Friday, October 10, 2008

Facing Facebook

Hey, everybody … uhh – just give me a sec-ond here [sound: typing].  There. I just had to update my status on my Facebook page to “April is Facebooking while talking about Facebook.” And maybe you are, too?  We’re at a clear tipping point, and suddenly loads of people my age have been sucked into the Facebook zone.  And while Sarah Palin blasted Joe Biden for “You know, lookin’ back instead of – doggone it—lookin’ forward,” the surging popularity of Facebook tells us millions are obsessed with looking both ways in order to make sense of the present.

For you folks not yet converted to Facebook, it’s a social networking site designed a few years ago for college students, but now over a hundred million users of all ages check their pages constantly to keep tabs on friends and family. Facebook is more writerly than the music-rich teen world of MySpace, but more playful and political than the buttoned-down professional network, “LinkedIn.” In fact, Facebook has been activist-minded from its start, according to the absorbing book, Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky; it appeals to people who relish the truly viral growth potential of social and political collaboration.  Given current politics, the lightening-fast ease with which you can post and analyze, say, the now-famous Sarah Palin “debate logic flowchart” or sign political petitions, make Facebook deliciously the flavor of now.

But why have a tsunami of middle-agers recently logged onto Facebook?  Maybe because mortality throws a too-casual arm around many of our shoulders, we relish the ties that bind us to the earth, and Facebook lets us collect and display the tapestry of people whose lives have threaded through our own. Like the Seinfeld episode in which George Castanza feels his “worlds colliding,” it’s a mind-blower to see the Venn diagrams of one’s relationships looped into one cozy circle—the face of a high school prom date next to a current colleague, a college roommate living two states over next to a neighbor from around the corner.  And because the system cheekily reshuffles with every visit the order of friendly faces on one’s page, I enjoy endless serendipitous surprises as I see cheek-to-jowl folks I love who may be strangers to one another at first, but not for long.  For example, after the recent vice-presidential and presidential debates, I raced to my Facebook page to decompress about what the commentators got wrong (Short answer: Plen-ty!), and relished a current colleague trading witticisms with a high school pal, who could respond to a next-door neighbor, and so on!  If our connections constitute who we are, Facebook enriches us exponentially.

But by far the most addictive part of Facebook is the “status update” function at the top of the page that constantly asks, “What are you doing now?” and even offers a sentence-starter: “April is …” Oh, wait; let me update my status. [sound: typing] Let’s see: “April is waxing rhapsodic about status updates.” Now, this may seem to be mere technological navel-gazing, but I place “status updates” in the long and noble tradition of autobiographical genres that foster self-reflection.  Puritans were consumed with spiritual self-scrutiny, and you can see aspects of the metaphysical in many responses, like “Brian is … lost, but hopeful.” Many are practical: “Mary is pulling on filthy gloves to harvest the beets.” or, “Karen is trying to talk sense to her toddler.” Unlike composing individual emails, a scan of the updates page offers windows into the worlds of dozens of friends, so you can learn more about them, and consider yourself in relation.  Autobiography scholars claim the genre reflects a poignant, human desire to impose coherence on our lives – to invent a story of continuity and logic; but most autobiographies reveal this as a lie at every self-contradictory turn. Facebook displays what rings far truer – a Walt Whitman sense of ourselves as a collage of relationships, some harmonizing, some clashing, all evolving.  In Whitman’s words: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then, I contradict myself,/ ( I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The accumulating faces on my Facebook page make me feel as swollen with richness as all those tomatoes that split on our vines after the deluge of rain a few weekends ago.

Facebook connects, however messily, our past to our present, and helps us imagine what’s next.  It’s timely, now, when we’re still eating summer’s melons but we hanker for pumpkin pie. And it suits the political season, too, since we know change of some kind is coming, but it will surely drag plenty of the past on the heel of its shoe. What do you think?  Better go update your status!

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on October 10, 2008
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