After spending a lot of time on social media, watching families’, friends’, and acquaintances’ days unfold through their stories, reels, and posts, I realized I hadn’t actually spoken to them in deep conversations or even casual catch-ups.
I know some snapshots about their lives, but I am not sure if I really know them at all. Perhaps you’ve felt this too—a strange closeness—but never really as deep as you would think of close relationships. We now scroll through the lives of our families, friends, and acquaintances the same way we scroll through everything else on our phones. Engagement announcements, wedding celebrations, birthdays, road accidents, travels, and even deaths, sometimes appear between ads and other viral online content. What’s fascinating is how we often give them the same treatment: a double-tap for a like, a brief comment, before we move on to the next post that demands our attention.
The Atlantic recently published a piece about what they call “The Great Friendship Flattening” which talks about how our relationships are getting absorbed into the endless stream of content on our devices. Reading it felt like someone had articulated a discomfort I’d been carrying since college but couldn’t quite name. I can remember how I used to have a friend who posted most of her life updates but barely responded to follow-ups from people who reached out to her. It felt like broadcasting was her only intention and not creating deep connections with people.
And yet.
I find myself doing the same thing. The broadcasting, and mainly the watching. I consume my friends’ lives the way I might consume an influencer’s content. I learn about their job changes and relationship milestones as a spectator, accumulating knowledge about them without ever actually talking to them.
Thinking about how much has changed since 2009, it seems that our friendships are becoming part of our consumption behavior, like binge-watching our favorite series.
The Atlantic piece explains that parasocial relationships are one-sided emotional connections that people feel with celebrities and fictional characters. You may know and remember many things about them but they don’t know you or have any idea that you exist.
The key feature of parasocial relationships is the lack of reciprocity. But isn’t reciprocity fundamental in deep relationships? With parasocial relationships though, reciprocity is more of a suggestion than a requirement. Most of the time, I do not respond to my friends’ posts. And I’m sure they would scroll past my online posts, too. We let these bits and pieces of our lives pass through our eyes and get absorbed into the flow of varied information we are halfheartedly paying attention to.
Maybe the most unsettling part is how normal this feels.
Way back in 2009, when I just created my Facebook account, I can remember how seeing a friend’s photo online felt interesting—a window into their world when we couldn’t be together. But now, that same photo feels like just another piece of content I consume, competing for my already fractured attention.
The shift isn’t just about volume. It’s about intention. Back then, we posted for people we knew. Now? We’ve all become performers, curating our content for an imagined audience. When everyone is performing, everyone else becomes the audience. And as audiences, we don’t have deep conversations with the performers. We only watch, react, then move on.
I don’t think these online interactions are worthless because I enjoy seeing glimpses of my family’s and friends’ lives every now and then. But something feels different when connection becomes optional, when staying updated on their lives requires no more effort than staying updated on a reality TV star’s life. We have become spectators, seeing their lives unfold without feeling the need to reach out to them beyond the comment section.
Social media is reshaping what we consider okay in maintaining our friendships. We are starting to treat our relationships as consumable, optional, and something we can always get back to later.
I still feel that unsettling feeling every time I scroll past friends without stopping, every time I feel satisfied that I ‘know what is going on’ with them without actually connecting. I try to stay in touch with those who reciprocate. But for the rest (and I’m aware of how this sounds), I’ve chosen to be a spectator.
Maybe that’s the real cost of The Great Friendship Flattening: not that we’re losing friends, but that we’re making peace with watching them from a distance. And maybe the scariest part? Most days, it doesn’t even feel like a loss.
jessa 