Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Facebook: Friend or Foe?

Recently, I attended a dinner party where a couple of friends were discussing the possible pros and cons of taking a break from Facebook. This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this conversation in recent months. In fact, it seems to be downright de rigur these days in Internet savvy circles. The bottom-line is invariably this: while a wonderful tool for sharing stories and insights, staying in touch with friends and family who live far away, and reconnecting with people from one’s past, ultimately Facebook only serves to drive us further apart. Instead of getting together for a night of board games with friends, we play online Scrabble with strangers. Instead of making calls to family members to discuss important life events, we just take the lazy route and post the news as a status update.

I know all of this to be true, and yet I admit that I’ve often scoffed at the idea of a Facebook break. Oh come on, I’ve said, don’t you think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? Don’t you find that if you really want to see or talk to someone, you still make an effort to do so? I never understood why someone who enjoyed what Facebook has to offer would want to take a break. Lately, though, my position has started to shift. I’ve begun to feel that Facebook might be doing me more harm than good. Here are three recurring scenarios that have made me think twice about the ubersite’s impact on my life:

Wow, I’ve got something really interesting to share! In other news, no one cares.

Countless times I’ve turned to Facebook to post a link to an article that I found interesting, a YouTube video that had me in stitches, or an idea that I wanted to discuss with my peers, only to be met with the virtual-world equivalent of crickets chirping. Hey, I’ve told myself, no big, it happens. But when it happens too many times in a row I’ve started to question myself. Maybe that link wasn’t so interesting, or maybe I’m late to the game and it was already posted by someone savvier weeks ago. Or—oh god—maybe everyone’s hidden me and no one has the heart to tell me. The inherent suckiness of this is made all the more acute by the fact that other people can post that they just sneezed, and receive twenty responses saying, “Wow, you rock! That’s so awesome!” I wish I could be more blasé about it or laugh it off, like a friend of mine who once posted a comment, received no response, and then reposted the comment prefaced by “I SAID…” But lately, it’s not so easy. It stings, and worse, at times makes me wonder if perhaps my friends and I don’t have as much in common as I thought we did.

Check out pictures of this amazing event you weren’t invited to!

Say I’ve recently invited a favorite couple to dinner and been told they’re too busy to socialize at the moment. Or perhaps I’ve repeatedly emailed a friend about hanging out and never received a reply. Then one morning I log on to Facebook and am bombarded with a whole gallery of photos posted by that couple or friend, replete with all of my besties hugging each other, holding drinks, and celebrating some seemingly landmark life event. The captions inevitably say, “Last night was epic, how will we ever top it?!” Or, “You’re the best friends a guy could ever hope for!” Ouch. I can’t help but wonder why I didn’t make the cut.

The funny thing is, in real life it’s likely that I never would’ve heard of this event I wasn’t invited to, and would thus have been spared the indignation and hurt feelings. I’m starting to think it works this way for a reason. Because of course I realize that my friends are allowed to have dinners and parties and BBQs that don’t include me. We have different levels of friendship with everyone we know, and it’s inevitable – and understandable – that I might be invited to a casual friend’s big birthday bash but not her small impromptu Sunday brunch. I know that my friends, family, and acquaintances aren’t out to show me up or hurt my feelings. They’re just posting about what’s going on in their lives. But maybe it’s all a little too much information. Maybe we don’t need to know—aren’t supposed to know—a lot of things that our fellow Facebookers tell us.

Man, I never realized until now that everyone’s life is more fabulous than mine.

Maybe one morning I wake up feeling pretty good about things, despite the endless rain, my sore back, that job I never heard back about. But hey, I’m in a great relationship, I love where I live, my dogs are awesome. Life ain’t so bad. I log on to Facebook and am immediately greeted by photos of a coworker’s recent safari in Africa, or I read a status update about how my friend’s fabulous new husband just took her to dinner at French Laundry, or I learn that a not-terribly-ambitious acquaintance just landed her dream job. Well gee, I felt okay about my life before I went online, but now I see that my existence is entirely pedestrian and fruitless.

Perhaps the hardest part of all this is realizing that it works both ways. If I’ve felt hurt or slighted by others’ Facebook updates, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve inflicted some of these experiences on my friends without even thinking.

I was discussing all of this with a friend recently, who made the very salient point that spending a lot of time on Facebook is like reliving high school, a place where we spent five days a week, nine months out of the year interacting with the same group of people. We formed cliques, we joined groups, we made our political affiliations known. We spent so much time together that we all knew way too much about each other. This inevitably led to gossip, fights, allegiances that were quickly formed and just as quickly broken. The popular people got all the attention, regardless of how smart or interesting they actually were, and the geeks and nerds and dorks – the ones with eccentric interests and tastes – got ignored, or worse, openly mocked. When we moved on to college or jobs, all of that changed. We got out into the world and realized that what one relatively small group of people thought or did wasn’t the entire scope of our existence, and we were so thankful that high school was over. But some days, Facebook can make you feel like you never left.