Diary Entry

Losing Friends

I don’t love Facebook, even though I’ve used it, abjectly, to promote my last book.

Beyond the obvious embarrassment of self-exposure, the most anxiety-producing feature of the Facebook model is the business of friending (apologies to Webster’s Third). Why friend someone you don’t know? Why friend someone you know but don’t consider a friend? Why―and this is the issue tormenting me today―friend a colleague you know only slightly? With a few exceptions, I do not include colleagues and students in my Facebook world. I try to keep a firewall between “Facebook me” and “school me,” especially when posting about my cancer and the politics of that illness.

Yesterday, over lunch, I learned that Jerry Watts, a colleague of ours, had died earlier in the week. I had missed the notice since I rarely check our overburdened university email. The shock stayed with me all day. I’m sure my seminar was very strange. Jerry Watts, a man I barely knew but always liked (not Facebook like), in part because he had supported me in some contentious departmental debates a few years ago, was dead. You can read about him…on Facebook. He was a distinguished scholar of African American political thought.

I doubt seriously Jerry noticed I had not clicked the accept button, when I received his friend request a while ago. If he had, I doubt it would have affected his sunny, generous nature.

Today, I belatedly friended Jerry Watts and “liked” the posts about him. I will miss his lovely presence. We all will.


Nancy K. Miller. Diary

Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books, the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be. 

View Diary posts related to the My Multifocal Life project.

Archives
Categories