I am a few years younger than the first Facebook users. Four years younger than Zuck. I remember when Facebook opened up to high school students, and the outrage the day News Feed popped up. I am the perfect age for Facebook the way a 13-year old girl in 1964 was the perfect age for the Beatles. I have a unique position on the generational landscape to claim knowledge of Facebook, and I’m here to say that most of the articles I’ve seen about it are way off.
There’s plenty of ink shed on the topic these days. Facebook, as all humans know, is planning an IPO. The $100+ billion forecasted valuation predicates on the fact that in about seven years Facebook has become a global institution claiming a seventh of the species as users, and it hasn’t even begun to monetize yet. It could prove to be a truly earth-changing platform. But it’s not yet.
I think Facebook is often described in monolithic and mysterious terms because many people writing about it were never part of its core demographic and don’t understand it well. You have to suppress laughter at press such as the article in this month’s Atlantic, entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” It’s one more skirmish in a years-long battle to academically conquer social media. Step one in this fight is acknowledging its résumé. It seems unacceptable now to discuss the phenomenon of Twitter without referencing Arab Spring, for example. But like all résumés, the accomplishments look better on paper than they do in practice. Revolutions have succeeded plenty of times before the #locationoftheriot was so easily shared. Social networks have existed as long as there have been common fires to eat around.
The theme that I keep hearing about Facebook is that social connections are somehow much different than they used to be. Society will no doubt assimilate this new technology consequentially, but as of now, it just seems too trivial to make a real impact. The connections I have on Facebook fall into two camps: people I know in real life and people who could disappear from this earth without me being the wiser. The latter are like constellations in the sky, individuals revolving in the ether with names I knew briefly. They only exist in news-fed wall posts. The familiar group divides into many layers, like our own atmosphere: some people are near and essential; others are distant but active acquaintances. The line where it dissipates into inert background is blurry. This is exactly the same as social circles before Facebook, with the sole, but crucial, difference being the ease with which I can choose to re-access, and rarely, re-engage, these individuals. Most of the time, though, you choose not to for the same reason that people rarely used to flip to the bottom of their rolodexes and dial for the hell of it. The only difference between that and the Facebook roster is that loaded term ‘friend,’ which throws a lot of the older crowd off. They’re not real friends, Pop. We know the difference.
You get your $100 billion dollars’ worth from stalking, really. Whether creeping the fuck out of myself by digging around a profile or clicking on enviable pictures while drunk and lonely, this is the game that Facebook has changed. The only thing is, I don’t stalk when I’m not motivated by non-Facebook factors to do so. What’s crucial to understand is that the primary non-Facebook-factor-that-leads-to-Facebook is boredom. Yes, the onset of a crush will send me to Facebook. So will planning a party. (I’ll get to this later.) The overarching difference between my experience and the way it’s portrayed is that in my day, Facebook was universally recognized as a waste of time.
I say that positively, in the sense that “building interpersonal connections” in your common room when you have a paper due tomorrow is still a waste of time. I also mean that in the negative, like when you’re sitting at a 35° angle alone at the library, killing time on the internet until your brain rounds into clutch mode. This is what Facebook was immediately embraced as and invented for. That it will become something much important, we are all certain, but for now it’s not. My point is that for all the fretting, Facebook is A) merely an enhancement on real interactions, and B) almost entirely a diversion that its core users understand is fundamentally non-essential. Most everyone my age understands that if Facebook is the foundation of a relationship, you do not have that relationship.
Like many new conveniences at their advent, social media has been somewhat binged-upon, though I am far less guilty of this than the guy who’s making a Facebook account for his divorce law firm. This should temper over time. The days of people posting way more than they intended are already leaving us. Most Facebook users have become adept at projecting their identities in the short while that it has been a necessity. It’s pretty simple: put up attractive, safe pictures of yourself and exchange wall posts once in a while. (Facebook profiles are also like constellations in that they often look nothing like what you think they should.) Even the girls that post pictures of themselves peeing in front of forty of their friends understand what they’re doing to the extent that they understand things. As social media matures, I maintain that online life will acquire more the degree of modesty employed in everyday life and this stuff will continue to disappear.
My mom recently suggested I “poke” someone. Not having been there at the massive rough-hewing of Facebook protocol, there’s no way she would know that poking is never, ever called for. Another day, my student debt servicer told me to Like! them on Facebook. Why the hell I'm supposed to develop a deeper relationship with the bane of my existence is unclear. This is what I’m talking about. Facebook right now is still in the experimental phase, but since many of its users are late to the game, they don’t know that the experiment has already been conducted by the vanguard. I think that Facebook is going to lose some of its luster as it leans away from the intrepid bong architects and more towards the student-loan-company set, and will eventually settle into a role as a social version of Microsoft Outlook. It’s very useful for that—inviting, changing plans, rallying consensus, etc. But this is not what these commentators will let it be. They must make it into a new discovery of fire, and it’s just not that. Facebook is a tool by which I can transpose my extant life online. More than anything, it’s a personal diversion not far above (and sometimes secondary to) solitaire on my phone, and the same goes for the other billion people. What it will become, no one knows. For now, chill out, everybody.
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