I Want to Get Away

In case you haven't noticed during the last decade or so, the internet has changed the way anyone with regular computer access communicates with their friends and family. Like the telephone, airplane, train, and mail carrier before it, the internet has managed to once again shrink the distance and time between two people - although now that distance seems so small it's almost as if our friends live in the same apartment building. We may not see each other all the time, but it's never hard to know what's going on in their life if we're interested.

In many ways, that's a great thing - we feel closer to our geographically distant friends and relatives. With email and instant messages we have the response time of a telephone coupled with the opportunity to carefully word our statements - an opportunity previously confined to letter-writing. With social networking sites like Facebook, we can even keep our social circle apprised of where we are, what we're doing, and who we're with at all times. In fact, with Facebook it's actually somewhat difficult not to know what's going on - we're notified of breakups, of new jobs, new pictures, new favorite books and movies and music and friends. More than ever, a social "sphere" is truly that - a group of people whose very lives are broadcast for their chosen friends and family, who in turn broadcast their own lives right back.

But what about situations that call for a decrease in communication? A breakup, or a dismissal from a job. The internet has turned these things into situations far more difficult than we were once used to.

When a relationship ends, it's rarely a purely mutual agreement - and even when it is, the concept of moving on is much more difficult to do than it is to talk about. Sure, we may "break up" with a girlfriend or end a long term friendship, but often we still care about the other party on some level - even if it's jealousy, paranoia, or insecurity. We want to know what's going on with them after we leave. Did our ex find someone? How is she handling the breakup? Did ending a friendship force our friend to confront anything? Is it affecting their mood at all?

Questions once answered only by imagination or direct confrontation are now answerable with just a few simple clicks. Many times we're able to gather intel - who he's dating, what she's thinking, where they're at - simply by examing their myspace page, their livejournal, or barraging mutual friends with instant messages. On the flipside, they're able to gather the same information about us - forcing us to carefully word and even lie about what we're doing and how we're feeling - which really makes the whole point of these sites somewhat moot.

The "easy" alternative, of course, is to simply disconnect - from AIM, from MySpace, from your blog. But with a generation brought up with these devices as extensions of their communicative skillset ("When I get home I'm totally blogging about this!"), asking a person to unplug their ethernet cord is at best comparable to asking them to turn in their cell phone and unplug the landline.

The resulting fact is that the existence of the internet has forced our social relationships into recursive loops - breakups and ended friendships are hard to truly break away from, and even when we do, it takes very little to get us involved again. How many times have we marveled at the fact that elementary school friends have found us online? If it's that easy to reconnect with someone you haven't seen in decades, imagine how quickly someone you just stopped speaking to can nudge their way back into your life.

Some may argue these second chances offer opportunities to "patch things up" or "get closure" and that can not be denied. But for those out there who find themselves being drawn in again and again to people whose lives you tried to avoid, I can offer no solutions other than a firm exercise of willpower and a sturdy support system. Perhaps in another decade we'll have a better, more permanent solution.

-- Matt