For a bunch of phonies, Facebook users can be a mighty introspective bunch.
Last week, in this space, I aired a gripe that I'd been nursing for some time. Social networks like Facebook, I said, teem with positive, cheery, drolly ironic chatter that's a lot more concerned with keeping up appearances than communicating anything resembling reality. It's a bit like a party at which everyone was busy making happy, clever banter, which might have been great if only the party hadn't been going on all day and all night since 2004. The effect, I argued, was a touch phony.
The reaction was nothing if not swift, on Facebook, on Twitter, on websites and in e-mails – which are what pass for “old-fashioned” these days. (Complete, non-snarky sentences, sent in private!) One particularly astute reader wrote in asking whether Facebook users were riled up by my comments.
I'd been a bit wary on that point myself. But here's the funny thing: Facebook users were hardly defensive at all.
To be sure, not everyone agreed with my complaint. Many pointed out that, while there's a lot of disingenuousness going around, they also see a lot of real vulnerability in their Facebook correspondences. Daniel Allen, a blogger in Kitchener, Ont., wrote to say that on the same morning as he read the piece, “one friend changed his status to say he is ‘not a failure, he just looks like one most of the time,' ” prompting other friends to pile on in support. “It might be that the Internet gives us a mask to hide behind,” he noted, “but it does also give us the tools to connect in very honest ways. If we choose to.”
Others suggested that my problem is simply that I have, in the somewhat piercing words of one Globeandmail.com commenter, a “vapid, annoying, and fake” bunch of Facebook friends. (They say hello, by the way.) Still others made the point that much depends on a network's age. Indeed, one Facebook user set up a contest among her adult friends to come up with the most “realistic, non-witty” status update this week, with charming results. And then there was the obligatory contingent that announced they “wouldn't touch Facebook with a barge pole.”
I take most of these points as completely valid. Social networks, after all, are enormously subjective things. Everybody's network is different, and no two people see the same thing when they log in. The slice of the Facebook universe I see for myself is limited, a somewhat random selection of 265 people I've bumped into over the past 30-odd years, plus a few I've never met at all.
And while members of my particular cluster might be inclined to produce loads of drolly ironic content, it turns out they're also completely amenable to discussing the topic. Instead of getting angry letters, I kept encountering thoughtful comments from people who enjoy Facebook, take it with a grain of salt, and are merely trying to puzzle through its quirks.
The fact that Facebook culture often errs on the side of snarky is just one of those quirks. Of course, having complained about the prancing phonies, I arrive at a tougher question: what's to be done? I'm not demanding that people become drama queens. There are places on the Web for that, and we avoid them for a reason.
One answer is to try setting the tone that you'd like to see followed; not just putting out messages that push the range of the sayable, but encouraging and responding to people who push boundaries in their own rights. There will always be limits on public discourse, and rightfully so, but the more leeway we have, the better.
Cultural change, however, is always easier when someone volunteers to go first. I have a feeling that the economy might do the dirty work. The party is ending – not just on Facebook, but, we're told, most everywhere. To date, the chattering and chirping I see when I log in isn't just a reflection of a time in my life, but a point in history. These have been boom times, and for all the uncertainty about this planet's future, it has been a prosperous and carefree decade for my young slice of the Facebook universe.
But when people start getting laid off, or are threatened with layoffs, or are threatened with not getting hired in the first place, the mood begins to shift. When one person in a social network broadcasts vulnerability, it can be an awkward aberration. When bad news hits many people at once, we might find a more dramatic range than we knew we had.
The ironic voice isn't going away any time soon, online or off; it's the curse of my generation. We've recognized the fact that, whatever their foibles, social networks are creatures of great potential, as their denizens keep illustrating. I know we'll be able to roll our eyes and laugh to get us through the years ahead. The challenge is keeping it real.
