Reading the Relevant website today, I came across an article from Brett McCracken titled “The Death of Facebook,” in which McCracken blasts the recent chain-post “25 Random Things” that blazed Facebook in recent weeks. He believes that the utter lameness of the 25 things phenomenon will propel Facebook into cultural faux pas and irrelevance.
In other words, he thinks Facebook is about to go MySpace on us.
It’s really clear that the author is not a fan of social networking of this type. Not in the least. But I wonder if his description of how and why social networking sites are used really shines light on why the average person (or at least the average person of legal adulthood) uses such sites.
Here’s the climax of the article:
I feel like I have false notions of so many people, just because I know them only or primarily through the Internet. It’s so much more interesting and enlightening to get to know someone in reality, without all that. I like being able to discover things about people by asking them, hearing from them, having mysteries and encountering little discoveries along the way. I like seeing the dissonance between someone’s facial expression and or body language and what they are saying. When we all have control over what we look like and how we define ourselves on the Internet, it removes that mystery. And it turns “friendship” into something that has less to do with knowing people deeply than just knowing whatever bits and pieces of them they want to reveal (which happens in real-world relationships too, but moreso on the Internet).
Human beings are far, far more complex and wonderful than their status updates and “ingredient listing” profile pages. And it is far more rewarding and profound to get to know someone in an unsafe, slightly uncertain and awkward way than to rigorously research them and pretend to know them via all the accumulated Internet data on them.
So let’s take a step back from “25 Things” and think about this. Do we really think that sending out mass notes with carefully selected tidbits about ourselves is making anyone more known? Who are we kidding? As a mindless diversion and exercise in classic facebook self-love, it’s fine. But as a commentary on the uses and practices of online social networking (which I think it pretty much is), “25 Things” is nothing if not a warning sign that the end is near.
I think the author’s points are interesting (not to mention articulate, which I appreciate). But I generally disagree with his conclusions, and want to point out a few reasons why. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that Relevant thrives on the culture he’s bashing; it’s like Sports Illustrated running a piece about how sports are dull and and we should all be more interesting in knitting.)
1) All mediums of communication suffer from the shortcomings this article attributes to Twitter, Facebook, and the like. If anything, this validates Facebook and other forms of online social networking. Have you ever said anything super embarrassing over the phone? How many “sacred” face-to-face conversations do you make it through without saying something you regret?
If people look back on the “25 things” (which I didn’t participate in, by the way, so I’m not writing out of some deep wound or bias) and say to themselves, “That was so lame of me,” so what? Does that invalidate Facebook as a medium for communication? Or is it actually the other way around?
2.) The Internet is reality, as much as a face-to-face conversation is reality. If we’re going to have a big old philosophical conversation of reality and its ontology, I think we’ll find that poking someone on Facebook is “real” in that it happens. Is it significant? I don’t think it is. If it’s meaning we’re after, then let’s identify that. But people create reality that is not significant (think: reality television) all the time, and many of the face-to-face interactions we have are just as shallow. All of that to say I think people are enthralled with the idea that they can create reality (even if that reality is not significant to most of us).
3.) Social networking is probably used to maintain relationships far more often than it is used to create relationships. Most of the criticisms of Facebook and Twitter are knocks on their ability to help us get to know someone. (Which in itself is a questionable point because we carry such a strong facade on the phone or sitting across a table over coffee. I’m not deconstructing this to the point of saying it is impossible to truly know another person. I’m just saying that I don’t observe a lop-sided impact of insincerity and facade in one particular medium of communication.)
Facade aside, I think there’s something to be said of shared experience as a relationship-builder. And it’s more difficult to share experiences online than in person, I think. My guess is that most of us don’t attempt to do that, however. There are already people in our life with whom we’ve built shared experience and story, and we use things like Facebook to maintain the relationships beyond and in addition to those shared experiences.
Which leads to my next point.
4.) We are scattered. In the past six years, I’ve lived in Cleveland, Boston, and Seattle while having short stints (but building very cool relationships) in Chicago and Portland. There are so many incredible people I’ve met in each of those stops, and I want to continue those relationships still.
Psychologist Malcolm Gladwell says in his book The Tipping Point that human beings, on average, have the capacity to maintain between 12 and 13 close relationships. I think my personal capacity might even be below that average. At the same time, I absolutely love people I’ve met along my different stops. So while I don’t think it’d be healthy for my entire 12 to consist of people outside of Seattle (where I am now), I think it’d be weird if there weren’t 3 or 4 people on my list from places like Cleveland and Boston. I see integrity in that.
Not only do I want part of my 12 to reflect the other points along my pilgrimage, but I would like to think that people outside my 12 aren’t dead to me. I would like to think that I could maintain relationships with the occasional Facebook “How are you?” or by reading up on what my friend is up to these days.
It’s a much-improved version of the Christmas card relationships of our parents’ generation.
I use examples from my own story, but I believe that most people are in a similar position to my own. If anything, I think people (especially folks who are 10-15 years older than me) are more traveled and connected than I am. Globalization is not simply an economic term; it’s something that happens to us as people more and more with each passing year.
I don’t want to be punished relationally for having relocated a few times. Nor do I want to stick it to my friends who’ve done the same. Why should globalization cause us to fracture friendships and familial relationships? It makes no sense.
Is the “25 random things” phenomenon going to cause Facebook to shed it’s hip factor? I doubt it. But even if that did happen, there would come a new social networking site. Because millions of people are looking to utilize such sites to preserve connections around the world.
How ready are we to dismiss that as shallow?
Even when a networking site becomes lame and goes by the wayside, our maintained friendships tend to shift over to the next “in” site (how many of us have Facebook friends today that we’ve preserved from MySpace and Friendster days?). I don’t think we’re necessarily shallow. I think we’re learning how to navigate relationally through increasing globalization.
Because friends are friends, and we have them all over the place.
