Everybody looks good on Facebook

I went to see The Social Network yesterday and, by Jove, it’s a superb film. It would’ve been easy for David Fincher, the director, to make a blockbuster about Facebook by just focusing on pokes, Farmville, mafia knights, or whatever useless game you can play there; or, equally, he could’ve made a romcom starring, say, Jennifer Aniston and Luke Wilson about how this particular “.com” can start and end relationships – a 21^st century update of You've Got Mail, if you will. The sheer number of Facebook users alone would’ve guaranteed huge takings at the box office.

But for anyone who hasn’t seen it, you will only get about 2 minutes of Facebook in this movie – the other 118 minutes are a cinematic tour de force about genius and the price of friendship. The creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t come off well in the movie, although, even he, the central antihero of the story, can’t compete in assholedom with how Sean Parker, creator of Napster, is portrayed in this film. By the way, what does it say about us – or possibly just me –that a charismatic jerk tends to be perceived as being much worse than a geeky one?

So, a great film – go see it if you haven’t already – but I digress. I was actually going to write about why this tool, so ubiquitous today (at least in the West), caught the attention of millions with such lightning speed. In seven years it has grown from a college prank (FB’s predecessor, facemash.com) to a must have social tool boasting over 500 million users, and counting.  As the movie notes, “Facebook me” has begun to supplant the usual “call me” when eliciting contact from others, at least among younger generations.

To give some idea of the sheer scale of how Facebook impacts our world today, in the movie, the creator of Napster brags with some reason about how he changed the music industry forever. True enough, downloading and sharing of copyrighted material P2P is bringing a swift end to the days of a £15 CD bought from HMV, and Parker was indeed the first to popularize downloading music – most often for free. To say that he totally transformed more than an industry, however, would be an exaggeration because people still listen to music like they did before, even if the format has changed. Likewise, the business model used by record companies has simply evolved from a big investment to get the whole album, to buying just the interesting bits with small instalments. Plus ça change.

Facebook on the other hand... We are faced every now and then with new technologies that transform the how and why we do what we do: papyrus scrolls to pigeons to morse code to mobile phones, for example.* But this virtual world we are now moving into, spearheaded by Facebook, might actually change the very nature of how we human beings are.

Before I go any further, however, for the record, I don’t have anything against Facebook. I use it and I like it and I will continue using it because it’s great. And fun. And useful. It's simply great. It helps me to keep in touch with my friends, and with people from my home towns and beyond. It also entertains me in many ways and I like seeing what my classmates from primary school are up to even if I haven’t seen them in for years. In short, for me, it acts like a delightful glue connecting and unifying my past selves with whoever and wherever I currently am.


Now back to the matter at hand. Perhaps it’s just a logical extension of the internet applied to our every day affairs, but, as the movie hints on several occasions, Facebook is actually far more than the medium it works on. This is because of how it transposes so much of what we want and crave (popularity, friends, coolness, wit, sex, intelligence, looks, etc.) into a virtual world where we can have it all, and it does this to a far greater effect than television, another sign of our times.


The way people spend time on the website – unique visits to Facebook have a longer duration than any other website – refining their profiles, looking at and uploading pictures, corresponding with friends or playing games; adding likes and dislikes, filling out surveys... You know the drill. This myriad of simulacra provided by Facebook and its affiliates has created a new world unto itself. And day by day we move more and more of our lives into the realm of this virtual world. Facebook has achieved this by creating a space for us where we can be that what our egos want us to be, and nothing less, if I may put it in such a Freudian way.

Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook

In this light, its popularity is unsurprising – for what could be more appealing to a modern individual than a virtual world where people will only see and learn of you that which you want them to? It’s kind of like the 80s fashion of wearing and advertising your musical allegiances with band pins. Facebook, however, takes this psychology a quantum leap further by enabling people to clothe their virtual self in the finest of garments their imaginations can come up with. We can add bios, photos, interests, books we’ve read, status updates about our latest thoughts, links to songs and articles we like – basically we are allowed to design and change our whole (virtual) self at the touch of a button or two, and, most importantly, everybody else will be informed about it instantaneously.

Rousseau would have been horrified. Our Facebook self could be construed as an extreme example of his major gripe with society, that of veiling ones’ self with garments (read false advertising) in order to look and feel superior to others. Indeed, Facebook must be New York Fashion Week to his idealized state of nature where "there is a removal of all cultural clothes", which he thought are like "garlands on our shackles" because of how they constrain, distort and ultimately disfigure our interactions.

In today’s Sunday Times, Caitlin Moran quotes a recent article, according to which up to 40% of the information we give online is fabricated. She thinks this isn’t too bad – after all, we also do a lot of this in real life, only offering to others the information about ourselves that we want them to have, and, hey, sometimes adding an embellishments or two. Or three. I think she misses the point, though: the thing that makes the Facebook fib so much more powerful, alluring and addictive is that it doesn’t happen in real time. When social networking, you and I can create a fantasy “Me” at our leisure, from our home, or from wherever we are, day or night, and all the while we are safe in the knowledge that “I am in control of this conversation”. This 21^st century form of interaction is devoid of interlocution, and therefore you drive the narrative at your will.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s idea has such power. It feeds off and into our vanity, fantasies and egotistical yearning to be heard, to be seen, to be respected, be loved; and it does so by giving us total control over our social output. For at the end of the day, this is Facebook: a place with no bad hair days where we can take all the time we want to come up with that killer line without ever risking an embarrassing silence or an unintended faux pas.

Contrast that to real, everyday life as it has been through millennia, where things go wrong, where we often take our foot from our mouth only to put the other one in, and where we usually end up being far less impressive to others than we would like. A social existence where we must interact in real time and think on our feet, even if we might end up chewing on them, that is the real world.

It does kind of scare me, the thought of how big an influence this mode of interaction may ultimately have on how individuals see themselves and behave with each other, and by extension how society works. This is because Facebook, as a technology, panders to one of our lowest common denominators, vanity – just like Big Brother encourages people to judge and look down on others. That’s why I fear for the next generations, who grow up without ever knowing that there was a time without the distinction of “Friend” and “Facebook Friend” – and Jove help us if people begin to conflate the two. Even if this is overly dramatic, Facebook could be to society what the splitting of the atom was to science: an amazing tool and achievement, a game changer, but one that could also make things alot worse.

Maybe that’s just the conservative old-fart me talking – after all, who’s to say the FB Way isn’t as good as how our fathers and forefathers lived? Well, if Facebook isn’t just a fad – and I don’t think it will be because it’s simply too good a tool even if it’s name may change or some FB 2.0  might arrive – I would say it has the capacity to influence the deepest foundations of culture and society, namely who and what we see ourselves as. It could influence our interactions more than perhaps any other invention since... well, I’ll actually have to think about that and come back to you later because rarely does the way we humans conceptualize ourselves change to the extent of bifurcating ourselves into two worlds – the real and the face. Would that Rousseau were here to comment, he would probably do a better job!

In any case, the movie is great – do check it out – and I’ll try to think of other paradigm shifts, as Kuhn would say, that could rival this one, brought about by an obnoxious genius called Zuckerberg.

* Did you hear this story in South Africa, where a company with two offices got so annoyed by how slow their broadband was that they filled a USB stick with data, which they attached a homing pigeon. They then began uploading an identical amount of data to their other office via their broadband connection simultaneously as they set the pigeon off to do its thing. Believe it or not, the pigeon won and reached their sister office first. Nature 1, Internet 0.