A D Miller: With nowhere to hide, Google-age friendship will tear us apart

Your fingers hovered over the slot, clutching the 10p piece, anticipating the sharp, impatient beeps. But even as you dialled, using the payphone on the wall outside the gents’, you knew the call was futile. If your friend was coming she wouldn’t be at home; if she was at home, she wasn’t coming. As the smoke of strangers’ cigarettes saturated your clothes, you knew the evening was ruined.

Friendship once meant jeopardy. Friends would regularly lose each other, sometimes for ever. You met someone at a party, then misplaced his scribbled phone number — left it in your jeans in the wash, drunkenly thrown away with your ticket as you ricocheted off the night bus — and that was it. Or a longstanding friend moved schools or houses, you omitted to exchange details, and you never saw him again. Friendships were as fragile as memory.

Now no one is ever lost, let alone for ever. No one spends an entire afternoon failing to meet a friend at the Notting Hill Carnival, or a night hunting for a Cricklewood party in the rain. It scarcely matters if you botch your goodbyes: there are no goodbyes, not the terminal kind, since if you want to, and even if you don’t, you will all meet up later in the egosphere.

Yet although we can never go missing ourselves, something else has been lost, something to do with honesty. The frank, motiveless exchange of confidences with a person you trust has become an exotic rarity.

These days everyone has hundreds of friends, with all of whom we indiscriminately share everything, while sharing nothing in the old, private way. That is what friendship used to mean, a bond defined partly by its exclusiveness: us against the rest. Tensions or fall-outs are now marked not by screaming bust-ups but by silent, sterile unlikings and unfollowings, the deletion of phone numbers from electronic address books, all the recrimination visited on miniature avatars rather than breathing people.

Our friendships are hollowing out. They are so much easier to service now, just the odd, curt text message or reply-all email. Physical meetings are less central, and less sacrosanct, the negotiability of the details somehow making them more likely to be cancelled altogether. Phone calls, previously a disembodied second best to flesh-and-blood encounters, are the apex of intimacy. Even they have become discretionary: importunate friends can always be switched off — we will call them back later, definitely we will — offings that we all receive as tiny acts of violence but nevertheless inflict.

So in the ways it has structured and supplanted our friendships, technology has undermined them. There has been a gain, but it is a queasy and equivocal one. The past is back: the ancient, pre-internet history we never expected to see again, miraculously recoverable, peopled by the resurrected dead. We can find the unintentionally severed friend, the bully who wronged us, or — more unsettlingly still — the friend or ex we wronged. And they can find us.

The internet is a personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before us on a whim and a click. This is the paradox of Google-age friendship. Our close relationships are now more remote. The dead liaisons we’d rather forget have sprung back to disconcerting life.

A D Miller’s new novel of friendship and betrayal, The Faithful Couple, is published by Little, Brown.