This is the 23rd installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on October 7.
Money can’t buy you love—but it can rent you friendship. I was taken aback yesterday by an interesting report on the BBC website about how “friend rental services are launching in more and more countries.” The report focuses on one such service named Rentafriend, which was originally launched as a “a friendship-cum-social networking site, designed to take advantage of the fact that nowadays people often live far away from where they grew up and work long hours, leaving limited time to meet new people.” It is “explicitly stated” on the site that it is “not … a form of escort or dating service,” which the report bears out.
To use the service, you need to sign up, pay a membership fee, and browse for a friend who you’d like to hang out with. You then rent their time, paying for all expenses incurred while you’re spending time with them—like buying them coffee or tickets to a movie. Then, when the meter runs out, you bid them goodbye—or maybe take an appointment for another hangin’-out session.
At one level, this seems weird and pathetic. How sad does your life have to be if you need to rent a friend? And yet, there is clearly a market for this, and it is not hard to see why. You could move to a place where you have no friends, and no social outlets for making new buddies. You may want to chat and hang out with someone without invisible strings attached, the pressure of needing to fit in or be interesting, or the subtle social tensions that dog most of our interactions. After all, if there is nothing unusual in paying for sex, why should it be so weird if we pay for ‘friendship’? In a world where nothing lasts forever, and everything sometimes seems contrived, what’s the difference between friendship and ‘friendship’?
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When I read the BBC report on my netbook, I was sitting in front of my television, the volume on mute, waiting for a commercial break to get over and for Bigg Boss to resume. I don’t watch much television, but every year, I religiously follow Bigg Boss. This does seem rather low-brow of me, but I have a rationalization for this. Pundits say that the purpose of art is to reveal the human condition, and in my view, few things reveal it quite as well as a bunch of disparate people shut up in a house for a few weeks, away from the rest of the world.
Sure, they know there are cameras around them, and they are performing for the cameras. But we know they know this, and their carefully constructed artifice is as revelatory of their true nature as the cracks they carelessly leave. As the weeks go by, and they get used to their new environment, we see more and more of the people they really are—and find that our celebrities, whatever they may be celebrated for, are as petty or vapid or insecure or mixed-up as, well, us. That’s the human condition.
Since we’re on the subject, it’s also interesting to see how friendships form inside the Big Boss house. As in the outside world, inmates are drawn to people of similar social backgrounds or interests, and form alliances based on strategic considerations and conveniences. But it’s a zero-sum game, and you only win if everyone else loses. The real world isn’t like that, though we sometimes treat it as it is. So would a friendship you build on a show like Big Boss be as genuine and long-lasting as, say, one that you form in your office? If not, why not?
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While I was waiting for the Bigg Boss commercial break to get over, reading that BBC story, I also had the Pokerstars client running on my machine, and was waiting for a Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo Sit & Go to get started. I play much more offline than online these days, though, and the people I spend the most time with, therefore, are fellow poker players. Most of them do not share any of my interests or obsessions (except poker), but I think I can safely say I’ve made a few new friends among them. That is a bit unusual, because we meet in a zero-sum environment, for the sole purpose of taking money off each other, and spend most of our time together trying to deceive the other person, and to make them believe our lies. Unlike in other social interactions, though, this is explicit. Still, cash games at the stakes I play can get intense and personal, and there is an uncomfortable edge to some of these friendships. It’s a whole new dimension.
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Who says men can’t multi-task? While I was waiting for Bigg Boss to resume, the Pokerstars Sit & Go to begin, as I read the BBC story, I had Facebook open on another Firefox tab. As of now, I have 846 Facebook friends—and I admit that I haven’t met many of them in meatspace. It could be alleged, as William Deresiewicz does in this superb essay on friendship, that I have allowed Facebook to turn my friends into “an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public.” According to Deresiewicz, Facebook turns friends into “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.” When we leave a status update on Facebook, he adds, “we address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.”
I get his point, but I think he addresses a straw man. I use Facebook quite a bit, and I don’t believe that I, or any Facebook user, takes the ‘friend’ part of ‘Facebook friend’ too literally. (It’s just a term we use, and we could easily say ‘Facebook contact’ or ‘Facebook connection’, except that that chaps at Facebook used ‘friend’ to begin with, which is warmer and, well, alliterates when used in conjunction with Facebook.) Facebook friends haven’t replaced our meatspace friends, but added a new dimension to our friendships (and other social relationships), by giving us an additional way to stay in touch with what’s happening in our friends’ lives, and updating them on ours, without having to email them and ring them up individually. Given our typically busy lives, and the clutter of information around us, this is a useful service.
Also, I don’t think any of us are any less social because of Facebook. If I feel like going and hanging out with friends at a cafe, I do just that. I don’t say to myself, Hey, screw the cafe, let me sit at home and put status messages on Facebook instead. Who does that? Nobody. Straw man.
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Once this article is published, I shall post a link to it on Facebook and Twitter. Now tell me, in a pre-internet age, would I take Xerox copies of this article and hand them out personally to each of my friends? I don’t think I would—and if I did that on a regular basis, they would be justified in not wanting to be my friends any more. There are limits even to friendship.
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And here’s a possibly related piece: Society, You Crazy Breed