One More Thing

Posted on 18 May 2009 at 17:41

 

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Simon Brew, despite his supposed-hatred of it, does venture onto Facebook every now and then. But can he make friends with it?

You probably don't know my old friend Kenny*. I used to sit next to him in A Level Politics, and I always found him to be a thoroughly fine bloke. He put up with me generally being a bit of a cantankerous and quite miserable individual back then (unlike now), and became quite adept at closing his ears when I was heading off on one of my melancholy tirades. I always admired him for that. I should point out that I never copied his work; unlike the time that we had our textbooks and three different flavours of Choc Dips under our desks in Mr Hall's R.E. test, but perhaps that's a story for another time.

I also thought that Kenny was just the kind of person I'd be keeping in touch with once the exams were over. I distinctly remember the day we all left, happily noting down people's addresses and phone numbers in hastily bought notebooks, little realising that said books would be resigned to a quiet and dusty life under what could kindly be described as 'a pile of filing papers'. Instead, we were young. We were reckless. We even said we'd write letters to each. By hand.

Naturally, therefore, I lost touch with Kenny shortly after heading to university, his name nestling alongside those of an army of people that I had once spent my time with on a daily basis. And in any other decade, that would have been that. Once you lost touch, unless some nondescript TV channel decided to lure in Cilla Black for a revival of Surprise, Surprise, the chances of being reunited with a friend of old weren't that high.

Then social networking arrived. I'm not the biggest supporter of social networking, for a conundrum of fairly tired reasons that I'll happily bore you with again at some point. But, in my quieter days, I have to admit that I begrudgingly give it some credit. Because one day, there was Kenny's name appearing on my screen, as Facebook cheerfully suggested he might be someone that I knew. It seemed very chipper about the whole thing.

Now I've no idea how Facebook does it, but I have to assume there's an amalgamation of friends' lists analysis technology and blind luck there. The alternative, after all, is that somehow social networking resurrected my book of contacts from nearly two decades ago and has been waiting, patiently, to surprise me with them all. Virtual Cilla, if you will. But nonetheless, there was his name. He could, once again, be my friend.

I should just add here that I've never subscribed to the theory that if people were that good a friend, you'd have found a way to keep in touch with them. That's fine if you are a good friend, or at the very least an organised one. I'm neither. But, even though it pains me more than you could probably know to admit it, social networking does have its benefits. Grrr.

And yet there is a flaw to electronic communication that social networking exposes. Because were I to meet Kenny in a pub, I could chat to him, buy him a drink, and bore him so much in an evening that it'd be 20 years until our paths crossed again. On the Internet? You just get an empty box.

'Hello', I tentatively typed, feeling - truth be told - like a bit of a moron. 'How are you?' My masterpiece of letter composition then arrived at the obvious next station, when I asked: 'What are you up to?' The problem, of course, was that two clicks of a mouse away was an abundance of information that told me exactly what he was doing. He'd been mowing his lawn. And I wager he wouldn't have told me that in a pub. Still, a cursory sign-off later, I sent the message. Dammit, at least I'd tried.