Hey so you know how people complain that nowadays the average friendship has been reduced to likes and comments in a post or reactions to instastories? I was just thinking about how before the internet, and a bit before domestic phones, there was the culture of calling cards.
People used to go calling on their social circle, it was a part of the social routine, right. You would go about your acquaintances’ homes paying them a “social visit” — standardly of the brief and socially agreed length of 15 minutes — every so often, as to maintain your acquaintanceship status. But, when you didn’t want to actually go and talk a bunch of nothing or if someone was a bit tiresome or you just didn’t have the time, you could go purposefully at a time you reckoned they weren’t home or available and leave your calling card with the butler and bamf. Your calling card had your name and address and meant “hey, I was here! I thought of you! I’ve made an effort! I’m keeping my side of this relationship up!”
And like… That’s exactly what we do with likes and comments. We’re here just keeping the ties up. And the internet allows us to do it more easily and across any earthly distance. We don’t need to be deeply in contact with all of the people we like. You can still like them a lot and only talk with them briefly between instastory reactions for a while. It doesn’t mean that our relationships are weaker now than they were before! We are actually able to keep up with more of the lives of loved ones from so far away now. Though it might mean that we end up having far too many relationships that we could just let go of, that we don’t really vibe with or care about, and it’s more than okay to drop those!
But in the end, social media, the core of it, before all the troubles of excess and overstimulation, is just what people have done for centuries. Checking in on each other and waving hello… and idk I just think that’s really neat