I was a moody girl. When I was 12, someone gave me a bright-red diary with a lock and key. In it, I would write my most secret thoughts – my sorrows, my crushes, my (highly judgmental) views about my (awful) parents, reflections on the meaning of life, if indeed it had any.
I would have been horrified if anybody’d read it. Public self-disclosure was anathema to me. My inner life, although incredibly banal, was nobody’s business but my own. I felt basically the same about my outer life. Why should people know what I was up to?
Now there’s Facebook. People live their lives in public and self-disclosure is the norm. All the silly things you’ve ever said or done are there online for all to see – your youthful indiscretions, your foolish choices, your awful fashion sense, your appalling former boyfriends and (if you’re unlucky) their nasty comments about you. In six short years, the Facebook page has become our age’s leading form of self-expression.
This week, Time magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg its Man of the Year. This event was reported everywhere, as if being Time’s Man of the Year still meant something. Mr. Zuckerberg, who is 26, graciously expressed his humble appreciation for such an honour, even though I doubt he’s ever read a word of Time in his life. Why would he? He’s worth billions. Time is worth next to nothing. Its circulation has dwindled to 3.4 million and is tottering toward the Old Media graveyard. Facebook now has more than 500 million users around the world. If it were a nation, only India and China would be bigger. Facebook users aren’t the least bit interested in what Time has to say. They’re interested in what they and their friends have to say.
I’ve tried to get the hang of Facebook. I believe people who turn their noses up at new technology are silly and conceited. So I signed up and began friending anyone who asked. I now have 147 friends, almost none of whom I actually know. Most seem very nice. Their tastes and activities are as ordinary as my own. I have 64 unanswered messages, four unreturned pokes and 28 new friend requests. I feel incredibly popular, but also guilty, because I’m not a very good friend. I never tell them anything about myself. I haven’t even put my picture on my Facebook page. I simply don’t believe I’m all that interesting to anyone but me. Besides, it’s none of their business.
I don’t feel particularly superior about this. I’m just saying I don’t get it. I’m like someone who’s emigrated to another country late in life, and never will pick up the language or the culture no matter how hard I try. I’d rather read a book (I’m not a total loser – I have a Kobo) than check out people’s status updates. Tweeting strikes me as an even more pointless waste of time. The answer to “What are you doing?” tends to be utterly inane, unless, like the Globe’s Mark MacKinnon, you’re trapped in a street protest in Bangkok with wounded people all around and you’re desperately trying to contact the Red Cross.
Some people who’ve studied the sociology of Facebook say online friendships are an answer to the anomie and isolation of the busy modern world. This makes sense to me. We no longer live in tribes, or in extended families, or even any families at all. So we form virtual tribes, instead. Facebook is a way to build our tribal bonds even if we live in different parts of the jungle and don’t have time to see each other any more. Face time has been replaced by Facebook time.
Despite all our Facebook friends, in reality, we have about the same number of friends we always had. According to a theory known as Dunbar’s number, there are only a finite number of individuals – about 150 – with whom you can form a stable interpersonal relationship. This theory was named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who says that 150 is more or less the limit imposed by your neocortical processing capacity. But the number of true close friends that people have (seven to 10) is much smaller.
Other theorists have a name for all this Facebooking, tweeting and microblogging (expressing your thoughts whenever you have one). They call it “ambient intimacy.” The constant online chatter is a substitute for the ordinary conversations people used to have at the playground or around the water cooler. The content doesn’t matter. It’s all about connection. This social chat is just a modern form of grooming, the equivalent of picking nits out of the next gorilla’s fur in order to maintain reciprocal harmony and signal your good intentions. I’ll pick your nits if you pick mine.
There’s nothing wrong with intimacy and connection, of course. But, like nit-picking, I’ve found that intimacy is a lot more satisfying face to face. I believe that self-disclosure is highly overrated, that narcissism is the signature pathology of our time and that society would be much improved if only we stopped obsessing about ourselves so much. And so to all my would-be Facebook friends, I want to say: I love you, even if I don’t know who you are. But you’re really not that interesting. And to be honest, neither am I.
