The Rings
Facebook is the most interesting social experiment in history, for thousands of reasons. Mass psychology and the formation of social beliefs held by many people fascinate me, and both are implicated in Facebook discussion on an individual level amassing to a Mandelbrotian scale. You can comment, I can like that comment, add to that comment, disagree with it, et cetera. As in discussion in everyday life, we bring our preconceptions to the discussion and rarely leave with them disabused or even modified. All the while, everyone else gets to peer into the arena, and have their notions confirmed, rejected, or ignored. It is a voyeurism that is unrivaled, but so new that we barely have had the time to dissect what it actually means – a theme of moral catch-up that becomes more opaque as technological advances become more commonplace. Facebook has affected our lives and the continuity of the human person in ways uncaptured just a few years ago. Where once there was a disconnect between who you are with coworkers and who you are with college party friends and who you are with your family, you now live in a glass house that disallows hiding easily one facet-persona from the next. But you can always pretend that you are someone you are not. Is it easier or more difficult now that your habits and activities lay exposed to all?
Rumors abound about the ridicule Zuckerberg has heaped upon those who use his site, the most famous of which involving how stupid people are to post about themselves. Who would have imagined just 10 years ago that people would be willing and enthusiastic about revealing their interests, their travels, their hopes, their bodies, where they are at all social events, who they love, what they have for dinner, their real-life rivalries and emotional distress, their surgeries and medical procedures, and their proposals, new babies, and all other moments that used to be precious because they were shared between few people as opposed to so many? The experiment is a pseudo-but-real-life postmodernism that reflects our deepest narcissism and need to be known. What I generally see when I peruse my Facebook feed (I very rarely will visit anyone’s personal page, because it is uncomfortable for me) is the yawning black chasm of the self that will never be known or filled enough to prevent us from wanting to keep posting updates about our cats, delicious quinoa salad, or how we feel about the Seahawks win: I need to have my say. I am important, and what I say matters. I am special and people should know it. I am what I say, and if people like it or dislike it, they like or dislike me. The answers to emptiness have roots in a far older way of life than the internet.
We all are important, unique, and worth getting to know – I firmly do believe that. Still, it seems we can never slake our thirst to be known by others – nor our curiosity about what it is like to be another fully conscious human being who has a free will and mind of their own. Ronald Rolheiser, prescient spiritual guide that he is, noted that the deepest and most destructive greed we have today is not for money or power, but for experience. Seeing this and doing that are the new forms of being the best. Ever we want to be the One-Upper, whether the ability is withheld in a smug self-satisfied silence or we morph into one of those annoying people who One-Ups with stories every time one relates anecdote. Experience is the most important word used on job applications, and even video games rate the strength of a character based on the experience points the character has collected. There has never been a time in which experience was so crucial to our lives. Or so we have come to think.
Facebook is the ultimate opportunity to view and share experience. Even if we have not done X, Y, or Z, we probably know someone who has, and we likely can find pictures of it going down on our friend list. I want to be known, and I want to know – and a program on an electrical box hooked to billions of other electrical boxes with anonymized avatars is now the best way to expand that sphere of experience to a staggering degree within a few minutes. I cannot say if this phenomenon is good or bad, but I would venture to guess that it is at least dangerous. There is value in the forgotten virtue of innocence, but the voices that clamor for our attention and experience often drown out what usefulness simplicity and innocence (modern read: ignorance) can have. There is some value to having a small troupe of friends to be close to rather than spending time posting on Facebook for thousands of semi-acquaintances. There is great value to sharing experiences with a single individual or a few people without having to display it and see how many people like it or would like to do the same. There is increasing value to hidden aspects of our good selves and the beauty of the world – if only because scarcity dictates it. Secrets are a form of mysticism in their own right, and they can be destroyed by photograph or descriptor. And while I write all of this, I know that I of course am just as guilty as the lot for my experiential greed. There is a reason I buy so many books – I have a voracious greed for experience in the form of knowledge, and it is one I know I will have to get over someday. Lord, make me holy – but not just yet…
As much as experience though, I believe that people have a want to be liked. For most people this means being liked by a majority of others. For a rare few, it means being liked by those who matter most (family, close friends, etc.) and imagining the rest don’t matter at all. Either way, when we post on Facebook, we pull out our speculative post-modern view and do our best to imagine how people will respond to our post or what people will want to see or hear. What is vogue today? When we figure it out, that is what we post. Why? Because most of the time, that is why we post in the first place. We want to know what people think of our lives and experiences, beliefs and choices. I have a feeling that most of the book was beyond my mental capacity, but I think this concept is the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Style beat substance to a pulp all the way back in Ancient Greece, and the results are still with us. We would rather be liked and go out in style than be discerning of truth and what is actually correct. Who wants to use the technical rules of logic when it is so much more fun to attack someone personally? Who wants to stand up for what is right if it means looking like a fool? Pluralism means there are so many paths that can be taken that rejecting any of them means not being liked. Who wants that?
Now let me engage in a bit of post-modernism myself, in a few moment of exposed self-reflection that I believe is indicative of wider experience. I am not keen to talking about my personal experience, but where it proves a point it may be useful…
I have a bit of a reputation on Facebook that hemorrhages into real life, even though very little of what I post on Facebook is “me.” One of my gifts (that doubles as a curse) is the ability to see flaw and criticize anything and anyone where it counts. It is a dangerous ability to have that I have to temper quite often, because it can lead down a spiral of hypercritical anti-everything that wholly defines who I am. Many are surprised when I am uninterested in talking about politics or social problems with them in person, and generally the reason is that I get it all out on the internets – I make a serious effort to avoid the ability to criticize becoming more than a small attribute even though many who only know me online believe it to be my only motivation or self.
When you have a gift, you are to use it and share it – and that is why I spend some of my time encouraging others to think and examine their world. More than once I have been stopped in conversation (in person) to be told that something I posted on the internet made a person ponder that which they would not have without the prompt. I am proud of the fact, even while nothing I post is new or original to the world and the credit lies with a greater thinker than I…
Not only do people make a point to mention something I post on Facebook when they run into me in the real world, I have also been warned that people who discuss the things I post range from my own mother to the Board of Regents of a major university, to coworkers, to a professor teaching a class, to lawyers on a lunch break, to priests, to best friends, to ex-girlfriends, to the HR department of a company I didn’t know existed. Descriptors range from “extremely offensive” to “over-posting” to “enlightening” and everywhere in between, including “Can we hire you?”. I would guess that I have had over 250 people delete me on the site, with 90% or more doing so because they took offense to something I wrote. My interactions on Facebook have had huge effects on how I have been treated by others in real life, for the mere fact that I have and voice opinions on the site, where many maintain that I should just shut up and use the platform to post about some funny event in my life like everyone else does. It is generally not something that would cause me furrowed brow, but it does say something about our ability to discuss issues, take criticism, and deal with competing worldviews. There is a good indication of what our mass-media snapshot culture has done to our thinking skills if we have only the route of deleting or silencing people who post things that make us think or who disagree with us. We don’t have the right to never be offended, but we may have the responsibility to listen to those who do… Alas, I digress to early…
I try to post a picture and a status each day. I put some degree of thought into what I say, not because I am seeking a certain reaction or attention in general (most of the time), but because I would like to point out something that is generally not talked about or causes pause – even if just for me, and even if I am in error. There are times I post things with which I do not agree, and others when I wish I could elaborate more fully. In either circumstance, the purpose for me is to present a fractured self. Human language truly is too unspecific and limited to express our best ideas, and it is ever-the-harder when our character ceiling and attention spans so limited. Facebook is a way for me to learn, and one of the few ways in which I gather knowledge that is not greedy. I am proud of the fact that I seek truth before approval by peers and betters, but most of the time the experiment is one that causes derision and heartburn.
My purposes seem to be misunderstood most often when the posts appear to be political. I consider myself a- or anti- political, to the surprise of most (aside: are we who we think we are or are we who others think we are?; also, my definition of political would be the interactions among and between parties and people vying for state power. I have no interest in the competition for power [read: politics], except the toppling of it down to the last brick stacked on another brick). I do plenty of talking about morality, religion, and economics, much of which appearing political, often merely because it involves government or those who are in politics (for the most part, the justification for that type of topic-concentration is because it is so severely widespread as to be unnoticeable without loud critique). Most often, those who are upset with what I have posted misinterpret the goal of a post. It is not to marginalize others or spotlight myself; it is to teach, learn, and challenge ideas.
Despite my goals, I could fill a book with the details of the vicious and poison-filled conversations had and messages I have been sent by people who disagreed with things I have posted. I am not bothered by barbs decrying me as overconfident, uneducated, rich, white, over-educated, a racist, an idiot, an attention-seeker, a negative nancy, or any other insult or nicely-worded anger under the sun. This is now a part of the gig, to which I long ago acclimated. Fascinating as well are those who say or like nothing of mine on Facebook, but make sure to comment in person how they felt about a post I offered to the FB-public (where some craft a persona by commenting or posting, others craft and absorb by abstaining. One wonders if those who post less on Facebook believe their expositions to have more meaning than those who post often…). I notice, too, that people extrapolate what they think I believe based on schemas they have built from their experience of the world. One political illustration is an accusation that I am a Republican because I am against welfare programs. There is narrowness in this type of categorizing that boxes in the accuser and reveals a serious mis-education that is based on false generalized schemas that discount the flexibility and originality of individual minds. Much of the time the heuristics are useful and proper, but their abuse in passionate conversation is dangerous. Little of it should matter to me, though. I am playing in anticipation of Tolkien’s Long Defeat, and I toil not to be liked but to find what is good and true in a world that offers so many paths as to discourage introspection altogether. What that path is like is a discussion for a medium more personal than a blog post…
That is not to say, however, that I am not surprised by such visceral responses to what I do on a social media site where a majority of posts are devoid of meaning or substance. We have become subject and object of triviality in most things, and we are very rarely reminded of purpose, death, conflict, morality, principle, violence, the depth of the noumenal, or anything that makes us slightly uncomfortable or implicates any negative feeling. Very close family members worry that I descend to deeply into such topics, while I worry they avoid them with the same effort I give. Examine the amount of likes on an inspiring-yet-generic post about a sports team versus the amount of likes that someone gets posting about the nature of sin in Orthodox Christianity. We are suckers for optimism and cursory summaries, and the way that Facebook and Google algorithms are organized can create a bubble in which comfort is the medium itself.
More important than what we are presented with, though, is how we present ourselves. People come to completely associate themselves with many things they believe, to the point that any attack on those beliefs is personal and accordingly deserving of swift and harsh response. What mechanism drives us to formulate our identity based on some beliefs and not others must be strong and very specific, because it is only certain value sets (political, cultural, religious) that leave us unable to dissociate ourselves from what we have learned to hold as thematic in our minds. It is simply not the same if I say I like Britney Spears and you disagree. There is no repercussion there, and we both can think each other “nice” and go on liking other things on Facebook without wanting to gouge the other’s eyes out. These special beliefs are the categories of opinion that are both most frightening and most fascinating, because they are the ones that make people love and hate others based on little but in-group-identity. It results in our wish to be liked creating a socially-enforced thought-guidance momentum. This type of hoi polloi regulation of the outliers reminds me why so few people find it worth their time to post anything of substance on Facebook in the first place, and the cycle begins anew, toward ever more shallow interaction. People have demanded it of me often: “Why do you post things like that? Why can’t you post normal things, like your dinner?” Where we think that our Facebook bonding-by-liking posts about Kanye West with random people we don’t really know is satisfying, we still have this yearn to be known and we feel as empty as ever. Could it be that these concurrent phenomena are not independent of each other in the first place? Is depth requisite to contentedness, and is Facebook a catalyst of the tech-generation’s maladjustment? Another digression I would like to leave behind for now…
The problem with people attacking me is that I am not holistically present in a small snippet of text I have posted on the internet, nor even the aggregate of all of them. In person, I am (as all of us are) much more dynamic than a conversation on the internet can indicate, no matter its breadth or scope. I am worth more than these small statements that cause people to make up their mind about me in full. A vast majority of those who discuss things on my Facebook status know little about me – what I do for a living, how I spend my time, who I love including how and why, what I find actually emotive, what I am like in person, how I discuss issues in the presence of others, and on and on. Some don’t even know what I look like, as I found out yesterday when I ran into a law school classmate who I have as a friend on FB who did not know me when I said hello. I post very little about myself or my feelings online, even on this blog where I write far more than Facebook (this post being exception to the rule, in some respects). It is unlikely that anyone who I only interact with on Facebook has any clue as to my emotional condition or the intricacies of my thought. And people are convinced that anger or disgust is the appropriate response to, not a crime or a morally abhorrent action, but a perceived belief system. A tolerant society, indeed, we have in the West…
It is strange that there are still people that are incensed by the things I post, to the point that they will refuse to associate with me in person, and are stunned to hear things about me that contrast steeply with an internet persona they have associated as Kevin Johnston’s 1-to-1 identity. My beliefs become me and I them, likely because their beliefs are how this person identifies himself/herself. This is problematic. You are not your beliefs alone. You are perhaps your actions, your memories, your experiences, or perhaps an amalgamation of all of those with a mix of beliefs – but what we believe or appear to believe is not a holistic explanation of who each of us are. A study was published some years ago that compared people’s beliefs and actions over time, and how the two affected each other. The conclusion of the study was simple: our beliefs are generally created by our actions, and not the other way around. If I want to act a certain way, I will find a way to justify it and meld it into my belief system, even where I previously believed the action to be wrong. Belief is subordinate to action, and it is much more evident that we are composed at least as much in our action as our belief – especially where the two diverge. So perhaps it is the case while you rail against someone posting something on the internet that they believe (which I do often), the person should not be the focus of your complaints. From what I have seen, you probably don’t even know them, and are arguing with a ghost.
I am of course, not of the opinion that we are able to escape ourselves fully when we log onto the internet, nor that we can keep up a façade of false character for a sustained amount of time. I think people very much are connected to what they put on the internet – but where it is the most base and unthinking self possible, offended at content or mere depth of another’s opinion, perhaps the outlet is unhealthy and it is time to step back.
More thoughts someday on the topic, I am sure. For now at least, I will stay on the social network…
