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A Son’s Revenge: ‘Friendbombing’
I HAVE many new friends. Too many.
My troubles began when I signed up for a page on Facebook.com, the Web site that’s phenomenally popular with millions of college and high school students.
I did it, frankly, to keep up with my own children. My daughter, Elizabeth, off at college and a 10-hour drive away, details her days on her LiveJournal.com and Facebook pages. Anyone can read the LiveJournal page, but Facebook requires that you have your own account, and be part of the same network (like University of Michigan students) or share “friend” status, to read others’ pages.
But a child doesn’t need to be out of town to be a little distant. Sam, my 16-year-old son, has a Facebook page, and when he occasionally left it up on his computer screen, I noticed it was a pretty freewheeling place, with coarse language, flirtation and jokes about high-school drinking. I mean, I hope they were jokes. We’re talking about that. In any case, it all made me want to keep an eye on things.
Now, I wouldn’t read my kid’s locked diary. But if Sammy is going to put his daily thoughts out there for the world to see, I’m going to check in every once in a while — and let him know that I’m doing it, too.
Facebook recently started offering accounts to corporations, and I signed up, and immediately “friended” Sam and Elizabeth, as well as several colleagues at work. My colleagues and I have not written on each others’ “walls” — a way for members to leave messages that can be read by anyone in the network — because we are, you know, grown-ups. We are neither hip nor cool, nor are we happening. And I was happily able to check in on my kids.
But things took a turn on Monday, when “new friend” requests started rolling in from students at my son’s high school. It was mystifying. I dug around and found that Sam had formed a group, Friend My Father.
He wrote, “My dad got a Facebook, lets make it worth his while.” He told them how to find me online, and then wrote, simply, “Go!”
Sam invited more than 100 teenagers to join the Friend My Father group. That night, more than a dozen did so, with “new friend” requests popping up every hour or so. Many of them wanted to say Hi. I replied. One asked questions like “waddup mr shcwartz? how it goes” and “r u a journalist or a writer? is there a difference?”
I had, to coin a phrase, been friendbombed. It reminded me of what computer security experts call a “distributed denial of service attack,” in which multiple computers send so many messages or information requests that data can’t get into or out of the targeted machine. As I sat at home Monday night trying to get work done, I occasionally moaned and announced to my wife, in resigned monotone: “Andrei has asked to be my friend. Sida has asked to be my friend. Alison has asked to be my friend.” My wife, who ridiculed me for cybersnooping on our boy, laughed at what she seemed to think was some kind of poetic justice, and said that Sam had cleverly exacted his revenge.
I explained to Sam that I didn’t quite know what to do with all of my new friends. “Yes!” he said with a smile. “I embarrassed my dad!”
The friend requests continue. I’ve known at least some of these kids for a long time, and like them. It’s nice to know that they like me enough to sign in and say, “Hey.”
But Facebook’s use of the word “friend” is a little troubling in a world where true friendship is hard to find and even harder to sustain. The idea of getting friends wholesale seems to be part of that element of the Internet that can render life virtual and a little pallid. In many ways, the Internet strengthens relationships by allowing easy communication over a distance. But without a human touch, it’s hard to keep the conversation going beyond niceties. Facebook seems to be saying: “Sure, we might be seeing less of our real friends face to face. But we’ll make it up with volume.”
I have visions of becoming like Charlie Rosenbury, a college student in Missouri who ended up with tens of thousands of friends by writing an automated program that put his request out far and wide. He became a Facebook celebrity and an object of ridicule.
But mainly what I wonder, as the new requests pop up one after another, is what parents will think if they discover that I am part of their teenagers’ network of friends. I worry that two terrifying words will come to mind: Mark Foley.
