Too Much Of A Real Thing, or Google + Is Off Today
When I first got on Facebook, in summer 2009, nobody told me it was an irony-free zone.
During Twitter’s ascendancy after the election I’d written a joke, or maybe I stole it, about Twitter=Obama (new media, youth culture) Myspace=Bush (sick of both of them), and Facebook=McCain (for olds). Then I decided to actually use Facebook, assuming I’d find a voice. All I found was the toughest crowd on the internet.
People on Facebook do not like to be truffled with, as Michael Scott would say. They do not, as a rule, like references or sarcasm or metaphysics or self-awareness or any of the other laws that keep the internet running smoothly. Facebook is about being disciplined and practical and dead earnest, 24/7 we never close open 7 days a week.
Post an annotated clip from The American Soldier and the only person who’ll Like it is the dude you pretended not to see that time at the Blonde Redhead show. Type the following during a hangover: “dehi-dr8ed” and it will languish, unLiked. But simply say “soooo hungover!! :(” and the woodwork will be evacuated of Likers.
No matter what I’ve done on Facebook, from posting Most Emailed clip art to inscribing droll dissertations on everyone’s lack of interest, I never felt expressive. I got really good at Twitter and Tumblr mostly cause I copied really good ones. But who do you copy on Facebook? My favorite updaters are the ones who only do it twice a month and what does it say about a thing when people excel at it by not using it?
The early joke about Twitter, one that still gets made by confused late-adopters, was that it’s the best way to find out what everyone ate for breakfast. Of course, anyone still actually tweeting about food better be a sushi chef.
But on Facebook I see food-related updates ALL THE TIME and they always get double-digit likes. I get it: people like food. But unless your meal cost less than five dollars, or more than five hundred dollars, why are we talking about it? I digress.
Another popular Facebook status regards weather. It’s hot. It’s cold. It’s raining. It might rain. It stopped raining. It’s a nice day. LET’S GO TO THE PARK, with risible emoticons. I don’t have to tell any of you this.
The basic counter-argument to all this is: don’t use it, or friend better people. Which, I know: all Facebook needs is more water and a better class of people. Which incidentally is all Hell needs.
Facebook, as taught by Aaron Sorkin, was initially about taking the entire social structure of college and putting it online. After that, it became about taking the entire social structure of IRL and putting it online. I realize I’ve buried the lede with a backhoe here, but this is why I find Facebook disorienting and why I am moving more and more away from it: Facebook is the only part of the internet that is exactly like real life. And the internet was never supposed to be about real life.
On Twitter you play the world’s longest game of Risk; you dip in and out throughout the day, the conversation continues, and you leave the board set up for when you come back. On Tumblr you can resort to a stream of images if what you’re saying doesn’t move anyone. Even mySpace, that magic 8-ball of persona engineering, located rabbit-holes of HTML and comment-threads to get lost in, sometimes for hours. I don’t think I need to get into the dating sites and how fabulist those are.
All these examples are from social media, but really the whole internet’s social media. Stereogum is social media. Kottke is social media. The goddamn Huffington Post is social media.
News and branding may seem like they’re part of real life, but they are not who we are. We are Facebook profiles: a/s/ with optional l, no bullshit. No games, just sports, as Mel Gibson once said to Nike.
This sucks beyond recognition.
If you are slightly awk. and don’t actually like a lot of people; if you keep your friends close and your enemies on an external hard drive; or if you just don’t find every move you make totally fascinating; your Facebook wall will die of dry rot.
But if you’re a social cross between Tiesto and John Kerry, are always in the backs of places with a chipmunk grin or pointy ankle boots and have many, many sycophants who will ford a river for you, sneaks laced around their necks: Facebook is not a witch, it’s you. All your posts about being homesick on vacation will get about a thousand Likes. You can quote Kenny Powers and the whole internet will blanch en masse. Post the O.N.E. video two months after it came out, as opposed to two hours, and you will be offered strange toffees by German tourists.
If you are popular and great with people IRL, you are popular and great with people on Facebook. And if you’re not, you’re not. Nowhere on the net, which btw is the title of my first collected works, is this more absolutely true. Our actual stati are mirrored, and some people really dig that.
But barbarians need to be educated, and I don’t have time for your lack of irony anymore.
