The Predicament of Facebook

I do not decieve myself when I think about why I like to use the peer-networking site Facebook. The reason this bothers mention is because a lot of people on Facebook think they actually use the site for its descriptive purpose; they think they use it because it connects them with their friends. The dark truth behind Facebook is that it is not constructed around "friendship" based relationships at all, or perhaps a more progressively minded individual would say that Facebook and sites like it are redefining the word of friendship, but I think that is giving up far too much credit to the creators of said sites.

I don't use Facebook because I like keeping up to date on my friends' lives. In fact, I rarely check my friends' profiles and the truth is I don't care that a guy I went to high school with just read Gulliver's Travels and it changed his fucking life. These are legitimate, true friends I am talking about. I would attend these peoples' weddings, I would invite them to BBQs, I would bail them out of a fight. But I seriously don't care about half of the stuff people put up on their profiles. But I still fill my profile with shit I am confident nobody else I knows cares about either. My roommate Matt doesn't have to read my Facebook profile to know that I have a newfangled obsession with the band TV on the Radio, he just has to walk into my bedroom whenever I am playing music. Why do I bother? Why do I list seventeen of my favorite bands if nobody is going to read it? I take more time judging whether or not a band should truly be qualified as a "favorite" or not than all of my friends will spend reading the list in its entirety.

The reason I do this is to expand my social capital. I jump like a crazed baboon anytime I see that I have a new friend waiting in the ranks to join my "elite" list of 329 friends. I can't even name half of the people on that list, but I will add even the most casual of acquaintances in a heartbeat, and I will PORE over their interests with a fine-toothed comb. I just became " Facebook friends" with a guy named Manny with whom I had (at most) five minutes of solid conversation with. Five minutes. I learned a little bit about the guy, but if he called me and asked to borrow two hundred bucks I would remove my phone number from my Facebook profile. This is what Facebook has created in the new social landscape of career-bound twentysomethings. We meet, date, hookup, work, and compete with hundreds of casual strangers, and all off a sudden this qualifies for immediate social connection. Manny has at his fingertips the single most powerful (and terrifying) use for Facebook; Manny can construct my life's narrative however he pleases and there isn't shit I can do about it. I can add clever quotes or funny ones, I can post pictures, I can say that I like to eat cheese and drink wine, but none of that really matters. What matters is how Manny percieves the information I provide, and there is no fucking way I can shape the perceptions of 300+ people that I know on varying degrees, especially when several of them I haven't seen since I had a bowl cut.

So I like to construct narratives. I like to decide if your religious views hold true to the pictures I see posted with you chugging your beers. I like to bathe in your hypocrisy, but on the lighter side, I also like to glimpse at the little unique qualities about people that come through. A wall post really doesn't say anything, "Did you see the Broncos game?" coming from my buddy Garrett is nowhere as interesting as seeing that he posted it at 5.12am, undoubtedly sitting in his boxers. Don't get me wrong, the real life comes through, but Facebook is making it so that you have to dig a hell of a lot deeper.