Facebook: Where Friendships Go to Never Quite Die
On its 15th anniversary, a look at how the site has changed social life by keeping weak connections on life support forever
By Julie Beck
In the world of Harry Potter, drinking the blood of a unicorn will keep anyone alive, “even if you are an inch from death.” But survival comes at a terrible price: “You will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips,” the centaur Firenze explains to Harry.
Facebook is unicorn blood, and it has touched the metaphorical lips of billions of relationships. Of late, the social network has been attempting to absorb every facet of existence formerly untouched by its grasping fingers: dating, commerce, etc. But its central feature remains what it has always been — a digital Rolodex of everyone you know and everything those people have ever shared on their page. Your “friends.” Some of these people are actually your friends, of course. And some of them are old Little League teammates, or people you took one class with in college, or fourth cousins you’ve never met but found on ancestry.com.
These relationships are the ones that suffer most from Facebook’s shimmering unicorn-blood curse. They live an extended half-life far beyond their…
