How Facebook Is Making Us Creepy, Desperate, and a Tiny Bit Undead
Another reason to hate Facebook: It’s turning your friends into zombies
Deb Schwartz has edited and written for multiple glossy magazines. Currently a tutor with the Bard Prison Initiative, she recently completed a novel about a butch bromance set in early 90s New York.
The fantasy of smartphones and Apple goods generally is that via daily intercourse with them, our lives will come to mirror the devices themselves: their beauty and efficiency, their futuristic/Zen-organic/baby-fascist “simplicity.” These enticingly touchable devices and their attendant apps and social media platforms dangle a promise, endlessly renewed by updates and upgrades, of a life very different from the messy, uncertain, contingency-filled one we currently inhabit; a life more akin to the enticingly empty infinity pool tapering off against the backdrop of the Caribbean used to advertise all things up-market. In other words, a life that is clean, bright, cool, and deathless.
Each time we pick up these devices—yes, still and always, newness hovers behind the screen—we are filled with hope that we might experience something like an answer to our yearning for a better world, or at least a better something. There will be the email you are waiting for (you know, the one with The Answer), the post everyone likes, the something that puts an end to the scrabbly, casting-about yearning that has you crouched over your device, endlessly posting and checking, posting and checking, the steady pull that keeps you in a forward-leaning posture of waiting, forever waiting for this less-than-entirely satisfying experience, the one you are currently engaged in (car ride, train ride, conversation, meal, holiday, project, childhood) to be over so the next (better) one can begin.
“I’m ready for this to be done,” I recently overheard a woman telling her trainer at the gym as she pumped away on the VersaClimber. Glaring at the clock on my own machine, appalled at its sluggishness, I was ready to silently commiserate, but it turned out she wasn’t talking about the first-world horror of cardio tedium—she was talking about her pregnancy. She was four months along, she reported. “I just want to get on with it,” she said. On the radio, wrapping up a news story about a LIRR commuting clusterfuck filled with first-person accounts from people whose rides did not go as planned, a WNYC reporter told listeners, “These commuters are ready for this day to be over, once and for all.” In our fantasies, the dissatisfactions of the present come to a close, the future arrives. We slide into the infinity pool. We relax. The meeting, the pregnancy, the day will be over once and for all. Certainly at one point the day will definitely be over once and for all for each of us. Is that what we’re rushing toward?
The poor day, I wanted to say to that WNYC reporter, the commuters—what did it ever do to you to make you pray so fervently for its demise? Because how often does it happen that we actually arrive, experience the contentment we are hurrying after? How long does it last? Is sleep-training a toddler really superior to pregnancy? And won’t you want to get that over with so you can get some sleep and get the kid off to pre-school so you can get back to work and sooner rather than later pack that sucker off to college?
Everyone, everywhere, wants the same things—love, happiness, contentment, good health. And we’ve always had the opportunity to watch ourselves (with varying degrees of clarity) and those closest to us (with what we trust is greater clarity) pursue these things—sometimes with grace, sometimes in ways that are neither productive nor pretty. The choosing of the inappropriate partner, the staying in the sucky job, the ongoing astonishment at the bad behavior of the known asshole to whom they are biologically or voluntarily tethered: possible paths to the poisoned well are many. This isn’t new. What’s new is the number of stages, thanks to social media, on which we can now watch our friends not only pursue their happiness, but narrate the process—for a much wider audience, and often dressed in costumes that make them completely unrecognizable to those of us who know them best.
It’s distressing, watching this happen. Watching your nearest and dearest become transformed—by which I mean minimized—by technology. Not only watching them as they become enraptured by their device, endlessly checking for that bit of information—finally, the celebrity gossip to end all celebrity gossip! And with that, I’m done checking Buzzfeed forever—or affirmation—Hooray! The Nobel committee has ruled that my tweet is the funniest, smartest tweet of all time and now all tweeting will henceforth cease— that might provide the sort of happiness that would allow them to surrender said device and participate in the fleeting present in which we all live, but witnessing the shockingly pale reflections they create for themselves online. Outside the world of social media, if you experience something someone you know has created, whether it’s a cake, a drawing, a birdhouse, or a bowl of soup, you gain new insight into that person and feel enriched by the encounter (yes, even if it’s not a world-changing success). “Ah! I never knew you thought about that,” a friend of 25 years told me recently after reading something I’d written; meaning at least in part I never knew this aspect of you, never followed that street, never knew it opened up into a park like that, how delightful. But online, the experience is typically the opposite. Very rarely do I see a post and think what lovely cake; more often it’s I cannot believe this pile of horseshit.
Because too often, one’s online persona becomes nothing more than a conglomeration of one’s most highly developed defenses, a golem of neuroses. Defenses can be wonderful things; we’d all be dead without many of them (they’re what motivates us to protect our head from a blow, our skin from the cold, our psyche from stress) and bereft without others (talents and hobbies can both be pathologized as defenses; it’s common pop-psych wisdom that there would be no actors if there weren’t people who feel inadequate and crave attention). One of my favorite defenses, according to my psychoanalyst, is humor. This defense, of course, can be deployed in ways that are more or less positive; making a funny remark that cheers up a down-at-the-mouth friend is clearly a more productive deployment than saying “after you, Princess” to the huge, angry person who shoves past you on the subway. But while none of my attemptedly humorous social media posts are going to get me punched in the face like cracking wise with a stranger might, neither are they productive. Like many posts I see, instead of having some worth unto themselves, they’re transactional, crafted and displayed in the hopes of getting something back.
Maybe I’m working at home, feeling a little lonely or isolated, when I think of something funny. I could keep it to myself, but I’m also thinking my friends will like it—and more importantly, “like” it, offer me some electronic validation that I am funny (and therefore special). So I post. I feel confident I’m going to get some likes. I get a couple of likes. Of course, the more likes, the better, but as I keep refreshing, I realize I don’t just want likes from random people. I want likes, or comments, optimally comments, from certain select people, which will keep the conversation going and keep me from myself or what I’m doing a little longer . I hear from A, B, and C. Well, that’s fine, but where’s D? I might have to text her or ask her the next time I see them “Hey, did you see the thing I posted” D. will likely explain she was busy arguing with her girlfriend. Jesus, D. and her fucking girlfriend, I think to myself, responding to D’s imagined explanation, When are they going to break up already? And then there’s fucking E, who never comments on anything, that tool. In my attempt to get attention I have not only managed to end up feeling less adequate than when I began; I have also manufactured resentment where no resentment existed before. Why are the people that I wish to affirm me, my joke, and my existence not responding in a timely manner, fulfilling this need I have voluntarily created? What a mess.
And it all arises out of a simple urge: the urge to exchange the thing that’s happening—anxiety, loneliness, frustration over a commute or pregnancy or any of the dozens of difficult mind-states we all encounter dozens of times a day—for a different, better one. It’s an attempt to salve some immediate craving, however fleeting. And it never works. It never, ever works and on top of that it’s humiliating, the doing, and then the re-doing once you’ve forgotten the lesson of the unsatisfactoriness of the last go-round. And the only thing worse than watching yourself do it is watching your friends do it. Possibly because there are more of them, possibly because watching one’s friends do exactly what you do is somehow more painful.
There they are, parading their defenses just as you do, and getting just as little in return. And if you really know them well, that’s when it’s most jarring. To watch the people you love take their experience, which you know to be rich, difficult, changeable, and complicated, and shove it down the narrow chute of social media’s conventional forms and have it emerge as bologna is terribly sad. Instead of the delighted I never knew you thought about that, what lovely cake, it’s that’s not what really happened. You’re selling yourself short, playing the fool. You know this friend’s mother is in the hospital, or she’s waiting for her own test results, he’s worried about getting fired, or not getting tenure, or his kid’s behavior problems, and there he is posting about some office minutiae hyuk don’t you hate it when… Or conversely, there’s the very accomplished friend posting overly personal information about her relationship situation or mourning process. Hacking up their densely marbleized lives and processing them into Lunchables-like chunks, transforming their complex, beautiful selves into consistent, approachable avatars worthy of comments and likes.
What are they—we—trying to say? Hoping to get? Actually getting? A post, unlike other kinds of performance, is one that requests and allows for an immediate, direct response. I want to hear from you what do you think about this like unlike comment share. Tell me please, what I am. Am I funny? Isn’t it hard, what I’m going through, and am I not deserving of your sympathy? Don’t you see how frustrating/joyous/tedious this is for me?
Mostly, what is hard about watching one’s friends and loved ones online is seeing how much they want. How hungry they are for affection, support, attention. How very naked and vulnerable. There they are—there we are—laid bare for all the world to see. One wants to pull the blinds down, draw the covers up to their chins, press a cool compress to their foreheads. And why, the thought creeps in, if they were so agitated, disturbed, or happy, whatever way in need, did they not call me? Not only did E. not like my comment but why, instead of posting about the anniversary of his father’s death, didn’t he call me? The people who responded in the comments section I barely know and I barely know them because they’re not his closest friends. They’re acquaintances. He could have called me or someone else who knows him, who cares, who might actually give him what he needs, what most humans need, which is to simply let him know that what he’s going through is really, really hard.
What one feels, reading these hastily typed posts, is the overwhelming press of so much human want—our friends’, our own, pinballing about, looking for sustenance, for answers, for reflection in the shiny, touch-responsive surfaces around us. The lucky among us do find, in varying degrees and for varying stretches of time, relief and rest from this want, this searching—in our work perhaps, our faith, out in the woods or in our kitchens, among our nearest and dearest. But in the virtual spaces of social media there are no such refuges and no such rest can be found; only the scramble toward something that looks like it—that winks at us for a brief, sparkly moment, then retreats back into the dark.
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