Thoughts on Facebook by Natalia Ilyin
My real problem with Facebook is that, unliked Linked-In, which is basically a resume service and has no pretence to warmth, Facebook gives us the illusion that we have real, working relationships. It allows us to “keep up” with people without actually doing the hard work of interacting with them. With Facebook, we can avoid the back and forth of real conversation—posts are not conversation— and thereby reduce the friction with which real communication burnishes friendship after the age of fifteen or so.
Facebook also reduces “friends” to a numbers game. Real friends? if you’re lucky, you’ll have three in your lifetime. To devalue the concept of friendship, to commodify it— that’s a depressing outcome of social networking. When all friends are equally important, none is important.
Facebook is attractive because it is a large, clean grid into which we can enter, a grid that makes life less complex, provides a sense of boundary, of safety, of organization, of comfort. With the population so much larger than it was even ten years ago, an organizing system for people is useful. And so much more fun than having a small number tattooed on one’s forearm.
I’ve signed up and look! I have so many friends. I must be of value. I can sit here and create and promote a better me. I can clean up my existence and create a false-fronted representation of my life. Hey. Let’s all contribute and create a huge network of false-fronted lives, lives that make us all feel of value, of importance, to ourselves if to no one else.
I can play Facebook all day long, and avoid the real work of my life, the work of becoming “single, separate, vertical and individual,” as Wallace Stegner once said.
I can always avoid the work of my life in other ways, but this particular procrastination device is more attractive than my previous procrastination devices— it’s designed to change and refresh and update constantly before my eyes. It keeps me busy and happy in my chair. Facebook keeps me busy like a baby with a mobile over the crib.
Really, why spend too much time in real life where things get hard, where people make so little sense, where sadness erupts, where life can be messy and confusing? Why not just sit here and write little things and look at the pictures of all my friends and post to people from my past whom I never bothered to contact before contacting them became as easy as typing in a search? But we’re in touch now, and isn’t that nice? Something of a relief, feeling like we’re in touch again.Via Natalia Ilyin’s blog, via Design Observer
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