RATTLE TAT: about face: a reunion too far?

Feeling nostalgic about nostalgia? It may not be as ridiculous as it sounds...

Yesterday morning my inbox registered messages from LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Facebook. And I congratulated myself for being so connected. I am; I’m very connected. I’m a member of numerous networking sites and interest groups and I instant-chat regularly with like-minded bods who search for cyber distraction to delay inevitable outcomes of success/failure (delete where appropriate), were we to devote that time to work.

Status update: Rachel Delahaye ‘is procrastinating' (updated eight minutes ago).

Apart from Tweets and pings, hits and things, the most exciting thing about being connected is meeting up with old friends again. Meeting up, cyber-style, of course. I don’t think I’d be a fan of the stuffy reunion party where the people you really want to see don’t turn up and so you end up monopolising the finger buffet and pisspoor punch.

Internet up-to-dating wins hands down (although the volauvents aren't so forthcoming). You can compose your comments to sound spontaneously witty and over-embellish adventures; then, if eloquence fails you, there are emoticons and semicolons to wink and nudge for you; you can have a seemingly seamless conversation without any ensuing lull or pointless head-nodding... Through the internet friendships can be fanned, like fires, with progressive emails, either developing into roaring relationships or smouldering like promising embers, awaiting another go another time, but hey, great to be back in touch. The internet has opened up the channels of past, present and future – and that’s got to be good, hasn’t it?

Then why did I wake up in the middle of the night in a panic about loss of long-lost? Seriously. I woke up and wondered what the immediate euphoria and naval gazing would cost us, long term. Facebook may have facilitated the finding of our past, but it also issued it a passport into our now. That’s fine for old fogies like me who have a past to catch up with, but where does that leave our children who are still forging a present?

You see, Facebook is no longer a simple time-wasting ‘application’ with which you can see how everyone’s aged and then ask them to choose what Superhero they’d be and challenge them to a game of Scrabble. Well, it is (and for the record I am currently losing at least 7 games, and without doubt – Superman). But Facebook also functions as an address book – an extremely efficient one. It won’t warp with coffee spillages or get lost in a move; it won’t become tatty, illegible or burned in a freak ironing accident. It’s a living, breathing little black book that will update itself – no Tipex required – the moment you’ve met someone new, or old, and supply you with status updates... Just think, you’ll never again need to wonder what Suzanne Biggins from primary school is up to now. Suzanne Biggins is ‘Settling down to watch American Idol’ (updated five minutes ago). Now you know.

Facebook’s joy, for me, lies in rediscovering the various Suzanne Bigginses throughout my life’s chapters – I’ve met kids who lived in my street when I was six, someone at BBYO camp, an old teacher and several boyfriends. But because getting a Facebook page is almost like a birthright – I mean my friend’s two-year-old kid has one – it could mean that our children will never experience the joy of loves and shoves of yore. How can they, when friends will never ever be totally out of touch?

Before the internet, there were no real means of hooking up with past lives, distant relatives, long-forgotten school chums. Then came Friends Reunited, where arms extended across the globe to clasp in tearful reunion people that had mattered and meant something to us. But if Friends Reunited was the heyday, Facebook is the final harvest. For now, there will never be friends lost or missing. We’ll know where everyone we ever met is – more than that we’ll know what they’re doing. Most of the time it’s not very interesting. No offence, Suzanne Biggins.

My daughter will never get to ponder, age, 30, what happened to that teenage holiday fling with that chap from Belgium. ‘Cause they’ll have become FB friends the moment they parted and he’ll be regularly waffling his status updates. Suspended romances will become loves, more or less ordinary. I’m not saying muscles from Brussels (or anywhere in the European Union) offers an entire reason to enter FB with caution; that’d be crazy, obviously. But what will happen to the word ‘wonder’... I wonder.

I still have holiday romances which, thanks to my personal lack of organisation - I never took down their names - means they'll remain a wonder, a misty memory of youth and folly. I recall sitting on a rooftop in Corfu with a Swedish navy cadet.... dimly... dimly. This way he's immortalised - an innocent pale-haired youth - and not an updated reality of a life-dissatisfied thirty-something who could well have 'issues' and a deceased mother rocking in the upper room of his Stockholm hotel... And I'll never find Alison again, a girl from Troon whose surname I've forgotten who I met on a disasterous au pair job in Arcachon; our one night off we spent on the beach - two young girls with lots to say and a huge stash of beer in a plastic bag... I can't revisit these people and nor do I want to. Will our children have the luxury of choice? Even if you don't want to seek, you can always be found....

And on a life balance note: do we really have time in our four-score years to shelter under our friendship umbrella every single person we shared a laugh or interest with? Although I’m as guilty as Ashton Kutcher on Twitter for getting numbers (I can’t resist the slightest acquaintance) I’m beginning to think that life is just a bigger version of Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman's theory of desk filing (found in their book A Perfect Mess). Basically, you don’t need a cabinet because the stuff you don’t need falls off the desk or gets buried beneath more important stuff; chaos has its method. To put that into relationship terms: basically, there’s a reason why you don’t stay in contact with everyone you meet.

I shared my concern with David H Freeman, who said: "Like much of the web, Facebook is an odd combination of the very neat and very messy. It's messy in the sense that we can just keep tossing friends in there, or let them straggle in on their own, without any regard for space and time--if you have millions of friends, as does, for example, my good pal Ashton Kutcher (he must be my good pal, because he keeps tweeting me, or would, I'm sure, if I used Twitter), then you can cram them all into Facebook the way my grandmother used to cram old magazines into her basement. On the other hand, it's neat in the sense that you can instantly focus in on any one friend, or group of friends, or friends who meet some criterion (not that my friends meet a single criterion I'd care to name), in a way that my grandmother could not with her magazines. Whether or not Facebook becomes a way to neatly and selectively manage a vast horde of friends, or a way to overwhelm yourself with a billion pointless interactions a day with everyone in the horde who has nothing better to do, is really a matter of personal style (where by "style" I mean personality disorder)."

I like David's style - and I do have an abundance of old friends in the basement and magazines in my online favourites.... But clutter, some day, always needs a clear-out unless you're ultra meticulous in your storage of it. But does even the most avid socialiser have the organisational skills to keep tabs on the new old friends, while giving existing cherished companions time - and more importantly, quality? Can overstretching communication lead to the compromise or disintegration of true physical friendships? I mean, I write to my Scrabble opponent for three hours a night – but I haven’t phoned my best friend for months...

And anyway, my point is: shouldn't we preserve the long-lost phenomena?

I have a lot of respect for one ex-friend who arrived on Facebook, said his hellos and then promptly closed his account with this parting message: “I always fantasised about living in the age of the tall ships when the world was flat and you could vanish off the face of it, following some adventure, for years on end, to places no one had ever heard of before… But alas those years are gone. Do you remember the time before cell phones, email and the internet? I miss them. In many places even the land-lines didn’t work so the only contact was letters that would take months to get anywhere, if I had ever written one… which was also a rarity, and then you could always say they got lost in the post when people got upset. I miss that too. As life goes on and communication evolves we reach an apex, which now seems to be Facebook. I have to say I find this the scariest yet, a new level of communication with daily updates on the breakfast choice and thoughts of the day…”

Bran, by the way. Rachel Delahaye ‘is moving’ (updated three minutes ago).

While I am interrupting the flow of this post to check my FB notifications and give a thumbs up to a friend whose latest quiz results have compared her cooking skills with those of Bernard Manning, I do have empathy with my brief found-and-released FB friend. Fifteen years ago we were good friends, then we weren’t and now we never will be – which is probably how it should be. And this is where my fears about Facebook converge with my other previous rants along the thread of ‘convenience’. Wouldn’t hooking up with this particular lost friend have been... so.... so pre-wrapped, had his FB page been given the chance? Wouldn’t it have been so convenient? I could have said things that I didn’t get a chance to – things that I should never get a chance to, so that they remain ‘lessons’ and not pseudo-posthumous pardons. (I didn’t have anything that profound to say, but hypothetically, you understand...). And I did momentarily feel affronted that he shut himself off again, before I’d had the chance to squeeze the encounter of interest, gossip and dangerous talk of meeting up again (these things can always lead to divorce, disappointment or indiference). The fact is we will soon ‘convenience’ ourselves out of living – if we haven’t already. Life should have its hardships, disappointments and lost loves. Life needs bitterness in order to have its sweet.

I guess, perversely, it still does. A friend found an old friend on Facebook who relayed to her the bad news that a particularly gregarious old college friend of ours had been killed. And I only thought about him, full of life, just the other day. In nearly twenty years we hadn’t spoken, and now I’m heart-broken.

Some people’s lives and deaths we just don’t need to know about. And if our children are ever going to have the chance to gather brief encounters, then we need to deconstruct our expectation – our demand – that every memory should show its face.

PS: Rachel Delahaye 'is pleased she finished her long-winded post - anyone around for a game of Scrabble?' (updated one minute ago)