Baseball Cards
It is precisely how social media intensify the addiction to others that some find so troubling, particularly those whose ontological-subjective narrative comes from traditional liberal humanist senses shaped (dare I say determined) by literate and print narratives (especially the Great Canonical ones). [Note 6] I offer as an example William Deresiewicz's (2009) recent Chronicle essay "Faux Friendship," which laments how Facebook displays the disfigured "fluid and flexible" (and thus empty and meaningless) state of contemporary friendship (and, by extension, postmodern subjectivity). He writes of his quantified friend list: "They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets."
The metaphor of childish toys (and childish relationships) also operates in his conclusion that:
Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling, from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.
My first, tongue-in-cheek response here is to remind Deresiewicz that Plato and Aristotle, Byron and Emerson, can be baseball cards too: symbols frozen in time that, through their very distance from the present place and time, offer notions of a better, richer world. This once again rehashes the ancient debates between idealism and sophistry, conjuring the ghosts of Socrates and Callicles. Such is not my explicit purpose here.