VALERIE SCHULTZ: Facebook no friend of mine
| Wednesday, Dec 09 2009 03:41 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Dec 09 2009 03:43 PM
I admit to being the dinosaur of the family. I manage to get to a certain point with technology, and then I stop. For example: I have a cell phone. I do not take pictures with it. I do not send text messages with it. I use it as a phone. Another: I have a laptop computer, which I think is a fantastic invention. I use it mainly for writing and research. I communicate by e-mail, which, according to my kids, is so last century. I do contribute to a blog, but I have yet to master adding photos or links to my posts. I listen to the radio, rather than podcasts. I don't own an iPod. I have not built myself a Facebook page or profile or whatever it's called. I'm not even sure what Twitter is. I am what my husband calls (in a nice way) "low tech." Call me Stegosaurus, and I won't complain.
I am a little tired, though, of some people acting as though I am the only human left on the planet who isn't glued to Facebook in my free time. The Facebook network puts its users in touch with classmates from middle school and other people unheard-from for decades, turning everyone you've ever met into "friends," complete with photos and music and their favorite things. I guess I'm just not that into it.
A little background: Facebook.com, a free social networking website, has been in existence since 2004. Facebook was born at Harvard University as a tool for students to connect with each other. From there it expanded to other Boston area universities, then to other Ivy League universities, and then to all college students. It subsequently became available to high school students, who had previously been relegated to MySpace. By 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address could join Facebook. Currently, more than 350 million people worldwide use Facebook to "share their lives online." According to the website, Facebook aims to "make the world more open and transparent," and to "create a greater understanding" among its users.
Facebook has so permeated civilized society that the 2009 Word of the Year, chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary, is a Facebook verb: "unfriend." This is defined as deleting another person's access to your Facebook page. When, for whatever reason, you no longer consider someone your friend, you "unfriend" him or her, and they can no longer see your information and comment on it. I assume it's quite an online slap.
The thing is, as much as I feel annoyed by Facebook, I secretly fear being left out. Facebook is where my husband gets his seemingly inexhaustible supply of news about family and friends: births, deaths, moves, marriages, cancers, remissions. He is up on everything. He could write his own gossip column. But there is no need, because everyone on Facebook is writing their own personal entries in their own gossip columns, one status update at a time.
Do I sound catty? I feel catty. But I am not particularly interested in knowing what everyone is doing at every given moment, and I'm pretty sure the world doesn't care about every tedious thing on my schedule, either. Do my plodding details matter that much to anyone but me? Does my daily life become fascinating if I document it with bulletins and photos? Do I have intrinsic value if I am the technological equivalent of an open book?
Most of all, that persistent misgiving: Am I being left behind?
My cousin John, who was my companion Facebook holdout, told me at Thanksgiving that he is now on Facebook. Et tu, Brute? He has gone over to the dark side. I am worried that I am making a generational stand, in that by not being on Facebook, I am in effect telling the world, I am one of the old people.
Except that some of the old people are digging Facebook, too.
I get that Facebook bridges the generations, that it does good things for instant communication. But perhaps the price of all that connectivity is a lack of physical intimacy, by which I do not mean sex, but that instead of sitting around the kitchen table with family or grabbing a cup of coffee with friends, we are instead sealed alone in our computer rooms, typing out our thoughts and desires to a neutral screen rather than to a sympathetic real face.
And at the same time that people are logging on in private, Facebook has made a bit of a mockery of privacy. More than one college student has messed up a promising job offer or an elite graduate school acceptance because of some indiscreet posting or photo, too much carousing or cleavage, on Facebook. Apparently, there are ways that anyone can peruse your Facebook profile, and perhaps learn a little more about you than you might have willingly shared in person. What feels chummy and secret in the privacy of your dorm room is anything but. Paradoxically, more is known about us by strangers through Facebook than may be familiar to the people with whom we are in actual physical proximity.
The dinosaurs may have become extinct by not adapting to a changing climate, and perhaps that is my fate: if not extinction, then irrelevance. But you won't be reading about it on Facebook anytime soon.
