Two years ago, I wrote about Facebook. The only thing that's changed since is that Twitter has become the place where I too can comfortably dump my own small statuses into an online void. With The Social Network hitting theaters on Friday, I figured now would be as good a time as ever to post this.
Why I'm Nostalgic for the Way Facebook Used to Be
Back in the fall of 2004, thefacebook.com swept through Kenyon College like a virus that came with life's antidote. thefacebook.com was as much of a revelation as it was unique. It wasn't corny like Friendster, or geared at teenagers like MySpace, and it exploded onto the scene with such force that it divided the haves from the refuse-to-haves. Holding out became a game for the stubborn, most of whom succumbed to temptation within a year.
thefacebook.com was quintessentially college and liberal-artsy at its best. Amid a small Ohio bubble that had the propensity to suffocate, it channeled excess energy into a thriving digital world. And it did so with a refreshing, clean interface that enhanced its aura.
The single profile picture forced the user choose how they wanted to be represented, and lent a greater importance to the identity generated by the surrounding content. The wall was a place where, like online graffiti, friends could erase and change the messages others left, with only the drag of a mouse revealing who had done what.
The poke, as a generation-defining cyber tool, fascinated and delighted in its simplicity: you could poke someone without touching them; important because of the sexual harassment stories that were drilled into us as scared freshmen. The poke was also revolutionary because this is the same generation that was weaned on AOL 3.0 instant Message conversations with random, depraved thirty-year-old men that usually began with "15/F wanna chat?" thefacebook.com's immediate ability to compartmentalize our actual friends and remove much of the unnecessary and dangerous from the internet was an incredible blessing in disguise. It was more social than network, and that played into the need for typical college procrastination.
Excessive procrastination led to Facebook stalking, the idea--and reality--that anyone with enough time on their hands could find someone else, a friend or someone in their network's vicinity, a lot more interesting by repeated views of their profile. Everyone did it, and talked about it. Discussions of Facebook stalking became college-defining jargon along with things like "[name of person] sucks at life" and riffs on tools, toolboxes and large home appliance stores. (All that noted, it's essential that I remind anyone reading this that the original rule of Facebook was: Don't judge someone by their Facebook profile, even though that's an inherent contradiction.)
I remember sitting in a computer lab during my study abroad in Madrid when the Facebook Photos application debuted. I realized immediately that my life had changed forever: less qualitative analysis and more pictures of drunk girls in skimpy clothes.
The shift was seismic. Trying to glean the depth, or lack thereof, of someone's digital persona based on selected, representative information is--and was--completely different than looking at digital images. Facebook photos took a lot of the onus off the Facebook stalker and put it one the Facebook stalkee. We lost interest in our personalities--the nitty gritty of what made each of us unique--and went body image crazy, which, if you're scoring at home, made Facebook less of its own entity and just another cog in the world's silicon growth.
Facebook has come a long way. Think of it like a child. And I say that not just because it has issues with breast-feeding moms. Facebook came into the world innocent and in need of constant attention, a relatively blank slate for its collective family to project on to. As such, those involved couldn't resist spending most of their available waking moments around it. In this analogy, inviting high schoolers roughly a year later was akin to the terrible twos.
Now almost five years years old, Facebook focuses on candy (a dizzying array of excessive applications that are good for short jittery bursts of excitement but not much else--save online Scrabble) and a nagging penchant for reminding the world of what it's doing at every moment (status).
For someone who was there from almost the beginning, status is the truly perplexing phenomenon. Much of thefacebook's original brilliance was predicated on the mystery someone's profile could create. Now, there's no mystery to anything. Moreover, status only benefits those that use it. What was once a relatively level playing field is now a self-promotional war zone for those with the itchiest trigger fingers.
It's surreal enough to have the freedom to, for example, go out, get wasted, come back to your dorm room, listen to that Savage Garden chika cherry cola song repeatedly, and then create the Facebook group Jake is so drunk right now and compulsively listening to Savage Garden. To have the opportunity to do something like that--not that I did, [wink emoticon]--and then do an internet about face two months later because the real world is threatening; it just sucks.
It's not that I have a problem with the real world being on Facebook. No, the strangest thing for this original thefacebook member is that the current Facebook climate protracts a self-awareness of the gap between college and married life. I feel like the center of a ven diagram: I can look at my past by checking out the circle to my left (debauchery of the current college generation) while also peering into my future by looking at the circle to my right (the profiles of my older friends and colleagues, who mostly just post pictures of their kids). It's a simple reminder that while I yearn for the past and long for the future, I'm rarely happy with my present status.
Status also has the ability to marginalize the importance of practically anything. The day before Barack Obama was elected president, I found out that a journalist buddy had interviewed him via his Facebook status and a linked article. Two days later, I found out that a girl I went to high school with cooked "beef bourguignon" in celebration of Obama's victory.
It's too bad she told everyone, and then posted pictures of the bourguignon. I had imagined it to be more interesting than the presidential race in its final days.
Sunday, April 29, 2012 at 09:43PM