I 'Friend', therefore I am

IN a breathtakingly brilliant essay for the New York Times, British novelist Zadie Smith explores the cultural implications of Facebook. She asks, do we use social networks, or do they use us? By all means take the time to read it.

Some excerpts:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”

“... To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos. Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX”

“When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: ‘It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.’ But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?”

Smith, 35, is on to something here, I think. Her words are worth mulling, I know.

Though I don’t know why, I’ve never been enthralled by Facebook and its sundry imitators. Yes, I dabble in it, but I do so reluctantly, like a chess aficionado who humors an amateur because it seems obligatory. That of course is my problem (or arrogance), not that of those seemingly contented souls who populate Facebook. I certainly see the sex appeal and the boundless opportunities it offers for social interaction of a sort. I understand its general usefulness and value. After all, I grew up fully wired into technology and happily embraced it. Hell, I still do. And so far, I think the societal benefits of the digitalsphere still outweighs its costs.

But like incessant texting, I find it vaguely disturbing that so many people so readily hide behind self-constructed virtual walls. I find it peculiar that people so easily take up residence in a digital space where the wondrous subtleties of human eye contact, voice, language and body gestures can be so neatly avoided. And I find it troubling that so few seem to even care about any of this. Has it really come down to: I Friend on Facebook, therefore I am?

One wonders: Is this Rod Sterling’s portentous “fifth dimension,” that space “between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge?” Zadie Smith’s astute observations could very well be that “signpost up ahead” urging caution as we mindlessly off ramp into this cultural Twilight Zone.