to flesh-and-blood encounters, are the apex of intimacy. Even they have become discretionary: importunate friends can always be switched off — we will call them back later, definitely we will — offings that we all receive as tiny acts of violence but nevertheless inflict.

So in the ways it has structured and supplanted our friendships, technology has undermined them. There has been a gain, but it is a queasy and equivocal one. The past is back: the ancient, pre-internet history we never expected to see again, miraculously recoverable, peopled by the resurrected dead. We can find the unintentionally severed friend, the bully who wronged us, or — more unsettlingly still — the friend or ex we wronged. And they can find us.

The internet is a personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before us on a whim and a click. This is the paradox of Google-age friendship. Our close relationships are now more remote. The dead liaisons we’d rather forget have sprung back to disconcerting life.

A piece by AD Miller in the Evening Standard which is very well written and speaks of something lost that I've felt for many years.

It's a week from a friends birthday dinner and I decided about a month ago that I wasn't going to go this year. I'll make some excuse up about a cousins wedding or birthday who I haven't seen for years.

It's always the same each time, the same people (her main group of friends) who know each other much better than they know me. I only see these people at this dinner each year, so it's a weird exchange of acquaintance. It never goes beyond that and I and they have lazily excepted this. Not that I set out to, but deeper friendship just never happened.

Millers piece made me think about how lazy people have become about relationships, about making the effort, about making the most when you do meet people. It seems everyone relies on Facebook these days to almost carry on the beginning of a potential friendship without really having to actually physically be together. They almost can't be bothered to make the effort when they do meet you because they think they've now 'got' you on social media. They collect people instead of having a genuine friendship. Like Miller says, you can never be lost, they can always find you, so why make the effort to establish a friendship when you will always be 'available' in the egosphere.

I, unlike the rest of humanity it seems, am not on any social networking site. Therefore I don't exist. I think this may be the main cause of why I haven't established friendships with these people. Meeting people in person seems to be almost secondary to Facebooking people now, the internet has become the main way to 'make' friends.

I've fought this since Facebook became what it is today, and now I feel I have no choice but to become one of those people with their head bent over their smart phones, in silence, in a group of 'friends' who are all doing the same. Do or be dead to the world.