Sometime last spring I read several of Zadie Smith’s novels (The Autograph Man & On Beauty). They were fantastic. But, as often happens these days, it’s Ms. Smith’s articles that made me interrupt conversations to read aloud brilliant, piercing observations about the state of humanity. Smith, daughter of a Jamaican and a Brit, stands between several worlds and two generations, giving her a unique platform to critique both generations, doing so with humility, grace, and uncompromising truth.
Her “10 Notes on Oscar Weekend” (found in the collection, Changing My Mind) is a prime example. So is her “Generation Why,” a discussion of The Social Network, You are Not a Gadget (Lanier) and Facebook published in The New York Review of Books several weeks ago. I highly recommend it. She writes:
Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format? …. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
CTH remarked, as we were discussing the article, that the vices we fight in our day seem more like cockroaches than dragons. Perhaps less immediately fatal, but they creep into the dark corners of our lives–making themselves at home. And then, when the day comes, they are nearly impossible to root out.
R. Card Hyatt
Rebecca, thanks for pointing Zadie’s ideas out to us. That quote is dead on target. Yet the thing that gets me is how people have ‘happily’ submitted to an online existence as hollow as a balloon.
There has always been a temptation towards shallowness. American culture often seems predicated upon that thin desire. But now we can finally do something about it. We have moved from easy smiles and handshakes to smiley faces to finally avoiding the other as completely as we can manage at the moment. It’s living with others, body and soul, that is reality.
Thanks
Byrne
*Shiver*
The ability to incarnate our shallow desires. This begins to remind me of certain levels of Dante’s Inferno.
R.C.H.
In one sense, if what Smith says is true, then Facebook, and social networking in general (whether we look to the future – Twitter, or the past – Myspace, Xanga/Livejournal, Friendster) is something to be feared. When I read excerpts and articles (San Diego CityBeat Magazine ran a op piece on Facebook recently) on the topic I often wonder who they’re talking about though. For example, Smith claims that Zuckerberg believes “the exchange of personal trivia” is the same as “friendship”. Are there people that really believe this? Are 500 million people really so entrapped by “a Harvard sophomore” that they don’t realize how ridiculous Facebook really is?
I’m not saying that no people like that exist. What I do think is that at some point something else, something more distracting (or better at distracting?) will come along. I know Smith echoes this as well, but I feel like we’re coming at it from different angles. Perhaps I missed something, but I feel like she portrays Facebook as being some software incarnation of Zuckerberg’s boredom. In a sense I suppose this might be true, but at the same time is there any escape from this? If you’re using a PC are you bending to the whims of Gates or Torvald? If you’re an Apple fanatic, are you really just getting sucked into Steve Jobs kingdom? Heck, outside of computers…if you drive a Ford, is it because Henry Ford got bored one day and said, “I want to build a car because I can”?
I realize the last example might be ludicrous…maybe. Still, as I’m typing this out on WordPress.com I can’t help but feel like I’m in someway doing it in the manner in which I do it because a programmer made the decision to make the comment box X pixels by Y pixels…
and like most things I write, I have no idea where I was going with this.
I find it’s easy to be cynical about things that are popular: Vox Populi, Vox Crap. But I’m kind of with Caleb (?) on this one — I don’t know anyone who confuses their Facebook connections for real friends, or their “Likes” to express deeply-held aesthetic preferences. My concern for Facebook is not that people will confuse it for reality, but that they’ll waste time on it that’s better spent in other avenues.
Facebook is probably not the incarnation of our shallow desires, but simply the latest manifestation of real desires that aren’t being met, like most vices have been since the beginning of time. Eliot complained of hollow-chested men long before the internet was invented…
CSD
Not Caleb 😉
But yeah, people are definitely wasting time on Facebook when they could be doing other things. Giving our society’s tendencies towards convenience, I wonder if these other things are really “better”, but that’s neither here nor there. Unfortunately, a lot of people would probably just be on their couches watching TV if they weren’t on Facebook, but I suppose watching TV with family is actually better than sitting in front of the computer while the rest of your family is on the couch watching TV…
That being said, if my wife is watching “One Tree Hill”, I’m definitely going to head for Facebook 😉
CSD– I find that it’s easy to be unthoughtfully cynically about popular things. I think it’s quite difficult (and rare) to be thoughtfully critical of it–thus my respect for Ms. Smith. For example, hating on Twilight or HP vs. reading and critiquing it? The later takes time and effort, making me suspect that the majority of people who decry the books’ sins don’t do it. But this is my own cynicism rearing its head.
What I am most afraid of, personally, is how Facebook (or the like) might alter my behaviors. For example, I already use fb messages/posts to ask a quick question when I might have called the person instead. I am especially tempted to rely on the facts/news I learn about someone on fb– which cause me to feel like I know them better than I do (case in point, chelsea s. is pregnant– if it weren’t for fb I wouldn’t know this because I don’t actually know her that well. The abundance of information gives me a false sense of connectness. And this is me, I’ll always choose real live people over everything else– and I’m still worried about fb’s effect on me).
And, for quite a lot of people (perhaps those who surf Facebook during my entire 3 hour class on special education) it is a sign of alienation from real personal contract … ?
Just some thoughts,
RCH
@everythingisgenius
I agree that almost everything we do is defined by limitations set by others. The question is how deep those limitations go. I propose that the limitations of Facebook (or Apple–especially if you’re constantly connected to its world via iPhone, iPad, iPod, laptop, etc. It’s not fair to harp on Facebook as the only culprit here.) run deeper than something like the WordPress comment box or an 8 x 11 piece of paper.
RCH
I agree with you RCH. There is a way in which our media do change us. Marshall McLuhan noted this back in the Sixties. He said “the media work us over all of the time”. By ‘media’ he did not mean merely television, film, etc. He included light bulbs, cars, washing machines as things that mediate our relationship to the world. Think of how much the light bulb has changed everything about us. They aren’t merely candles that last longer. Rather they have abolished night and true darkness. I am fortunate. I live in a place where real darkness still exists, where the woods are suffocatingly black. When I reenter the world most people live in I am forcibly concussed by the depth of the change.
Everything connected to the computer alters our relationship to reality, thus changing us. As Jacques Ellul pointed out in his books on technology, no technology is neutral. Timid souls, he points out, want us to believe so, that it is all just a question good use. But each technology has it’s own needs and demands and we alter ourselves to fit the medium.
Television isn’t just a domain for couch potatoes. It has altered our perceptions. Americans now talk in the ironic tones inherited from sitcoms. We filter information now so rapidly and shallowly that major news stories, say the Chilean miners’ rescue, which would have been been a front page story in the 90’s is now just a photo and a paragraph in Time or Newsweek because it’s already old news in less than a week.
So yes I’m saying there are serious ontological issues here. Humanity has changed in the last few years as a result of social networking. Consider how different communication was only ten years back. 15 years ago people still wrote real letters. And don’t we all feel busier now? Like there’s always something we should be doing? These are major changes in my book.
As Hans Rookmaaker once said “Yes let’s be nervous together.” It’s the together part that is crucial. (Great discussion by the way.)
I can definitely agree that the limitations Facebook has are greater than the limitations of some other things. I think that the limitations exist (well, at least some of them) for very practical reasons.
I also agree with The Andromist. Social networking…hell, the fast-pace of the internet in general is changing the way we interpret things. To tie into his reference to the Chilean Miners, I’ve seen some studies that show that because there is so much microblogging and headline news (Yahoo! homepage for example) that we’re losing our ability to connect with stories because we blaze through them and move onto the next story before that story has processed in our minds.
In some sense, technology has been a major boon for collective efforts. When a disaster happens somewhere (say, a massive earthquake in Haiti), we can all jump on our computers and read about it, go to the Red Cross website and donate money. This is great for the effort, but, because of the speed, likely undermines our personal connection. At the same time the internet, specifically social networking, increases our ability to be annoying. I always get a laugh logging onto Facebook after there’s been an earthquake here on the West Coast as inevitably all of my friends will log onto their accounts and post “OMG, DID YOU FEEL THAT???” A couple minutes later all of these people will make another post that includes the USGS supplied information…it will look something like this: “OMG, 5.6 129 miles south of San Diego!”
RCH, I do appreciate the examples you provide regarding chelsea s. and the feeling of knowing someone better than you actually do. I think this is a very common thing, and certainly something that most, if not all FB users feel. I guess at this point the question that crosses my mind is, what do we (collectively) do about this? Is there anything we can do about it? Is this something that only individuals can become aware of and will have to solve at an individual level?
Putting my spoon in the soup, too, I want to say that though I very much agree with the general sentiment here that remains wary of social networking online “presences” like Facebook, there is one way that Facebook proves to be actively useful.
That way is this: Many people use Facebook–most of my personal friends do (and by using the word “friend” I don’t mean the word in the sense “acquaintance” as it is used on FB)–to remain in contact with the particular socially conscious organizations of which they are, in their fashion, a part. Through Facebook, many of us, who don’t choose to publicize what color we are painting our bathrooms, or what is heating in the microwave (“RIGHT NOW!”), do choose to learn of events, comment periods, petitions, and public statements pertaining to the social issues we find important or which concern us. In this way Facebook works as a clearinghouse… a single place to check in a busy day in order to stay caught up with what is going on, and to decide how to allocate spare time for letter-writing and commenting and other activities of that sort in the name of change.
I am NOT one who lives online–the very thought is anathema. As one who still “comes and goes” from immersion in the online/internet “world,” everytime I am online for any length of time, I can feel the tempting tug to go deeper and deeper into the shallows of the internet, even as I know there is much more important work and play to be done in the tangible world of what some of the creepier, Singularity-believing “netizens” call “meatspace”. So, I am not immune. I sense the seductive danger of virtual life.
For someone used to being in a world that isn’t surrounded by human artifact–like one of the commenters above, I live in a place where the woods are “dark and deep”–the contrast is sharp, though between the virtual real and the physical real. May I suggest that the contrast is sharper for someone living in a context like mine (or the commenter above) than it would be for someone born and raised into, and living in suburban and neo-suburban-rural America?
A person could walk some hundreds of miles from where I am sitting to the Bering Sea without meeting anyone, or at best only a handful of people. Traveling weekly from my home to the closest town is a passage through wilderness and near-wilderness that comes right up to the edge of both sides the highway. The temperature outside right now is -18F. Yesterday it was -30F. These details aren’t mentioned to boast and brag. I think they are germane to the discussion here. It appears we’ve lost a taste for the vividness of daily experience, particularly agonistic daily experience of a certain physical kind that asks us not to always remain perfectly comfortable. Because our society has chosen (if choice is the word) to have its membership lose contact with the natural world–meaning a world not dominated by climate controlled interiors, machines and human artifacts–with even the food eaten coming wrapped in layers of packaging from hundreds of miles away–we may have perfectly prepared ourselves to turn toward the dancing “reality” of the colored screen.
How many children or youths today will look back in adulthood on “tanglewood days” of spent hours outside in the woods, at the edge of the woods and exploring trails and paths? How many will have run through open fields or meadows under the sun? How many will have sat around a fire in a forest clearing in the middle of winter, snow all around, and real cold to be felt when one ventures away from the comforting circle of flame?
In my life, I’ve lived in both places. I’ve lived there (in the artifact of the American City) and I’ve lived here (on the edge of deep wild). The City was not without its attractions and entertainments, but the true leisure of being in a place that fully lives after its own fashion, according to non-human rules, and made by no man or woman’s hand… that leisure was entirely missing. I choose here, where I am sitting to write this, meaning this wooden chair and the scene outside my window.
As we have made it easy to turn away from experiencing life in a physical setting of vegetation, rock and the occasional wild animal–what the 19th century began to call “nature”–toward life in the physical human artifact of the suburb and city, can it be any surprise then, that more and more of us make it an easy choice to turn away from the physical to the electronically virtual?
Erratum (I wish there was an “edit” button!):
In the first sentence from the 4th paragraph in my posting, there should be a comma after the word “though,” making the sentence read:
“For someone used to being in a world that isn’t surrounded by human artifact–like one of the commenters above, I live in a place where the woods are “dark and deep”–the contrast is sharp, though, between the virtual real and the physical real.”