Everytime I catch The Social Network on FX, I feel a little uneasy about logging into my Facebook account afterwords. If you accept even a fraction of the film as being historically accurate about the founding of the website, you have to acknowledge one uncomfortable truth: Mark Zuckerberg is exactly the kind of obsessive, creepy loner genius who would start an online "community" that is more often about satisfying your ego and gleaning information about people than it is about trying to promote community.
Granted, I've yet to log out of my Facebook account completely in protest over this, but I do take precautionary measures; I leave no mention of where I work on my profile (or here, for that matter), I try to refrain from saying things that I wouldn't say unless it were to a close friend or family member, I don't do the whole "pity party" parade once I've experienced an emotional trauma (often because, getting older and wiser about how a few minutes' satisfaction over calling someone a "bitch" online can lead to long, long periods of painful regret after, I figure it's time to grow up and let that pass). I do all of this and more because I've realized something that a lot of people younger than me (and some older than me) fail to grasp: social media is not your friend.
Twitter and Instagram and the like are often cited as "bringing people together," but often times a Twitter feed (especially that of a celebrity like Donald Trump or Justin Bieber) is often merely a sounding board for the absolute lack of tact or basic intelligence that many such "famous people" seem to lack. Of course, in the good ole days of Hollywood press machines, agents and studios could keep stars from making asses of themselves, and at first you could have made the argument that social media made us more aware of our celebrities' failings. But those are now carefully stage-managed and spin-controlled now, and I honestly have no interest in joining Twitter because if I only needed 140 characters to make my point, I'd be a different person than the long-winded bastard you see here before you.
I'm not saying that all social media is a bad thing, I'm just saying that a lot of it makes me uncomfortable, from the way it sometimes rewards asinine comments to the fact that the "community" it seemingly provides is an illusion. I'm "friends" with people I've never met (granted, most of them are writers or entertainers whose work I admire and who, if they got to really know me offline, might like me too. At least I'd like to think so ;-p). But the flip side to that is that I'm friends with people I know in the real, concrete, non-Matrix-y kind of world (i.e., flesh and blood) whom I otherwise wouldn't have contact with (either because they're far away geographically or because my body odor is repellant to them, one or the other). And sometimes I go months or even years without hearing from them, but every now and then I see a familiar name on my Facebook wall and feel some nostalgia for the times when that person was closer by.
My problem with Facebook is that, often times, it feeds into the general narcissim of this age, when people know Snooki but not any president other than Obama, Reagan, or Palmer off 24. There is a desire to be memorable, to have our lives documented like the celebrities we seem to admire now (and these celebrities don't even have to be talented; just look at the Kardashians, a family so ass-backwards that they released the sex tape *before* they got famous). People spend so much time taking pics with their phone that they then post to social media that they often don't think about what it is that motivates them to do so. I'm as guilty of it as the next person, but still: don't you ever see a bunch of people staring at their phones "documenting" the fact that they're at an event when the event is going on right in front of them and they can't even be bothered to look up from their screens?
Like I said, none of these musings have led me to leave Facebook, though I do watch myself more than I used to (or I try to, anyway). I would like to leave a legacy a little more substantial than a few clever comments on someone's Facebook wall, and I understand the reach for online "immortality" that seems to be Facebook's bread and butter. It's just something that I thought needed to be brought up, maybe in hopes of helping those out there who seem to live via Facebook (and not really live outside of it) realize that it's not healthy but it's not irredeemably bad either. "Shiny Happy People," for the record, has nothing to do with social media, but it's a song that R.E.M. profess to hate but which I'm sure has its own fan club on Facebook. I'm probably not going to join (I like the song, but there are far, far better R.E.M. songs out there), but I wouldn't discourage you from doing so. Just don't miss out on the actual life that's occurring while you're documenting it with your phone or tweeting about it at 140 characters per tweet, is all I ask.
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