Obsessions and Lamentations #17 - Facebook Edition

I don’t like Facebook, even though I’m on it.  I’ll get to that contradiction in a minute.  First let me say that I don’t expect this screed to be part of the first wave of a Facebook backlash lurking on the horizon.  Technology that has become ubiquitous is never subject to a backlash, or at least not one that it doesn’t just steamroll over.  TV may have had a backlash, but you’ll spend hours in the Cleveland Plain Dealer archives trying to document it.  Still, if you went back and dug up all those predictions that TV would take over our lives and rot American brains, well, have you seen our 5th grade Math & Science ranking lately?  And the sad fact is we may have internalized the criticism, have come to accept it as given, yet still watch 151 hours of the stupor-inducing swill per month, an all-time high according to the Nielsen Company.  We are vanquished colonists, in TV’s thrall and grumbling all the while.  And so it will be with Facebook.  With about 25% of the world’s internet users already sporting a page full of useless aphorisms and little league baseball pics, it’s fair to say we are already conquered.

How did it happen?  Anthropologists say we are social creatures, so at first blush this phenomenon seems like the natural next step towards forming a global connection, or Gaia, if you went to graduate school.  But think about your own social relations.  They tend to break down into 4 major groups.  First are people you don’t know.  Second are people you casually know, maybe knew better at some point in the past or run into now and again.  These people used to be called acquaintances, but now are called “friends”.  Some people I barely know have 1,216 “friends”, and I am among them.  Then there are what used to be called friends, who are now a small subset of “friends”.  These are people you actually like.  Finally there are your loved ones, who are more than your friends but are also just your “friends”, like everyone else.  These are the only people we want around us all the time and they can usually be counted on one hand.  Everybody else we prefer to deal with on our own terms.   This is where Facebook comes in.

But while brooding on all of this, I am reminded of the OJ Simpson trial, which for those of you not living in the States in the mid 90s, was the biggest thing to hit here since the Beatles.  I, like most people, thought it ridiculous when Simpson was first accused of brutally killing his wife and her friend.  OJ was a good guy; kind, gentle, affable, game for a good laugh (see Naked Gun).  But I remember thinking during the high speed chase we all watched on live television, “Jesus, he really did this!  I guess we didn’t really know him.”  I’ve kept that lesson handy every time I watch the star of the moment, say, Sarah Palin, ruthlessly manage their public image.  Palin is not a crazed murderer, as far as I know (and I take her word for it that she has never decapitated someone in a fit of rage), but she maintains a tight veil of secrecy around her (see recent Vanity Fair article) and still manages to pull strings throughout the lower 48.  How does she do it?  Facebook.

The sad fact is we have a little OJ and Palin, killers respectively of ex-wives and wolves, in all of us.  We all want the perks and pleasures of popularity and universal love without the messy downside.  They say that most people’s greatest fear is public speaking.  Facebook solves this problem by providing everyone with a stage on which to strut without the risk of tripping on the footlights.  We can all be our own PR experts advising ourselves, the stars of our own show, exactly what post or link will enhance our public image.  And so we can all fulfill our lifelong dreams to become who we are not, virtually speaking.  After he tried to hack off Ron Goldman’s head, OJ tried desperately to don his happy-go-lucky mask, which helped him escape prosecution (hundreds of years of racial persecution didn’t hurt either).  Can you imagine if he had Facebook?  Jeez, anybody that posts the double-rainbow dude youtube video can’t be half bad, eh?  Look what it’s doing for Palin, by all accounts a ruthlessly vindictive halfwit whose cocksure, self-aggrandizing demeanor would be hard enough to take organizing who brings what snack to the kid’s weekly soccer games, much less threatening to be leader of the free world.  Online, she morphs into her unique combination of Mama Grizzly and William Kristol’s right nut, avoiding what we all fear most – exposure.  And again I return to our continuing fascination with vampires; this time to note that they too wilt in the light of day.  No wonder we love them.

Mark Zuckerberg may be an accidental billionaire, but it is no accidental irony that such a social misfit created the largest social networking platform in world history.  It’s perhaps the most effective mechanism yet found by which to slip out of our own uncomfortable skins.  So like it or not, it’s here to stay.  We’ve only begun to see what monsters it will spew forth.  Like a lot of people, I’m planning to see “The Social Network” this opening weekend because I like David Fincher and hearing a choir singing Radiohead gets my blood pumping.  But even more interesting perhaps is a new documentary called “Catfish”, which tells the story of a young man’s Facebook relationship with a woman who, spoiler alert, is not all she’s cracked up to be.  What do you do when you fall in love with someone who doesn’t actually exist?  My bet is, a lot of people are about to find out.