Friends with internet benefits
Inadvertent phone snubbing and overtly dismissive gestures, winning friends and holographing people
🫥 Friends don’t let friends phub
Imagine you’re having dinner with your friends on a well-deserved night out. Even though your phones are on the table, the buzz of notifications distracts you. Or maybe you’re settled in for a movie you choose together but your partner can’t separate from their phone. Or you’re in the middle of a brilliant analysis of the latest news cycle but your roommate is pulled into a group chat. Phubbing, or “phone snubbing”, describes when someone looks at their phone in a social setting with others. And you’re doing it whether you are staring at your screen for a long period of time or just glancing at it for a moment.
Now while some of us may be over it because phubbing is so common—and we’re all guilty of it ourselves—it turns out to be a big deal according to study after study. Phubbing leads to anxiety and depression, partner resentment, and a decreased sense of overall wellbeing. And this is just in partner relationships. Phubbing has negative effects on parent-child relations and on friendships too.
This happens for a couple of reasons. The Displacement Hypothesis suggests that time spent on smartphones displaces meaningful interactions in person. Adding to that, the lack of eye contact, dearth of keen listening, and general inattentiveness contribute to a sense of disconnection. A recent study published in Computers in Human Behavior explores how phubbing also results in a retaliatory cycle where one phub begets another reinforcing bad feelings.
Through daily diary entries, the 75 study participants documented perceived phubbing, relationship satisfaction, self-esteem, mood, and responses to being phubbed. Partners who felt they were being phubbed in their relationships were less satisfied with their relationships and reported more feelings of anger, jealousy, and frustration.
When participants felt phubbed, they were more likely to pick up their own phones too—partly out of boredom, sometimes out of revenge. The UK-based research team sums it up:
“Partner phubbing operates as a vicious cycle. This may explain why, over time, phubbing is associated with several negative outcomes (i.e., relationship dissatisfaction, increased anger, resentment and tit-for-tat retaliation).”
Even if we claim to be nonchalant about phubbing, it still registers as a snub. We have it in our power to stop the cycle of disregard!
📽 Hanging with the holographic homies
Meta is trying their best to make the metaverse happen, but so far the idea has no legs (literally, you’re floating around with no legs). This week they announced a Meta integration for Zoom and Microsoft Teams. With so many of us balking at going back to the office, setting up a metaverse office might seem like a good idea on paper (except who uses paper anymore). At least it might be harder to phub, or perhaps we will develop this important skill as we acclimate to the metaverse realm. More likely, it will add to our Zoom fatigue and many will opt for a “disable metaverse” mode.
Meanwhile, Google is developing an immersive holographic chat, Project Starline. In contrast to avatars puppeted by face-scanning cameras, Project Starline project a real-time 3D feed of your face.
According to Scott Stein of CNET, who tried out the early proof of concept, the Starline booth is unnerving at first but as you chat it feels more like two people chatting in the same space. A step up from adopting cartoonish second selves, to be sure.
👯♂️ Time for a friendassance
Trying to make and keep friends is one of those things that seems so easy when you’re a kid (probably rosy retrospection, let’s just go with it for now), but becomes more complicated as life goes on. Besides learning not to phub our friends, what can we do?
Dr. Marisa Franco, author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends, offers sound advice in this New York Times interview.
Other people won’t reject you. According to the risk regulation theory, we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on how likely we think we are to get rejected. So if you try to connect with someone, remember that you are much less likely to be rejected than you think.
And they are likely to like you. Research on the liking gap tells us that, while you may think you are not liked, most people will automatically like you (at least at first, but no phubbing okay?).
In turn, that will make you more likable! The acceptance prophecy (don’t you love all these new terms?) says that when people assume that others like them, they become warmer, friendlier, and more open. The mutual liking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You are likeable! People want to like you! Seems simple but a revelation that can change how you interact with everyone. I’m a big proponent of this mindset shift myself. It doesn’t only apply to meeting people in your neighborhood or at a local meetup either. It translates to online places, too.
Connect with cool people (hint: all people are cool people). Just this week, I count three incredible friendship moments, that started with me reaching out to a stranger on the internet or a stranger connecting with me. The more you can show people that you like and value them, the better. Research shows that just texting a friend can be more meaningful than people tend to think.
Develop the art of hanging out. If you’re still having trouble, hang out in places—irl or online—regularly. That capitalizes on mere exposure effect, or our tendency to like people more when they are familiar to us. It might feel awkward at first, but it’s well worth sticking it out.
Most of us don’t have friendship all figured out. The data shows that so many people are lacking community, and that is nothing to be ashamed about. Communities used to be built in, now we have to do a bit more work to seek them out.
So often, social media is demonized as the source of isolation and loneliness. Of course, this can be true, especially if we don’t use it intentionally with meaningful connection in mind. This Harvard Business Review article (of all places), has a few more great tips for cultivating friendships online: connect with people you like (and avoid the haters), build on the connections that bring out your best, and make plans to hang out in person if you can.
Rather than lurking, which is related to increased loneliness and disconnection, why not engage? Am I convincing myself to be more conversational on Twitter?
Truly am grateful for just a little bit of your attention from time to time. And I’d love to hear from you too if you’re game to reach out to a stranger on the internet!
You might be guessing that this week’s feeling is phubbing? Or maybe one of those evocative new conditions and predispositions related to friendship. Possibly even lurking behind which there is a dark cloud of emotion. I’ll get to those, I promise! Visit the guide on Medium, where I’m becoming something of a feeling collector.
Me: Imagining myself in a beautiful garden, sniffing posies to get a waft of a mood and plucking new tender emotions from a somewhat wild flowerbed because, yes, I am a proponent of a Romantic-era, Capability-Brown-inspired, rewilding type of garden despite my impulse to create a Neoclassical-style order.
Actual me: Wandering around the forgotten corners of the internet, falling into Wikipedia rabbit holes, and rubbing my bleary eyes shot through with LED light.
Anyway, do visit from time to time and see what crops up!
🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷
This week there was a hot minute where #ByeFelicia was trending after a long hiatus. You probably know why, but never mind that. In contrast to the inadvertently dismissive feeling we might get from phubbing, let’s explore this explicitly dismissive feeling.
Friday Feeling > Bye Felicia
🔑 DEFINITION
A dismissive send-off meant to show how little you care but often reveals how much you care.
See also: Ok boomer, bye girl
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
The phrase has its origins in a scene from a 1995 stoner movie, Friday, where rapper Ice Cube dismisses a hanger-on named Felicia. While the phrase first showed up in Urban Dictionary in 2006, it didn’t enter popular culture until 2009 when it was used in RuPaul’s Drag Race to dis and dismiss contestants. In 2011, a user uploaded a clip to YouTube and labeled it "Bye, Felicia," finally giving confused internet users the source.
In 2014, the phrase became popular enough that VH1 aired a show called Bye Felicia, about two life coaches who encouraged viewers to say goodbye to their inner Felicia. Bye Felipe, a blog highlighting screenshots of hostile responses to rejection sent by men from online dating sites, also launched in 2014.
Bye Felicia peaked in 2015, according to Google Trends. The notable resurgence might be attributed, once again, to Ice Cube who revived the phrase in the hip-hop biopic Straight Outta Compton.
From time to time, it surges in popularity again. In December 2018, former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, used it **to describe what was going through her head as she and President Obama waved goodbye to the White House as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Many a sarcastic Bye Felicia was directed at Donald Trump in the final days of his presidency in January 2021. In October 2022, #byefelicia was trending on Twitter after Tulsi Gabbard announced leaving the Democratic party.
💬 EXPRESSION
Bye Felicia expresses casual disregard as if to say, “That’s it. I’m done putting up with you.” Mostly it’s in the spirit of playfully throwing shade by suggesting the speaker couldn’t be bothered with another person’s presence.
While humor is almost always part of it, the tone has changed over time. Bye Felicia is often used in with a more aggressive tone than a nonchalant one. Often it’s used to pretend we could care less about something that actually matters.
Generations past might have used “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” in the same way. Gen Zs have adopted “OK, Boomer” to a similar end.
🎩 PERSON OF INTEREST
Ice Cube is the "Bye, Felicia" is a line uttered by the actor in the 1995 flick Friday Here's the gist: Felicia (Angela Means-Kaaya) wants to borrow a car. Smokey (Chris Tucker) says no way. Then Felicia wants to borrow a joint. Again, Smokey refuses. To dismiss Felicia, Jones (Ice Cube) waves her off with "Bye, Felicia."
In an interview with late-night host Conan O’Brien, Ice Cube elaborated, “That is the phrase to get anybody out of your face that’s saying something stupid.”
👎 NOT-SO-FUN FACT
Bye Felicia can be considered another example of white culture appropriating Black culture, along with slang like “lit” and “bae” and emojified gestures like clapping between words. Acknowledging origins, steering clear of ethnic stereotypes, and engaging with culture on more than an aesthetic level can move us toward a more fluid culture rather than an appropriative one.
💡 BIG PICTURE
Like so much of how we express emotion on the internet, Bye Felicia is exaggerated and playful but it can mask deeply felt emotion. A performative lack of caring often translates to caring a lot, whether dismissing a destructive person or a chapter of our own lives.
👋
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗