June 29th, 2009 The Victory of Fluff

Just the other day a friend posted a message on his wall on Facebook: “the sun is shining, I’m going to go for a bike ride.” The statement seems fairly benign, logical, and to the point. It’s positive and healthy, but so what? To what end? What is being shared in this post? Why would it be of interest to anyone but the author himself? This little innocuous post, so insignificant that it’s hardly worth mentioning, for me, encapsulates a malady which has engulfed an entire society.

So what is wrong with this? Why does it bother me so much? Maybe I’m just as much an idiot as my friend is, for thinking that such trivia should merit a whole article? For me it speaks to the fact that we have become so self absorbed that we’re being becoming incapable of authentic relationship. It is not uncommon to see people with over 1000 friends on Facebook –how can anyone be friends with over 1000 people?

Friendship has become devalued completely. It reminds me of what the communists did to the word comrade. Comradeship is the strongest bond between two people, and beans you place the others life and welfare a head of your own in times of crisis. Communists turned it into a prefix, a form of address, completely generic, applicable to everyone. In the process it devalued the word completely. In a land where everyone is a comrade, authentic comradeship cannot exist.

The Hungarians solved this linguistic dilemma by creating an entirely new word elftars, a communist comrade, not to be confused with the original bajtars, thereby maintaining the integrity of the original intact. Maybe we should do the same for friendship. Invent a new term which conveys the kind of insipid and meaningless connection inferred by “friend” on Facebook.