I remember first hearing about Facebook at dinner with a family friend who was then a professor at Vanderbilt University. At the time, the website was limited to those with certain college email addresses. In my fourth-grade imagination, the name conjured a literal image. I envisioned a phone book of faces instead of numbers, so professors could know the identities of the students populating their big lecture courses.
I recently found out about the death of my former camp counselor through his Facebook page, which illustrates the extent to which the idea that was a mere seed back in 2004 has blossomed, less than a decade later, into a networking tool of unprecedented ubiquity. As the site's popularity has grown, its effect on how we interact with one another has increased commensurately. Today, social networking sites account for 15.4 percent of all internet traffic in the United States, and Facebook has over 800 million users. It has been widely credited in Western media for helping to instigate and organize democratic movements across the globe, most notably in the Middle East. However, as Malcolm Gladwell argues in his perspective-lending essay published in The New Yorker, "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted," these contributions have been vastly overstated. In reality, Facebook's impact has been far more insidious, gradually and imperceptibly shifting social norms. Anyone who has attended a high school party in the past few years has witnessed part of its footprint: the preponderance of cameras that turn events into Facebook events. As the predominant form of social media, its influence is felt in countless more invisible ways, as well.
In retrospect, my initial understanding of the site was not so far off the mark: It is, in fact, a means of putting forth one's identity for the world to know. The promise that has captured the free time, if not the imagination, of so many of its users is that this identity is a purely egocentric construct. You can precisely micromanage your image by uploading certain pictures and un-tagging others, joining certain groups, "friending" particular people and putting out specific information about yourself. Written eight years before the advent of Facebook, David Foster Wallace's epic novel, "Infinite Jest," imagines the dark side of an age of technology that, in 1996, already seemed inevitable. This dystopian future includes the rise of a video-telephone, a process of escalating consumer demand and gratification involving increasingly sophisticated ways of digitally altering one's features. Not long after its appearance, people were using the novel technology to transmit "to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, [and] large numbers of phone-users [were] suddenly reluctant to leave home and interact personally with each other."
Facebook is psychologically perilous for the same reason as Wallace's "videophony": it allows people to create virtual, idealized versions of themselves that they then might choose over their unedited realities. Along with its technological ingenuity, this emotional complex must be given some of the credit for the site's takeover of not just our social media, but also as more and more previously interpersonal interactions take place online our social lives.
The Facebook reaction to my former counselor's death potently illustrates this takeover, and it typifies the site's promise and its compromise. Given my outlook, I was initially skeptical about its propriety: I worried that the site would reduce the dignity of mourning by the same degree that it reduces a person to an image. My cynicism was reinforced by some posts that stood out to me, such as: "This massive hangover would be much easier to handle if I would have had you to sing to me this morning. Love you." But, as I read deeper, I discovered undiminished, touching sentiments that honored my counselor's memory and likely provided some degree of comfort to his family. This is the upside of Facebook, whose beauty is its democratic insistence that anyone can have a public identity, a right previously reserved for celebrities. By the same token, it performs a more solemn function as a platform for public memorials, and this is a justice. But these benefits should not eclipse the site's pernicious legacy.
As scientists know, it is impossible to observe certain phenomena without altering them. This law applies to the many cameras the eyes of Facebook that constantly chronicle our 21st-century lives, inevitably modifying how we behave in subtle and undetected ways. In fact, it applies to everything that is not merely made public, but assimilated into our very images, on the site. With Facebook's ascendant prominence crowding out more and more of the old modes of socializing, this is an increasingly serious problem. The ability to do things like memorialize our lost friends with unprecedented efficiency and connectivity like the ability to keep in touch with people with whom we might not otherwise is, in and of itself, a good thing. But what is the cost? When we draw our social experiences, including our most solemn and profound ones, out of the well of personal interaction and cast them into the public domain, they often are swept up in the current of exhibitionism. Genuine connections are made when people can let go of the notion that they might be judged and make self-expression the priority rather than endearment. Facebook crowds out the opportunities for this to happen. Ironically, this can render a tool meant to foster "connections" a profoundly isolating force.
