Status Update

Continuing with the theme of interconnectedness, I’ve been thinking about Facebook a lot lately. I have mixed feelings about the place. (Is it even a place?). On the one hand, it allows us to create our own webs of interconnectedness that theoretically join each one of us with everyone else. On the other hand, the way it affects our self-perceptions is a little screwy.

By way of an example, yesterday my wife and I found ourselves alternatively commenting on the same status update while sitting next to each other in the same room. We were essentially having a light-hearted, snarky conversation about fixing the car on the internet, rather than talking face to face. Since we obviously could communicate in person I had to wonder, for whose benefit were we doing this? When you’re commenting on someone’s status update there is a definite pressure to be entertaining; to go for the laugh. That’s what we were doing; providing entertainment for “friends” who seemingly have nothing better to do than to comment on the method I chose to fix my windshield wipers. Really, who gives a hoot? Who could possibly be interested in the minutia of my daily life to such a degree? I think the answer is that *I* am the one most interested in shouting my existence from the rooftops, and Facebook offers me a platform to do just that.

The ego loves Facebook, it really does. Under the guise of making connections with other people, it gets to puff and parade and shout, “look at me! I’m here! I’m interesting!” Our lives will always be much more interesting to ourselves than they ever will be to other people, but the self is pretty uncomfortable with that concept. If I’m putting something up on the internet and people are responding, well shit, I MUST be important!

One result of this engorgement of the sense of our own importance is that we’ve all turned into little revisionist archivists; incessantly documenting our own lives through photographs, video and pity sayings and presenting sanitized versions of our personal histories for all to see. What a strange way to spend one’s time. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and smart phones allow for a sort of instant, technical scrapbooking, all geared towards leaving some kind of sunny, permanent record of our lives that bears no relationship to the often tumultuous suffering that we all experience as a normal part of being human. The more I think about it, the stranger it seems.

Does Facebook represent the idealized vision of our life as we would like it to be? No one ever posts unflattering pictures of themselves, do they? No one ever posts status updates about how miserable they are. In fact, if they did, they would probably be ignored. So what is the point of this seemingly pointless exercise? Facebook might connect us in some superficial, transient way, but it seems to me that the web it spins traps only ephemeral egos.

As usual, I’m probably over thinking it. Maybe it’s human nature to want to connect with others, no matter how superficially. Technology has given us a wonderful way to link the best intellects of all humanity through the internet so we can work together to solve the intractable problems of our age, and we use it to share videos of the dog chasing his tail.  I guess that’s ok, as long as we recognize that the dog, when you look at it closely, is us.