Suck It, Zuckerberg

I just finished The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse, a former insider at Facebook, and it helps confirm a belief that I've had ever since seeing The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg and his helpers are exactly the sort of people who would start a social-networking site, because they lack the real-life skills to actually make social connections in real life.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I think the cold, utilitarian mode of the website doesn't leave much room for human interactions, and for a long time I was cool with that. Because, cavet emptor, I'm exactly the sort of person who would be attracted to a website that keeps people at arm's (or computer screen's) length, even if I see them in real life.

My own Facebook story goes back to 2006, when I was starting back at college and everyone at Clemson was asking me if I was on Facebook. I had a MySpace account because, for the years when I wasn't seemingly moving in any forward motion towards a life of my own, it seemed like I would be left behind in the rush to become something, and I was insecure enough to think that an online profile, however miniscule, was preferable to no online identity at all. You can be anything you want to be online, the internet seems to promise, taking the place of traveling roadside elixir salesmen in talking up the tonic that is online communication. It's just a click away.

So I joined Facebook and haven't looked back...except when I have, and wondered what I became.

Facebook in those days was more user-friendly (sorry, but Timeline is shit. Absolute horrific horseshit, and reading Losse's book confirms for me the belief that Zuckerberg et al. don't give a crap what we as users think about it), and I used it alright. I sent friend requests to people I barely knew from some English class where we might have one social interaction tops, whilst discussing Wuthering Heights. But online, we could become "friends," which meant something (though I don't know if any of us ever knew just what). We could write on each other's walls (my inner comedian could be released full bore on display for the world), send messages if something more private needed to be said, and God help me I poked poor girls to death when that was still a thing (is it? I haven't poked in ages, and don't intend to start back now). But I don't know that it really solved the existential loneliness I felt at both being part of the circle and being apart from it. I didn't live on campus, and I had a job, so my weekends and "free time" were not my own. In those early days, Facebook more often than not made me feel less of a loser because, while I didn't have the time or resources to hang out as much in real life with my friends, I could still stay "connected" to them, revel in the same Beer Pong photos as they did, and it was okay.

Facebook, to be fair, is not evil; no technology is, unless the person using it does so for evil purposes. But it does facilitate something that the internet is infamous for, the sense (however real or imagined) that actions don't have consequences. You can poke someone, the internet says, and they might respond, but it doesn't mean that it has to mean anything (unless you're flirting online, then it's loaded with all sorts of meaning). The internet is meant to be a conduit for communication, but the extent to which we let it replace real-time, face-to-face (as opposed to Facebook-to-Facebook) interaction says a lot about us individually. There have been times when I thought nothing of sending a post to someone that could be misconstrued, or read wrong (I have a sarcastic sense of humor, something which can get lost nuance-wise in the cold, digital display of the spoken word), and there have been times when I thought that Facebook told me more about a person than he or she (usually she, because like every guy I've tried to friend-request girls I liked, and most of the time they accepted, and this led to me imagining all sorts of things that weren't there because it was easier to write on their wall than talk to them in person) said to me. Facebook enables that part of us that's afraid of rejection, that wants to be loved without doing the hard work of connecting for real.

Now, to be fair, I don't intend to delete my Facebook account anytime soon: for one thing, I do have honest-to-God connections with real people that I know in real life but don't get to see anymore, and in that sense social networking really is social. Keeping up with someone's life might still creep me out a little bit (or appeal to the creepy part of me, whatever), but for people who were or are important to me whom I don't get to see for "real," it comes in handy. And while I've never met A.J. Jacobs or Will Leitch or any of the other famous people who accepted me as a "friend," I admire their work and hope that, maybe, in the course of my chosen desire to write for a living (I was interested in sharing myself that way long before social networking came along), I can field friend requests from people who read something I wrote, liked it enough to seek me out, and merely want to show that they like my style (without being prone to breaking into my home at three in the morning because they think we're "soul mates"). The internet still works in making me feel less lonely, less disconnected from the real world (i.e., anything that's not Walhalla). But I'm more careful about it.

I tend to spend less than an hour online every weekday, checking emails in case something important happens (usually not; like you, I get all kinds of spam promising a larger penis. How did they know that I had that problem?). I spend maybe five seconds checking my Facebook if someone posted on my wall or sent me a message, a few minutes more thinking up a witty saying or real-life emotion to do as a status update (as of this writing, and due to a week of listening to Talking Heads, it's a song quote), and maybe gaze longingly at pictures of my niece, who is one of the best things to come into my life in a while (there are a few others, but I won't name them here). I'm good with a few minutes spent there, and yes I'll post this link to my wall, so other people can find it and read it at their discretion. I don't worry so much about "dying unappreciated" as I did when I was younger and more pretentious. But I do still want to see a book with my name in the author's place someday, fiction or non-fiction (or both, as all the anti-Obama books seem to me). So after saying all that about Facebook, I'm gonna post this to it anyway. Humans are contradictory animals, something that I don't think Zuckerberg and the techno-geeks can fathom. You can't solve us with a mathematical formula; we just are. So suck it, Zuckerberg, for creating this addictive and now-essential tool that we all use, even when we hate ourselves for using it.