Turning her back on Facebook
The tipping point for me was bacon. “Mmmm, bacon,” to be precise. One Saturday morning last February, those two words (is “mmmm” even a word?) awaited when I logged onto my Facebook account. I, too, love bacon, but after reading this status update by one of my Facebook friends, I lost my appetite for online social networking.
Like all doomed relationships, my brief affair with Facebook began with great hope. After the death of a college friend last fall, I was feeling sad and nostalgic for once-strong friendships worn away by time, distance and the busyness of everyday life. When a mutual friend mentioned how much she loved Facebook, it sounded perfect: a way of traversing great distances via my wireless router and reconnect on a deep level with those who once meant so much to me.
Feeling almost giddy, I logged on and created my profile. Lacking a decent digital photo of myself, I opted for the default profile picture: a blue-toned, featureless head with a Dairy Queen-swirl coif. I quickly discovered that many of those I befriended on Facebook changed their photo daily and added lots of photos of their children, dogs, vacations, etc. Wendy’s photos of her beautiful family on the slopes of Gstaad were particularly memorable. After seeing them, I felt gstupid for not being able to upload a photo or even figure out where the camera was.
For the first few weeks I was on Facebook, I spent 30 minutes or so a day trolling for college pals and “friending” them. Soon enough, I was flooded with friend requests myself. Weirdly, most of them were from high school classmates I hadn’t talked with since my graduation in 1984, people who’d never been my friends in actual life. Before long, I’d amassed 117 friends, including a random assortment of former work colleagues and even my high school German teacher.
Inane personality quizzes are all the rage on Facebook: What ’80s toy are you? What drink are you? What gun are you? If I were to sum up my high school experience by answering “What John Hughes movie character are you?” it would be a cross between “Pretty in Pink’s” late-bloomer/loser Ducky and that chick in “Sixteen Candles” who sported the back brace and orthodontic headgear. (I actually wore headgear to school in seventh grade and baby-sat the night of my senior prom. Coincidence? I think not.)
So, imagine my joy when greeted with earnest postings that “Jodie is driving her boys to ice hockey practice,” “Gwen is sipping wine and thinking about taking down her Christmas decorations” or “Mary is looking forward to potpie Tuesday.” I can hardly manage the minutiae of my own life. Why did I want such details from the lives of Jodie, Gwen and Mary, whom I barely remembered— and who I know for a fact barely acknowledged me while we were in high school? (Full disclosure: names have been changed to protect the innocent and me, should I ever decide to attend a high school reunion.)
I know, I know. I could have “unfriended” these folks— or I could have declined their friend requests in the first place. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And, worse, when I went onto my college friends’ walls (a person’s Facebook page)and read, for example, that “Mary friended Jackie” and didn’t friend me, I felt left out. I wasn’t the only one who got whiplash from Facebook’s ability to shove you back into the high school mind-set. After I canceled my account, my blue face quietly disappeared from the walls of those who’d “friended” me. The next day, I got a sweet e-mail from my college friend— a no-nonsense, very together, chief of staff for a state senator— asking where I went and if I “unfriended” her on purpose.
Another unflaggingly upbeat friend says Facebook is just mindless fun. She has the mindless part right. Mercifully, I jettisoned Facebook just as the craze of “25 Random Things About Me” was cresting. The idea is simple: come up with a list of heartfelt and/or oddball things and send it to 25 people. Oh, goody. The guilt of a chain letter wrapped up in the guise of personal revelation/regurgitation. I have trouble remembering the stuff I should remember: my husband’s Social Security number, my boys’ blood types and my mother’s birthday. But thanks to Facebook, seared into my brain is the knowledge that Pam is afraid of little dogs, Corrine can speak Mandarin and Dave gags on butterscotch pudding. Mind you, I can’t actually place Jenny from high school, but I now know that she prefers men with chest hair.
Like my friend’s musings on the wonders of fried strips of the other white meat, I finally came to conclude that some postings make no sense at all. What is the proper response to “Ah, here come the thunderboomies?” or “Sure is hot out there. Thank God for a/c”? The mysterious “Well, summbitch” left me completely confounded as did the obvious “Cathy has just finished work and is tired.” I was tempted to post: “Sarah has just finished eating and is digesting.”
I’ll leave it to the anthropologists to decide why 21st-century society feels the need to reveal personal details online. For my own part, my two-month Facebook foray proved a theory I’ve long held that the real world is just high school with coffee and taxes. Those people who want to keep in touch with me know how to find me, and I them. Once I put down the mouse and picked up the phone, I found I could bridge the distance I needed to travel. Mmmm, actual conversation.
