I Am Facebook and So Can You! OR obscenely long post #2

If any of you have been reading this blog since the beginning, or if you just generally know me, you know that I have been vehemently anti-Facebook since its conception.

And after years and years of prodding by basically everyone I know (Jordan even signed me up a couple months ago without my permission), I finally buckled. I am now a reluctant member of the online community.

The reasons I joined are simple—they are the reasons everyone joins, and conveniently, it has a lot to do with my last post. It is an easier way to keep people, even when people seem to be scattering. I heard this statement time and time again: “There are a bunch of people who I genuinely like and would never talk to if I didn’t have Facebook.” I used to think that, frankly, those people are probably not worth it and said so, but after a couple months of not hearing from certain favorite people in my own life and then hearing from them that it would be easier for our relationship if I was a member, I began to wonder if I was not missing out on something easy and beneficial.

Rachel encouraged Derya and I to sign up. We sat in her room and did it together. I cannot say this was a calm and enlightening process. I found myself screeching every ten seconds: Do I have to write down all this stuff? Do I have to put up pictures? What do most people do? Did you put the blog address on yours? There was real panic in my voice. After 20 minutes of these questions, over and over, and Rachel explaining that I didn’t have to put anything I didn’t want to, she informed me that I had to either stop being so neurotic or leave. This was going to be harder than I thought.

But in a couple hours I felt a little better. I was at the library (the internet, ironically, shut down inexplicably just as we had officially joined) and I was getting the hang of things. Facebook hacked into my email and showed me all my friends (amazing! they were right there all along!) and then, somehow, I got into a list of people from my graduating class in high-school. I was on a roll—like a fat housewife on Supermarket Sweep, I was just piling the friends into my cart. I was really getting carried away; the existentialist questions of what exactly constitutes a “friend” in this setting and what sorts of requests are appropriate completely melted away and I went with my gut reactions.

I left the library knowing that my day of Facebooking was over and I felt a surprising excitement.

This euphoria lasted less than an hour. Back home and without internet, I could not help but brood. Why the hell did I put that blog address up? I got one long personal post and a bunch of posts about rubbery poops on the first page. Who’s going to see it? What are they going to think? Rachel tagged a bunch of photos of me. I hated that Halloween costume, I really do look scary. And on and on. This was just another thing for my anxiety to take hold of. And I hated that I even cared about these ridiculous things. I am comfortable with the person I am and the person I have become, but something about that medium, that construction of a public face, was really freaking me out.

I began to return to the reasons that I did not want to join Facebook in the first place. Friends were always a little sour when I refused; they thought I was making a judgment on them for joining. On the contrary—I never avoided Facebook because I thought I was too good for it, but rather because I was afraid of the way it would activate my basest human desires.

The last time I was in Miami, Jordan and I were hanging out on the porch, just talking, and we got onto the topic of high school reunions. “Would you go?” he said. “Hell no,” I said. “But would you want to go?” he asked. “Of course, if I could be invisible.”

I think now about a This American Life episode I just listened to about superpowers. The first act is about this question: “Given the choice, which superpower would you choose: flying or invisibility?” The speaker in the piece poses the question to everyone he meets and explores the answers. What he finally comes to is that what is so inherently difficult about these two choices is that it is essentially the battle between what we want to be: the heroic, confident, gregarious person who flies, and who we really are: the horrible, sneaky, creepy person who can become invisible. I remember thinking at the time that invisibility didn’t really sound that appealing to me. I had completely forgotten about this conversation from less than a few months ago.

It is true. The desire for invisibility is a real one, and one with great emotional consequences. Almost every person interviewed who admitted that they would want invisibility mentioned some reprehensible act that they would commit given the opportunity and then almost immediately seemed to recognize a certain level of shame about it.

We like Facebook because by putting a controlled version of ourselves on a network, we can ostensibly sneak around unnoticed in other people’s lives. It is a nice trade off for us, considering we have already seen ourselves. I do not know what kind of “Facebooker” (isn’t it wonderful how this term has infiltrated all parts of speech? a real testament to the flexibility of the English language) I am going to be. I have not been on it but a day and I like to think that I legitimately have better things to do with my life, but who really knows?

But this shameful recognition is not the whole of the problem. Yes, it is embarrassing to be looking into other people’s lives, people that you care absolutely nothing about, but we take for granted that the only consequence of this behavior is some time lost to procrastination.

The other night, I went out to dinner with some of Brian’s friends. I was already considering Facebook, and I was asking people’s opinions about whether or not I should join. I thought Brian’s friends would be a good group to ask considering they are almost 30 and in what seems to be an age slightly older than when the whole thing hit. Surprisingly, they were all on it and seemed to enjoy it—saying the same things about keeping in touch that everyone does. A few minutes later, one of Brian’s friends turned to me and said, “You know, there is one thing…” She explained to me that, like most of us, high school was an intense time for her. She was sorting through how she felt about herself and her relationships to others, and a lot of the time she did not like the way it made her feel. Nowadays, she feels more confident, a more complete person, but when people from high-school began contacting her, asking to be her “friend,” the mere thumbnail of them, the mere reminder of their existence, brought back some of those old insecurities. Even if these feelings had nothing to do with the person, their proximity at the time bound them up in an intangible emotional zeitgeist, and it tended to resurface with them.

This popped into my head tonight as I talked to my brother, who called to talk about my newfound internet lifestyle. I should say here that my brother is (self-consciously) a sucker for spectacle; he loves to be a part of any larger-than-life “phenomena.” So naturally, he thinks Facebook is a ball—hilarious, he says. He tells me that he’s so happy to be alive at this time, that it’s so interesting. He tells me that he anticipates a time when he is going to see the grandchildren of some one-night-stand on Facebook—that’ll be great, he says. I think about all the women I saw today on that high school list, women I went to school with, several of their thumbnails showed them in their wedding dresses. I think of their wedding dresses becoming pictures of their children, becoming pictures of their grandchildren, becoming death announcements. (Where do Facebook pages go when you die?)

I tell him about what Brian’s friend had said to me, and I began to form an argument. The world is already obsessed with high school (and to a lesser extent college). It is only a four-year span, eight with college years, but it seems to hold a disproportionate amount of our imaginations. A too-large percentage of movies, books and TV shows deal with this time period ad-nauseum. I find that amongst the four of us here, we have invoked high school stories in a broad range of subjects, long after the getting-to-know-you phase. Given the opportunity to ruminate on high school or college, many of us will do it. So what are the repercussions of the creation of a tool that allows us to do just that? Suddenly, I tell him, the loads of people with whom I requested friendship are making me feel heavy. Applying his vision, I may have to carry them around forever. I realize that I, too, went through most of my trauma in high school—the presence of so many drugs heightening the intensity and my insecurity. I realize I am just not ready for constant little thumbnail reminders of my former self in the shape of other people.

He tells me that I am overreacting. He tells me he never thinks about this stuff, though he is “friends” with a variety of people from high school that he feels less than totally comfortable with. But as I continue to flesh out my points, I notice him becoming less and less secure in this statement. What if we aren’t even sure the ways that this works on us? What if it is too early to really discern the way these incessant promptings and reminders of things past affect our present? The word “unnatural” surfaces. We are doing away with “survival of the fittest.” It is like defying fate, like reversing the natural order of things, broadening the pyramid when it should be honed, distracting instead of focusing. It makes me think of Jurassic Park: we have created this way to resuscitate and preserve ancient history for our own amusement, but how do we know that at some point, the security forces won’t dissolve? How do we know it won’t get bloody? Who is to say that, without our knowing it, we are becoming like Newman, or that cowardly lawyer on the toilet, and we won’t one day find ourselves devoured by the long-extinct T. Rex?

I talked about it with Rachel a little later on. She is more optimistic about things. Though she admits that she never thought about it that way, she quickly developed a way to reconcile these things. With technology, she tells me, things are becoming so quick that it is literally changing our conception of time, erasing time lapses. The past, present and future are all convening, getting closer together. And so perhaps it is not about getting stuck in the past, but the fact that there is no past anymore—it has joined forces with the present. A good point, but a largely moot one. To use another classic movie reference (this time Ghostbusters), isn’t it our undoing when we start crossing the streams? And if there is only present than all we have is stasis. I want to move forward, dammit!

I invite you to take all this with a grain of salt. I suppose I know that I am overreacting. This is quite a long post for what seems like it could be a totally frivolous activity. All I’m saying is it deserves some thought, that’s all.