Staying Connected with Facebook

Let’s visit a stereotypical high school reunion situation in movies. There are tons of hugs going around. Everyone is asking everyone else what they’re up to nowadays, if they are married, how the kids are—anything to get a better sense of how their classmates have grown and changed. There may be that nerdy guy in high school who is now a big shot, and when his former classmates see him they are taken aback and surprised. It’s an exciting situation, where everyone is trying to make up for lost time.

I believe that this picture of a reunion is changing with the growing popularity of Facebook in high schools.

I am Facebook friends with most of the people I ever talked to in high school. This range is very wide, since being a Facebook “friend” with someone else doesn’t have to mean real friendship; a slight acquaintance is commonly sufficient for Facebook friending. Rather than only being a site where true friends can interact, Facebook also lets us stay connected permanently with anyone we choose for the rest of our Facebook account’s lifetime. This loose standard for friending has enormous implications. All it takes for me to constantly be updated and notified of what’s going on in someone’s life is a friend request. After that initial step, the friend’s activity will constantly be appearing in my newsfeed, forever (unless I go out of my way to “unfriend” this person).

Reunions will lose much of their appeal and excitement because people are constantly updated about their acquaintances through Facebook in their daily lives anyways, whether through the newsfeed or a manual lookup. The old question of “I wonder what Bob is up to nowadays” disappears because I would already know what Bob is going through. While seeing classmates in person for a face-to-face chat still has its benefits, the mystery in a reunion is gone as people are constantly maintaining their relationships post-graduation.

Every summer and school break, I still constantly see most of my high school classmates; all it takes is a Facebook event invite to Lynbrook High School Class of 2009 for everyone to be notified. These happen frequently, so I am still strongly connected to my high school class, with relationships that have not dwindled much since graduation as they did before Facebook. Facebook thus acts as glue in holding social groups together through different life eras in instances where distance would usually cause a fall out in the friendship.