Facebook and the Demise of Goodbye

A former colleague and good friend announced plans a few months ago to sell her local home and move to another state in a completely different part of the country. She has many good friends in my area, and amid all the preparations associated with getting the house ready for sale and making moving arrangements, she had to squeeze in time to say goodbye in person to her friends individually, as she had decided not to have a final gathering. 

My turn came, and we had dinner and said our goodbyes. I was fully aware that I would likely never see this individual again in my lifetime. My friend’s new city is not an obvious “bucket-list” place. My wife and I would probably not pick it out for a vacation, and neither of us have any family in that area or any business reason to go there. And as we talk about lifetime, while I have a ways go yet, in the great scheme of things, there’s not all that much of that left.

The modern difference in all this, however, is that my former colleague and I are Facebook friends. I was reluctant to join FB a few years ago, but she was one of the first to welcome me to it when I did. Being part of a younger generation and being who she is, she “shares” (there’s another word whose future I’m worried about) almost everything, and as she writes beautifully and her posts are almost always interesting, she has a large following.

In the old days, when you said goodbye in person in the circumstances described here, that might be it, unless you wanted to rack up phone bills or exchange letters (remember those?). There was goodbye, because there would be physical distance, so it really meant something.

In my friend’s case, she would not be leaving for about a month after our dinner, but she continued to post on FB, and I continued to follow. As there’s a drama king in me, I was moved to say goodbye on FB several more times; I’m a movie buff, and the best ones always seem to have logical endings. Anyway, she finally launched her cross-country road trip to get to her new home, FB posting, of course, all the way, and I and her large group of friends were able to “follow” her. It felt almost like she hadn’t left at all.

As in real (as opposed to virtual) life, there are all kinds of relationships possible on Facebook, and you can control their intensity, both on “input” and “output.” You obviously can control what you write and who sees it, as can your friends. You can “hide” the posts of the most annoying people from your input stream (“news feed”), and there’s even the nuclear option: you can “unfriend” someone.  

But “goodbye,” as some of us used to know it, can just about disappear from your life, if you choose, in our new ultra-connected world -- as perhaps time and distance already have.