Scenario A: OMG. I can’t believe he went on facebook and had time to message Michelle but couldn’t write me back about our plans tomorrow.
Scenario B: I found out your engaged on facebook? Is that how little our friendship means to you?
Scenario C: You went out last night and who is that guy in the pic with his arm around you? You said it was a girls night!
Scenario D: Hi baby I miss you -( ten minutes later )- are you mad? where are you? please message me!
Scenario E: Person 1: They broke up over facebook! Person 2: Well at least he told her as soon as possible.
Scenario F: He asked me for my number. Does he really think I’ll give it to him? He should just add me to Facebook.
Facebook Relativity Disorder – new addition to the DSM V by chit chat.
Remember that famous line from When Harry Met Sally? There are two types of women. High maintenance who have high expectations, wanting things the way they want it. Then there are the low maintenance who don’t require much effort to please and are laid back. And Sally is the high maintenance girl who thinks she is low maintenance. The way I see it, just like Sally society is also deluting themselves about our identities.
We want all the traditional values in a relationship – loyal, trust worthy, available, good listener, understanding etc etc. Yet, with the spin of post-modernism, we want all these traditional values to come in a small accessible package that doesn’t even require us to unwrap. Today we want friendship to work at the speed of the click of our mousepad … on facebook.
Little effort, constant accessibility with good quality results. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, facebook is Sally. A high maintenance girl disguised as a low maintenance women. Facebook’s main purpose is to make communicating more efficient, and people more accessible. In theory, giving us everything we want with little effort. The dirty little secret hidden underneath is that facebook actually increases expectations and the amount of work required to ‘maintain’ a modern friendship simply because it is more of a stalking mechanism.
A simple comparison:
Our parents can still be friends with someone they haven’t talked to in years – traditional friendship doesn’t require constant connectivity.
Older generation friends can bond and relive old memories to the greatest detail – modern friendships create so much waste its hard to remember the last time you had a good time together.
Friends from the black and white era interestingly understood the gray scale much better. If you didn’t call often you probably have a good reason. If you lied or hid something, again probably had a good reason. If you didn’t talk, time didn’t deteriorate a good relationship. Trust, loyalty, understanding. Hmmmm . . . now don’t those seem to take on a different meaning?
The Facebook relativity disorder has several symptoms:
- Individuals start to assume that long silences and absences are somehow a reflection of the relationship.
- The perception of time becomes skewed where each hour is treated as equivalent to a day.
- Individuals often draw conclusions from various random sources, often concluding that these in some way lead to an event that negatively affects them.
- Individuals expect instant communication regardless of the quality. The time lapse begins to determine loyalty which takes precedence over the actual message being communicated.
- The speed expected in online communication begins to transfer to in person communication, where conversations must provide instant gratification on a regular basis.
- Individuals perceive any other form of initial communication besides online with a stranger to be rude and overstepping boundaries.
- If prolonged, the disorder can cause a person to continuously question and re-evaluate their relationship status based on the interpretation of online observations and lag in communication.
If you are experiencing ANY of the above symptoms, I suggest you re-evaluate what those ‘traditional’ values mean. What are you expecting? Because you may be on your path to becoming a high maintenance freak who sees the world through the eyes of your Facebook wall; convincing yourself you value quality when you are really giving priority to quantity. Don’t worry, I am a victim as well.
Chit Chat.
chitchatclub 