When I was traveling in Chile last year, in the lovely seaside town of Valparaiso, I walked past a colorful little house where two discarded televisions sat outside on the porch. Written on them in white paint was the message:
“¡Apaga la tele… vive tu vida!” Turn off your television… live your life!
I smiled and kept walking, feeling secure enough in myself to know I wasn’t the type of person to succumb to media addiction anyway. Thoughts like that are easier when you’re half a world away from the junk-media society of America so it was only after my return to the States that I really understood what it is to create for oneself a virtual reality.
I created a Facebook account.
For that small, oblivious minority that still exists, Facebook (www.facebook.com) is by its own definition a ‘social networking site.’ If this definition seems rather undefining, well, then that starts to get towards my point.
Facebook (and of course its less-refined predecessor MySpace as well) has no legitimate reason to exist. It’s ‘social networking’ for its own sake. There is no cause, no common goal, and no point. It’s just people – millions of them – logging on to dissect the virtual lives of other people, who in turn are studying the virtual lives of other people, who are in turn…. You understand. Instead of spending time with people face to face, we can now all interact Facebook to Facebook.
Proponents (a euphemism for ‘addicts’) of social networking and personal blogging sites will argue that it exists as a communication tool, as if we had problems communicating when we only had email, instant messaging, text messaging, cell phones and antiquated ol’ postage. What Facebook has done is change the standards of our communication with a classic quantity versus quality argument.
Like the screaming crowd drowning out the melody at a concert, Facebook users clamor over each other in the World Wide Web, elbowing to be heard in the cacophony of cyberspace.
We’ve allowed a Website to replace everything good in the world – language, life experience, and human relationships – with shallow, two-dimensional substitutes.
The tender kiss under the stars has been replaced with a pair of pink lips you can smack onto your significant other’s ‘wall.’ The three most beautiful words a woman can ever hope to hear have been reduced to: i <3 u.
(And when that relationship finally ends, the late night sobs seem so melodramatic, because really, it’s just another line on the Facebook Newsfeed – “Joe Blow has ended his relationship with Jane Doe” – and little broken heart icon.)
Instead of spending a day walking around little stores downtown searching for that special something to tell your best friend ‘happy birthday’, you can now purchase a thoughtful Facebook gift –a little icon of a toy duck, anyone? – for a dollar. “Awww thanks, you shouldn’t have…”
A coy smile across the room, a wink, that chemistry-filled first sight, is now substituted by a ‘poke’. The first time I was poked by a stranger on Facebook, my gut reaction was to punch the guy, much like I did in second grade when the kid behind me pulled my pigtails. In both cases, I finally figured out he was attempting to flirt… and in the second case I would only have done my monitor and my fist some damage.
In the time you could have spent laughing over a cup of coffee with your real friends, you can now type away hundreds of unpunctuated, grammatically incorrect phrases to your hundreds of Facebook ‘friends’.
As young Americans, we’ve turned ourselves into a long string of ever-changing, meaningless adjectives, right at the time when we’re supposed to be taking over the reins of the world. We’re no longer defined by our functions as productive human beings, rather, we’re paragraphs of mellow, nice-sounding cliches like ‘dancing in the rain’, ‘listening to good music’, ‘eating chocolate.’ Writing that you do something too serious, (i.e. studying neurophysics or international economic development) isn’t exactly cool.
It’s also much easier, and less time-consuming, to write in your ‘About me’ section that you’re an “intellectual” than to actually read Stephen Hawking or Victor Hugo. Throw a few good quotes in (Bob Marley and Socrates together give you that laid-back, philosophical persona) and you’re done. Facebook is essentially individual public relations wherein each person can plan his appearance as carefully as a profile picture is cropped.
For the more advanced crowd, there are any number of virtual applications you can add and groups you can join, although I never really got this in-depth with my Facebook life. I was shocked when I logged in the other day though, to find out that my ex-boyfriend is now a leftenant zombie. (No, I didn’t previously date Tom Cruise.) In this case at least I was thankful that Facebook is only virtual.
For almost everything, Facebook and its associated tools and applications serve as sad substitutes to reality. It goes deeper than merely putting up another digital layer between human interaction; it actually serves to corrupt our most valuable life experiences by attempting to replace them. It speaks to a much larger trend of placing the mediocre on the same pedestal as the extraordinary, wherein every dull facet of our existences are given their share of bandwidth. In this way it perverts our true culture and intellect, and thus our humanity.
Wonderful things have been done with the Web; take for example the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which were orchestrated largely and successfully online. Take as another example the movements of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico wherein a social movement gained international support through the Web leading to an historic gathering of over 3,000 grassroots activists in Chiapas. The Internet has released knowledge from the confines of establishments and it has given free trade a medium. It encourages citizen journalism, grassroots politics and international entrepreneurship. And yet, while all of these revolutionary things are happening, millions of people are typing away at their Facebook accounts much too busy ‘socially networking’ to realize that democratic civil society’s greatest tool is also sitting on their mousepad.
If I had in me an ounce of the stuff that martyrs are made of, I would take my old Dell out in the front yard and scrawl on there:
“Apaga la computadora… demuestre su cara verdadera.”
Turn off your computer…show your real face.
Seed Newsvine