How ‘Pebbling’ Is Keeping Friendships Alive

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If you’re anything like me, you probably have a couple of ways of communicating with your friends.

You call, you text, you send them 7 TikToks, 2 Reels, and a good few tweets through the day.

This latter type of communication may seem to be entirely for the purpose of a lol; a brief respite from the monotony of life, where you can sit down, take a breather, and enjoy a stranger’s reaction to Jeremy Allen White’s latest Calvin Klein campaign.

You probably have that one friend (or two, or five) who you communicate with exclusively in memes. When you’re together, you’ll catch up, but online you don’t have time for pleasantries or ‘how are you’s?

There, you’re all about business, ie – sending each other tweets from Club Chalamet that only further solidify your statuses as Extremely Online.

On the outside, such relationships may seem distant and vapid, but as it turns out, there’s something really important about those frequent bits of content. In fact, there’s even a name for it – “pebbling.”

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Just like penguins will bring loved ones pebbles to show their affection, so too are humans warmed by pieces of content that land in our DMs.

A video of a cat touching tinfoil and freaking out. A brat summer/Kamala Harris meme. A concerned tweet about M Night Shyamalan’s filmography.

To some, a pebble may seem meaningless – a gesture that could have been carried out by any penguin. But it wasn’t. That pebble was chosen by that penguin, and gifted to another specially.

It may have only taken a few moments to find, but it means something, and is a way of keeping a relationship alive. A way of saying ‘I saw this and thought that you’d like it’ without making a big deal of it.

And if penguins can get something out of it, then so can we.