I was talking to a friend, encouraging him to get on to Facebook because, well, everyone else seems to be. But this friend can not sign up to Facebook because he is what we might call in tabloid parlance, a love rat. He's a cad. He has at least three active relationships on the go, and regularly revisits ex-partners.

So the idea of being registered in a place where all these partners could congregate and expect to add him as a friend is too terrifying for him to contemplate so he has to stay off Facebook.

His dilemma got me to thinking about how on the face of it, this connected living is great at one level - being able to share your pictures, moods and news with friends sounds perfect on the surface. But aren't our inter-personal relationships frequently more complicated than "add as friend". We have friends, and special friends, with varying degrees of closeness and just being an additional friend on a page warrants, perhaps, an undue equality between then. It levels out and makes transparent something which in normal life is anything but that.

Surely many of us have different versions of our own reality for the different people that we interact with. I have friends that wouldn't recognise the version of me that spends time with his family. And I'm sure my family would recognise the version of me that some of my friends know.

In real life, yes we have friends who are always there and remain true throughout. But we also have friends that pick up and make the best of during particular times or situations in our life. These are more transitory relationships that probably fulfill a requirement for a time, but is there any longevity in the friendship and do you really need the people you worked with 5 years ago to see who you went clubbing with 5 days ago?

Being on Facebook is all well and good if you have nothing to hide, but is this phenomenon going to leave behind those for whom relationships are much more complicated, and create some kind of moral apartheid where those who have secrets have to get the other bus. Just a little thinking out loud as I sit out in the garden on this sunny friday afternoon.

Labels: facebook