Dear Friend
Who Needs Friends Like These?
Dear friend,
You are a friend of a friend, about whom I know even less than I know about crop rotation in the fourteenth century, or marine biology, or correct programming syntax. Having said that, I can claim to know more about sheep farming in the twentieth century, and about quantum physics, and pre-Renaissance art, than I know about you. Give me one reason why either of us should continue to keep our names on some mindless list in Cyberspace.
(Excerpt from Friends Like These by Colin White)
“Nobody writes letters anymore,” explains Colin White, the London based author of Friends Like These. “They poke each other, they fling sheep, they scrawl on their Humpty Dumpty walls…” White is disillusioned.
After signing up to Facebook in autumn 2007, White abandoned any dealings with the site around the time his subscription to it hit the one year mark. Or at least, he eased off. Struck suddenly by the site’s innocuousness, White began ruminating on what friendship actually meant to him, and indeed what it seems to have become thanks to platforms like Facebook.
“It is a medium which does not inspire communication. It merely breeds narcissism…rewards the apathetic and celebritizes mediocrity,” he says: “It anaesthetises its users…I’ve had the most lacklustre conversations with characters from the previous chapters of my life, you wonder why they added you in the first place.” White packs no punches with his opinions, very much like he refuses to hold back in his book, a 138 page expose of the foibles of social networking.
As such sites become an ever increasing staple in our lives, supposedly, so does the inability to communicate in real-time. Inspired – no, appalled – by the fact, White composed 258 ‘letters’, one to every ‘friend’ nestled amid his popularity roster on the Facebook. Interspersed with apposite quotations from the likes of Bill Hicks (”The day I uploaded [the book] coincided with the 15 year anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, which swung my decision whether to include his quote in my conclusion,”), Beethoven, Aristotle and even Love, Friends Like These is sectioned into tenuous chapters thematically tinged with anything from love and admiration to disapproval to profound dislike.
Admitting that the initial spark for the book in its entirety began as a reaction against “one particularly annoying soul,” the subsequent dialogue developed “like something stuck in my teeth, giving way to a cavity. It was like therapy…” Cleverly using the format of a letter, White explains that such an “old fashioned” way of communicating could in turn “now be considered novel”.
Compelling (I read the book comfortably within 40 minutes), frank and viscerally revealing, Friends Like These might sound like a bit of a waste of time for anyone not known to White, and of course, anyone not featured (anonymously, I might add) in the book. Happily, that’s balderdash. For anyone who ever had their doubts about the way their lives and friendships were tipping, this is an essential piece of reading.
“There’s now a universally fanatical interest in self-portrait photography,” he says: “You hear people saying things like, ‘Ooh, that’s gonna be my new profile pic,’ or ‘That’s classic!’ or ‘That’s well random!’ And it’s all absolute shite.”
With astringent integrity and grit, White’s gonzo writing style is absorbing, entertaining and concise. His sharp tongue is both helpful and apologetic and at all times, laugh-out-loud funny. Plucking at the voyeuristic strings to our human bows, and somewhat ironically reflecting one’s own morbid curiosity for such lambasted carryings on on the likes of Facebook (think photo album after photo album of a snap happy clone), White’s opus is a weighty and worthwhile introduction to a writer who has every potential of garnering a cult following.
Friends Like These by Colin White is out now and available to order in print or download version at:-
http://stores.lulu.com/boredbrand
By Plum Woodard
What's on your mind?
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March 21st 2009 | 1
Sally says:
Too true, its not about collecting friends. one friend in the hand is better than 200 on facebook.
