CHANCES ARE I have more friends than you do. In fact, I would venture to say I have thousands more friends than you do. Most people, if they count their every last confidant, drinking buddy, and acquaintance, come up with a list of maybe 200 people. Not me. I know for a fact that I have 112,842 friends. How do I know this? Because I looked it up online. You see, I am a member of Friendster, the online friend-making community. Here’s how it works. First, a friend of yours who is already a member of Friendster sends you an email inviting you to join the network. Once you decide to join, you visit the Friendster website, answer a few questions about yourself, and send in a photo. Then the website constructs your online profile. This is posted as part of the Friendster profile of the friend who sponsored you. Your friendship with that friend links you to all of that person’s friends, and through them, you are linked to hundreds more. In only a matter of moments, someone like you can become as popular as I am. Your profile is now available to thousands of people, who have but to email you to broaden your potential acquaintance to thousands more.
Friendster is to relationship what Napster was to music. But Friendster is even better than Napster. There’s no whiff of illegality about swapping friends online. Each time I download a song from the Internet, my hands get clammy, as if I were Winona Ryder lifting a handkerchief from Saks.
Not with Friendster. Friendster is absolutely legal. No one has found a way to copyright friends. That’s a good thing, too, because otherwise I would have only two dozen friends. And if that were the case, I would feel like an idiot.
Truth be told, I’m not on a first-name basis with all of the 112,842 friends I met through Friendster. In fact, I don’t even know 112,837 of them. The five friends I do know are your typical sort of friend–the type with whom you go to the movies, have dinner, or grab a beer. The others I call “Friendster friends.”
Being a Friendster friend means that you are, in all probability, a strange person. Take my Friendster friend Electra (I’ve changed her name–though not that much–to protect the innocent). My computer tells me I know Electra because she is a friend of a friend of a friend. In her profile, Electra lists her occupation as “Valley Girl and agent provacateur,” which is a fancy way of saying unemployed. Electra says she is “always getting in trouble,” even when she “didn’t mean to.” She has an interest in tattoos. She says she’s “passionate about things that seem trivial to others. Like mustaches, dad jokes, and masks.” Electra is the type of girl your mother warned you about.
Some say Friendster is merely a meat market, an online dating service masquerading as an Internet friend clearinghouse. This is not true. I would never date any of my Friendster friends. If I met one of my virtual friends at Starbucks, for example, I probably wouldn’t recognize them. But if I did, I would walk away. Fast.
In fact, the best thing about Friendster is that you don’t have to interact with your Friendster friends. You can say you have more friends than anyone on the block, but never have to deal with real people. You don’t even have to leave the house. I’m sure there are people out there who find they spend more time each week scrolling through the profiles of the various friends they have swapped on Friendster than they do interacting with their actual friends. I’m sure of this because I am one of them.
There is, of course, a downside to Friendster. Trolling through the site proves just how small people’s sewing circles are. You and I are used to inhabiting Edmund Burke’s “little platoons.” But the social world of the Internet more closely resembles a horde of Mongols. It is hard to maneuver in this type of environment, and you find you aren’t quite as unique as you thought you were. As strange as Electra seems, I discovered I share with her a fondness for the HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I’m not sure what disturbs me more: that there are millions of Larry David fans out there, or that I have something in common with Electra.
But the rewards of Friendster far outweigh the drawbacks. In our world–the world Robert Putnam describes in “Bowling Alone,” a study of the decline of civic life–it’s often hard to meet new people. Friendster helps solve this problem. It’s even possible that Friendster is the future of civil society, the first of many virtual coffeehouses and other “third places.” That is, unless someone finds a way to patent friendship first.
–Matthew Continetti
