You are More than Your Facebook Page

A while ago, for my Creative Non-Fiction class, I read the article "Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith, a youngish black British female writer. It was both a creative essay and a review of the film "The Social Network" and it totally summarized all the feelings I have been feeling about Facebook. I got my Facebook page way back in high school, after everyone else had already gotten one and was always asking me "Hey, do you have a Facebook page?" I was kind of slow, in terms of being "internet savvy" or whatever. I think I'd actually just gotten a Myspace page a little while before Facebook exploded all over the place. That's how out of touch I was. But I digress. So, I got my Facebook page and started friending everyone and anyone I knew even remotely. It was all a competition to see who had the most friends. And it was alright for a while. I thought it was pretty useful to keep track of my family back in Seattle and also see what was going on in the lives of my classmates and whoever. But then I went to college. I got wiser about who were my Facebook friends and who were my real friends. Cue my first friend purge. And later, my second. Sure, sure Facebook was still kinda fun and what not. Games and things, comment wars, chatting. But its charm was wearing off. And then I read this article. You can read it here: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith

To summarize it's main points:

• The real Mark Zuckerberg is nothing like the Jesse Eisenberg version. Of course the screenwriters spiced him up with witty one-liners and what not. The real Mark Zuckerberg is quite boring, actually. He seeks the "elimination of desire." (A quote from one of his interviews.)
• The internet "underrepresents reality." (from Jaron Lanier's "You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto") On Facebook, all you are is boiled down to a series of likes and dislikes. Human beings are complex, confusing creatures that can't possibly be summed up in a bunch of random little facts.
• Facebook forces people to perform. It's all a big contest in who can get the most friends, who has the most pictures tagged of them, whose status gets the most likes. If a person's Facebook page doesn't have a lot of pictures or updates on it, people usually assume it's because that person has no life or is really boring.
• It allows people to do the very barest minimum in actual communication. And in some cases, people are starting to replace ACTUAL HUMAN INTERACTION with Facebook. (OMG He liked my status? HE'S TTLY IN LURV W/MEH!)

I would really just like to add to these arguments that I think Facebook is a poor replacement for real life. I'm not saying that I'll delete my Facebook or that anyone who uses it is wrong or an idiot or whatever. In terms of businesses and media and all that stuff, Facebook is great because it allows them to get in touch with all sorts of customers and push their products on people. I'm just saying that, eventually, I hope that Facebook goes away. It is killing the English language. It's making people more and more socially inept. And everyone should know that you are more than just your Facebook page. Go out and BE SOMEONE, and then share it with all your friends. Your REAL friends. Because, honestly, if you really wanted to be friends with all the people on your friends list, you'd call them up and talk to them, or do stuff with them.

That's all.

Peace out.