The Estranged

In teaching courses on relational communication, one theoretical challenge we often encounter is the way new technologies are reshaping what it means to be a stranger. In the current moment, no one is genuinely a stranger if there is a digital presence. A person seeking employment knows that the potential employer already has a sense of who they are, not from direct interaction, but from browsing through their online presence. What becomes worth pondering is not the absence of information, but the process of distancing. A person becomes a stranger not because they are unknown, but because they are deliberately pushed away, and often the reason this transformation happens is simple: the appearance of a new friend. It is the arrival of someone brighter, louder, more alluring — someone who captures attention in a way the old friend no longer does. The competition is not about information or memory; it is about time. Hours once filled with familiar voices and shared habits are now redirected to the newcomer. The old friend does not fade because they are forgotten, but because they are replaced (Rawlins, 2009). A friend was once someone whose life was studied with care, whose rituals, comforts, irritations, and unspoken expectations were known almost instinctively. That investment of attention was the heart of the relationship. But when a new friend arrives, the same energy once devoted to sustaining the old friendship is shifted elsewhere. The likes and dislikes of the newcomer are studied with eagerness, while the map of the old friend is allowed to wither. Knowledge does not vanish; it is dismissed. The logic of the transformation is harsh: to justify the diversion of time and care, the old friend is quietly reclassified. Forgetfulness is feigned, familiarity denied, expectations treated as if they had never been known. The friend becomes a burden, someone who now requires explanation rather than someone whose rhythms were once understood without effort. In this way, the old friend is made to feel like a stranger, not because of conflict, but because someone new has claimed the limited resource of attention. This neglect is especially striking in the digital age, when almost anyone’s routines and preferences can be uncovered with a few clicks. Curiosity about the new friend flourishes, while the old friend, made inconvenient by the competition for attention, is left unstudied, unremembered, unqueried, invisible not because information is unavailable but because no effort is made to look (Baym, 2015). It is like tending to a garden. The old friend was once the plant watered faithfully, its soil loosened, its leaves cared for with patience and affection. But when a new flower blooms, brighter and more enticing, the old plant is neglected. The water goes elsewhere, the soil hardens, the leaves curl. The plant is still there, but in neglect it becomes unrecognizable — a stranger in the very ground where it once thrived. The old friend, now displaced, also becomes like the switch on the wall — still present, still wired to the current of memory, but touched only when convenient. The switch waits, ignored until someone remembers to flick it. In the same way, the old friend waits in the background, useful only when no brighter light is available. This image echoes what I wrote earlier in the “switch” blog, where a friend treated like a switch is summoned only in moments of need and dismissed in times of abundance. Here, too, the once-close friend is left hanging on the wall of memory, waiting for a flick that may never come. And it is important to be clear: this is not about the fading of romance, but the erosion of friendship itself, the slow draining away of ordinary presence, routine attention, and shared care. Friendship requires presence; it is the ongoing act of care, the small attentions that keep another person alive in our mind. It is sharing an article because we already hear their laughter, asking about the lingering cough, sending a message not because we have news but because we thought of them, showing up for the ordinary moments and not only the crises. The erosion begins when these small acts are withdrawn, when curiosity fades, when attention shifts entirely to someone else. That is how a friend, once alive in daily detail, becomes a stranger — not by accident, but by design. Because the appearance of a new friend has reassigned the hours of care, and in that reassignment, the old friend is left behind, still present but only as the neglected plant or the forgotten switch, a shadow of the relationship that once was — just like Tim McGraw laments in his song about friendship, “And time gets thin, my old friend,” words that echo the voice of the newly estranged.