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"What are we going to to tonight, Brain?"
"The same thing my hero Mark Zuckerberg tries to do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world."
Facebook is doing a damn fine job of accomplishing The Brain’s goal in life: taking over the world. I can tell you why in one sentence:
Facebook (along with other social media, including to some extent, uh, the personal blog) has simultaneously given people a new way to be nosy and the false impression that they are the Center of the Known Universe.
We have, for all intents and purposes, become our own papparazzi, as Miss Manners observed in one of her recent columns. She’s right: we follow ourselves around all day with cameras and color commentary, subconsciously thinking that our actions aren’t important or interesting until our friends “like” them on Facebook. Then, we don’t even bat an eyelash when the Miami Herald reports to us what George Zimmerman bought from the prison commissary. Somehow in today’s weird world, this disgusting invasion of a man’s privacy now falls under the heading of “News”.
Facebook’s world domination has reached levels approaching terrifying: many people don’t view their relationships and life’s events as “real” until they are “Facebook-Official”. The fact that that term is now in our lexicon is a disturbing commentary on our world.
People really like to see public information that’s Flattering Stuff About Me and Gossip-Worthy Stuff About You. It feeds our egos while entertaining us. For some people, seeing Stuff that’s All About Someone Else is interesting only if it’s Controversial (for proof, I could show my blog stats from when I posted that Open Letter awhile back), or Makes Me Feel Superior. Couple the innate narcissism Facebook feeds with the added bonus of being able to crop, edit, label, tweak, and caption our lives into clever, far too informative, monotonous, vicious, inventive, deceptive or silly status updates complete with product placement, and throw the anonymous cyber stalking, some crippling loneliness, and the added bonus of not having to actually smell the people we are interacting with, or pay them the courtesy of looking them in the eye, and Facebook just goes to show that in 21st century America, everything, including our personal lives, is All About the Marketing.
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Brain: As you know, people in today's body conscious society are obsessed with losing weight. My plan is to secretly replace all the artificial sweeteners in the world with real ones, thus rendering the world's population fat, slow moving, and completely toothless.
Pinky: You mean like the guests on Jerry Springer?
Brain: Exactly, Pinklet.
On Facebook, I present you with the version of myself I choose to make public. Generally, I’m going to choose to reveal what I consider to be My Most Flattering Self. That said, it’s a pretty flat portrait: there’s quite a bit of my life that isn’t documented on my time-line. I’m not gonna spill everything, and you only get to see what I let you see. This isn’t altogether evil: parts of my life are really None of Your Business. But, this isn’t altogether good: you aren’t getting The Real Me, complete with my editorializing eyebrows, my lack of make-up, my spiritual struggles, my poor eating habits, my insecurities, and my obsessive tendency to listen to the same song 500 times in a row. Even though I listened to that songs 500 times in a row last week.
So, isn’t that lying? I don’t know. If it is, I think I’m ok with that. Because the friends on our newsfeeds who post everything from the state of their bowels and the results of their latest invasive medical tests to their latest temper tantrum or relationship drama kinda bother me: it’s like they’ve decided to run over to Kroger or sing a special in the Sunday morning service straight from bed, without taking time to brush their teeth, shower, comb their hair, put on deodorant or…pants. There’s a pathetic neediness to their unedited honesty. It’s just…too much information; it’s the most disgusting form of immodesty. In fact, some would say it borders on being obscene. Some people are willingly turning their lives into their own personal tabloid.
Far too often, people unintentionally shout out things about themselves while using social media that they did not actually intend to share. One’s prejudices and bigotries, their real or imagined talent, their intelligence and education, their tolerance for different types of people and their ideas, their desperation, and their capacity for mercy and grace are all on display in one’s public interaction on social media.
Could today’s Facebook-based society be a high-tech plea for mercy and grace? To some extent, we are all broken people, and broken people cry out in different ways. How we cry out, to whom we cry, and how we react to the cries we are exposed to says a great deal about us as members of the human race. With the world at our fingertips, we seem to think when we send some part of ourselves out into that world, more people are listening to us, but actually, it might be they’re just checking to see if you are listening to them.
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Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: I think so, Brain, but where are we going to get a duck and a garden hose at this time of night?
There is a healthy balance one much achieve between honesty and obscenity, between exposure and isolation, between humility and pride. Finding that balance in today’s over-exposed immodest world of Facebook is as difficult as Brain’s world domination quest and his well-meaning but fruitless attempts to try and comprehend the weird things Pinky says.