Erik Marshall

This is a weird situation where I have a short idea/complaint that is too long for twitter and too short, perhaps, for this blog, but I am putting it here anyway.

David Pogue reviews David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect (which I haven’t read), in which he, Pogue, takes Kirkpatrick to task for shoddy writing in the beginning of the book, which is about the formation of Facebook, but praises him on the end of the book, which is about privacy issues and the future of Facebook. Standard review so far, nothing objectionable. But in the third-to-last paragraph, he says:

It’s odd, though, that a book this carefully considered completely misses another possible Facebook effect: in an age in which one click establishes a new “friend,” young people may be losing the skills to build real friendships and negotiate real social encounters.

Now, I haven’t read Pogue in awhile, but I thought he would be savvy enough to avoid such stark, simplistic either/or logic. Does he really believe that the ease with which one can “friend” someone on Facebook negates meaningful real-life relationships and compromises the ability to interact socially? I expect this from people less versed in social media, but Pogue should know better.

I find this sort of thinking in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as well (which I talk about at Attention Theory). There is no middle ground here. Either we friend people on Facebook or we have real-life friends. Either we  pay attention to our Twitter accounts, or we read books and contemplate ideas in isolation. It is as if we must choose one type of media for life, as the various media represent some sort of zero-sum game for our attention and our cognitive ability, as if we could not choose to switch between them at will, depending on the context, the current need, or the goal we are trying to reach.

What is getting missed here are choice and force of habit. We choose how to interact with people and things, and these choices can become habit. We can forgo IRL relationships for Facebook friending, we can stop reading novels and other long-format works in favor of Twitter and blogs, but we don’t have to just because these new media exist. These media are not stealing our brain cycles like a parasite, nor are they causing irreparable damage to our brains or to our sense of social purpose. They are tools, like any other.