By Editorial Board
For most, if not all of us, the question of whether or not we have a Facebook is a rhetorical one. It doesn't matter if we visit it twice an hour or twice a month, for its obvious importance as a communicative tool is perhaps surpassed only by our ubiquitous cell phones.
And it's easy to see why MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like have caught on so overwhelmingly: They allow us to project idealized versions of ourselves, to get a little closer to the person we think we want to be. Like the first day at a new school, we get to indulge in some creative self-reinvention.
All of this is old news, of course, as social networking sites have been laid upon a hundred academic operating tables and given repeated diagnoses of "death of introspection, of solitude, of Western civilization," etc, ad infinitum. Maybe so, but as sites like the above aren't going away any time soon, we should all make some sort of peace with them.
What is concerning, however, is not when Facebook is going away, but rather the direction it's taking in the meantime; more specifically, the reason people create profiles. And increasingly so, it seems, our motivation for social networking is not even to be social at all. Instead, we do it to increase our own Web presence, to parade ourselves around for everyone (fingers crossed) to see.
The most glaring and complicated symptom of this are those who perpetually, almost compulsively, update their statuses. It's both the allure and downfall of the Internet that the lonely among us feel as though they always have someone to turn to, that someone is always "there," which is an obvious illusion but a helpful one too. In this regard, it's like Television 2.0.
There is nothing incredibly ire-arousing about someone who updates his or her status multiple times a day - it's probably a sign that they need a hug more than a Facebook. More problematic, however, is the underlying assumption that accompanies a mosquito-like Web profile, and the profound solipsism it entails.
The thing with repeatedly, almost unconsciously, telling the Facebook world what you're up to is that it makes your friends (if only in the virtual sense) come to you. There is no effort on your part to see what other people are up to, to inquire about their day; in short, to "be social," the greatest and most human asset of networking sites. Instead, everyone hears you buzzing around, waiting for you to bite us with a fresh update.
But the point, the real crux of this, is that such an attitude treats the self as though it were only definable by action: "So-and-so is at work :(" "so-and-so has way too much HW" "so-and-so is anxious ..." There is an unclouded danger in this, for it implies that there is no intrinsic quality that makes us different from one another, that if I act like you and do the things that you do, we could become, in effect, indistinguishable. If you stop talking, you might disappear from the face of the Earth. On Twitter, anyone could be Steve Jobs.
There are, of course, other, more mundane examples of the circling narcissism that inevitably turns platforms of connectivity to podiums of self-promotion, from MySpace five years ago to Facebook now to whatever we have five years from now. But the habitual misuse of what could genuinely help bring us all a bit closer is hopefully something that can be curbed - not likely, but not completely impossible. Thankfully, some parts of human nature remain malleable.
