Phones make friendship weird

technology complicates how we relate

This is part two of my summer series for my paid subscribers, called: knowing and beholding.

All of my readers will have access to my first piece in the series to see if they are interested in subscribing to get more content like this over the summer.

This series draws on a variety of research blended with my own experiences on how to know the people in your life on a deeper level, including yourself, so that you can love them better, in line with the command to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39)

I went out of state for college. I moved down to the West Coast and traded overcast Washington skies for always sunny California ones. I attended a small Christian university in Los Angeles and found deep community and belonging.

I imagine, in a prehistoric age, anytime before the invention of the iPhone in 2008, there was a freedom in moving away from home and only seeing your friends on holiday or spring break.

But that does not exist anymore.

There is a dynamic at play if you exist on social media and keep up with your friends that way. There is a pseudo-closeness that you can have with old friends that the internet maintains. Instagram stories become like life support for a friendship that would have naturally faded away into obscurity. Or maybe the friendship would have remained, but it would have looked different.

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If you run into friends at your local grocery store when you visit home, they probably already know that you are now a homeowner, or are starting grad school, or are pregnant, or fill in the blank for whatever life update applies to your season of life right now. The magic of reconnecting is lost because we all know each other at a surface level. But we don’t know each other at a deeper level.

Social media in a nutshell LOL

Unless you are regularly calling your long-distance besties on a regular basis, you are simply surveying each other. Watching what they ate for lunch, where they went on vacation, the person they have started dating etc. It is strange, isn’t it?

It is almost worse than knowing nothing at all. Because there are so many gaps between what we see and what is actually true. I remember having an old friend reach out to me during my freshman year, telling me how she was happy that I was obviously thriving. At the time, my parents were splitting up. But that bit did not make it onto my photos I posted hugging my friends and doing my Zoom classes from the beach (COVID was crazy) and pictures of me and my new boyfriend (now husband).

Social media is a highlight reel is so cliche it is painful. But it is cliche for a reason.

Checking social media and exchanging texts in exchange for real, embodied, in-person memory making has turned what used to be deep relationships into catch-up coffee dates and phone calls. Unfortunately, the catching up is not that interesting, because we are already seeing what each other is up to.

As much as some of us may loathe small talk, talking about the light stuff is a natural entry point for connection. What happens when that gets removed and we stop seeing each other entirely in person? What is left?

I keep up with a handful of friends since high school, calling every few months and texting when big life updates happen. I am grateful that we get to share those big moments with them in real time, even if it is not ideal circumstances. But the nature of our relationship is different because of the circumstances we are in, and the role that our phones play.

Phones and social media, in particular, make us think that we have a duty to be omnipresent. Because we have the ability to call, we should be able to maintain relationships, in theory. Distance is no longer an excuse to let a friendship go, because social media connects us forever (in theory).

I remember complaining to my mom about the people I went to school with and her telling me that after I graduate, I would never have to see or think about them again. This was when social media was still relatively new, around 2012. I am sure my mom thought the same thing until she made a Facebook account and came across peers from her past she had long forgotten about.

There are intentional friendships, like the ones I had in high school, that I put effort into maintaining. But there are others, like old coworkers, classmates and everything in between that have committed (by following me) to watch my life from an outside view for the foreseeable future. This is more where the life-support analogy comes through. At its best, technology helps us stay connected to the people we love most, especially when there is distance between us, but for the friends we are not committed to speaking with on a daily or weekly basis, it can make things weird.