Life and Death on Social Media
Social networks have made it easier than ever to share information with people who it turns out, really don’t give a shit about you. But while seeing others’ good fortune is easy to ignore/loathe, bad news is much harder to process, and makes you experience something that the Aspergers-inducing digital age has actively challenged: feelings.
In 2004, I was in my senior year of college and got an early invite to a social network called The Facebook. It apparently was something that the Ivy Leagues already knew about, but having grown tired of seeing the same beautiful, hyper-intelligent faces in their social circles all the time, they decided to diversify, inviting their awkward second-class friends to the party.
I accepted my invitation immediately.
Despite having been an early user of the platform, over the past 12 years, I have amassed a mere 578 friends (which was deemed “worrisome” by people I consider my peers.) In fact, this list is even cumulative — that is, I have never once gone through a friend-list-purge to delete those I no longer speak with (which was deemed “intervention-worthy” by people I consider horrible.)
It turns out, I have not been using the product in the way the founders/God intended. I keep a smallish group of friends. I keep quiet about major life events, and instead deliberate endlessly on whether or not to post something like my current grocery list (toilet paper, gin, pickles.)
This is mostly because I hate being in the limelight, and believe strongly that sharing a good laugh brings people together more than pictures of food. It’s also probably rooted in the countless years of my childhood I spent with a death grip on my mother’s leg, hiding behind a mop of hair — a strange cross between Diana Ross and Buster Bluth (if I could share that image as a status update, I would.)
Social media has always presented a curious juxtaposition of connecting millions (or sometimes only hundreds…) of people, while facilitating the demise of in-person interaction. When my friend Berry quit Facebook a few years ago, she was asked to give feedback on the network, to which she wryly answered: “Breeds Autism.”
I laughed out loud (see Autism), but couldn’t help but worry that she might be right.
A few years ago, I received a phone call from an ex who wanted to personally share some big news with me— he had gotten engaged. We had amicably broken up years ago, so I was genuinely happy for him, and impressed he would think to call me. Of course, part of what I perceived as maturity may have instead been the result of his Teutonic upbringing that valued severe practicality and lack of emotion (he literally built robots for a living). Still, I thought, it was pretty big of him to share this with me directly, before I would hear it from someone else.
It was also the last time anyone shared such a major personal announcement with me over the phone.
Nowadays, we see engagements — even those of our former loves — announced over social media to everyone at the same time. My closer friends will often send such major news via email to a smaller group. And my innermost circle will crank up the intimacy level to a group text.
But no one ever calls.
Calling not only is inefficient (informing one person at a time) but also requires you to hear a person’s reaction in real time. When one friend told me in person that she was engaged, I struggled with the requisite “oh my gaaaaahd……!”, barely concealing the fact that I detested her partner, something we both knew and actively avoided addressing for years. Social media removes all of this. It allows you to broadcast your achievements to anyone on your “friend” list — from your best friend, to your best friend’s 17-year-old nephew, to your best friend’s 17-year-old nephew’s therapist (3 of the 578...) Those who approve will “like” it, and those who don’t will do nothing. No awkwardness, no confrontation, no feeling bad about your completely inappropriate reaction to someone other than yourself experiencing happiness.
And then something else happens. Because it’s so easy to proliferate news, because one post of good tidings reaches all of your friends, you see a ton of such posts every day. It’s not that people weren’t getting engaged before social media — it’s just we never heard about it. Similar to our becoming inured to violence after seeing countless murders on primetime TV, the ubiquity of wedding photos, baby photos, adorable dog photos, adorable dog’s babies photos — it all make us desensitized to life’s biggest dog photos, rather, accomplishments. I got a promotion at work — so what? My cat never got a bar mitzvah. I’m a worthless piece of garbage.
But as easy as it is to broadcast the exciting, once-private details of your life to those you wouldn’t trust to look after your garbage, it’s just as easy to share the bad news. Given our collective American disdain for saying anything bad ever, it usually has to be really bad before we tell anyone what we’re going through.
And given our collective American disdain for hearing anything bad ever, coupled with our over-saturation with perpetual good news, when bad news does strike, it absolutely wrecks us.
A few weeks ago, a picture of someone popped up in my Facebook feed who I hadn’t seen in a while — he was someone I had dated about 10 years ago, which is always reason enough for me to drop everything and stalk away. When I looked closer, I realized that it actually wasn’t him, but someone who resembled him — someone I knew even less well, someone I had met at a party a few years back and had never seen since. The post was from a friend of his, stating that he was in a coma, asking for prayers.
I couldn’t move for a solid minute. I noticed the timestamp — the post was from a day earlier, so I frantically went to his profile to see if there were any updates. Similar posts flooded his wall, asking for prayers, cheering him on for a successful recovery, reporting signs of hope. And then I saw the post indicating that today, we lost someone dear to our hearts. That was it. He had died.
Within minutes, I had gone from casually stalking who I thought was an ex, to learning the intimate details of someone’s death, someone I had met only once and hadn’t thought about in years. I became overcome with sadness, reading how many people’s lives he had touched, and what a great guy he had been, a guy I had never had the pleasure of knowing. I became obsessed — I sent messages to our mutual friend, and learned even more about just how intertwined he was in the lives of people I knew and loved, and just how absolutely awful they all felt right now.
I would have probably missed all of this had I not checked Facebook that evening.
I’m sure other people I’ve met at some point in my life have died, and I’m not even aware. Before social media, news of someone’s death often came the same way of news of say, someone’s wedding — a phone call, a newspaper announcement, word of mouth. In all of those mediums, the best you could do was potentially inquire a bit deeper for details from friends, but it wasn’t possible to go on an endless clicking spree, reading every recent post from the deceased’s bereaved friends, and finding pictures of the person just days, sometimes hours before their death, thinking how he had no idea what was coming, and could the same thing happen to me?
It reminded me of a time when years ago, I saw a post from my lab partner in college. He was begging for anyone to help him, somehow, in any way they could — his girlfriend had gone missing during a backpacking trip in the forest.
I didn’t know his girlfriend, and I barely knew him. But that didn’t stop me from googling her for hours — not even specifically to help, but just because I couldn’t not do it — to find anything, any information at all about her whereabouts, where she was hiking, what she was doing, what did she look like, did she have brown hair like me, did she like other things besides hiking, what was her favorite band, and why didn’t she just stay home that weekend?
I found no answers, except a piece about how after many long unsuccessful days, the search was called off.
I was depressed for weeks over a person I never knew about until they disappeared.
I’ve told this story to many people, including a stranger I sat next to on a plane (let me tell you, I am just a blast to sit with). I confessed to him how guilty I felt being almost angry at my lab partner for forcing the burden of this information on others, making the rest of us feel bad as well. “I’m not a monster, I swear! I hate people for posting wedding pictures too!” I clarified. He laughed, and pointed out that I agreed to receive any and all updates from this person when I added them as a friend. Just like a friend in real life, you’re with them in sickness and in health.
He had a point. Maybe the problem was not that information was too easily available, but that my friends weren’t really my friends. Maybe my friend list should only consist of 250 people, or 50 people, which of course would be deemed “not unlike the Unabomber” by people I am no longer friends with.
Our conversation got cut short as the plane landed, and we said our goodbyes, exchanging contact information as we exited. I missed meeting people organically like that, connecting briefly, intensely, having real-life conversations. I missed feeling hopeful uncertainty for what the future held for two people, especially in a world where there were immediate answers for just about everything else.
He never did add me on Facebook.
