The Facebook Phenomenon

I joined Facebook a few months back. If memory serves, I was invited to join by a friend who used to live in Atlanta, but I don't remember clearly -- it could have been that I was in a frenzy of googling old friends and trying to find people I'd gone to school with.

Having lived around the world and gone to so many different schools (I counted once -- not including preschool, I went to 7 different schools for elementary, middle and high school, in 5 different countries, and then of course there's college and law school), there are so, so many people that I've known and been close friends with that I not only never see, I don't even know what country they're in or if they're still alive. It makes for great reunions, but the last big India reunion I wasn't able to go to, and I don't think my school in Israel even has reunions outside of Israel. Which provides a great excuse to go to Israel, but there are so many other claimants on my pocketbook at the moment that I don't see that happening any time soon.

Anyway, so Facebook is a great way to search for people and reconnect with old friends. I've reestablished contact with some friends from college and high school and middle school, and it's been great to catch up with them and see how their lives are going.

But Facebook is also fascinating for the sheer multitude of opportunities it provides to "interact" in cyberspace with people on a regular basis. There are all of these applications that allow you to do things like send each other greeting cards and write on each others' "walls" and rate your friends' hotness and "poke" them and start cyber-snowball fights and send them imaginary gifts and drinks and rate your compatibility on everything from taste in movies to who you were in a past life. You can join groups and networks revolving around TV shows, politics, knitting, where you go or went to school, and about every other thing you can think of. Essentially, you can have an entire, active social life without ever leaving your computer.

And of course, as with all social interactions, patterns emerge, only because they are all chronicled and cataloged in each person's profile, they are much easier to see and assess.

There are the people who are obviously concerned with having as many Facebook friends as they can possibly collect. I got a "friend" request from a guy one time and I saw on his profile that he went to the University of Virginia, but his name didn't sound familiar. So before confirming the request, I sent him a message asking who he was and if we had known each other in school. He replied that he didn't know me, but that he saw that I went to Virginia and liked collecting as many friends as he could. And sure enough, I checked his profile, and he's got over 1000 "friends." Where does he find the time?

Then there are people who are really into the cyber-interaction, and they make great use of the various games and "compare your scores on this quiz with Justin" and "start a pie-fight with LaShonda" and "give Dexter a Vampire Hug" and on and on. I think those might be the people who have jobs that they either don't like or that allow them alot of time to fuck around online, because while that stuff can be fun, it's also incredibly time-consuming. And also, addictive. To the point where if you couldn't be online every day, or almost every day, it would be really depressing, like you couldn't get your fix.

And I also wonder how fulfilling it is, ultimately. From a psychological perspective, it's kind of like collecting. I've never been a collector of dolls or stamps or spoons from the fifty states or refrigerator magnets or anything, because it always struck me as an enterprise that could never be satisfying. In addition to the fact that you've got all of this stuff sitting around your house or filling up you're drawers, you're never done. No matter what you've got, there's always more to get. If you can look at your profile and you can see exactly what how many friends you have compared to other people, and who's got a higher "hotness" ranking, and who's got lots of people sending them cards and gifts and wanting to get in pie-fights, it's like having your coolness graded, and your grade posted on the board for all to see. You've given your social standing a number that can always be improved.

I don't mean this as a criticism of Facebook or its fans at all -- I'm guilty of all of this stuff as well. I'll spend hours on the "how many cities have you visited" application, as if not being able to remember the name of one more little Indian town that I've visited will make or break me. I've wasted time playing the Never-ending Movie Quiz, trying to get my world-wide ranking up. And I search for people I know and look for new friends, because I feel like my paltry 12 makes me look like a loser.

Geez, didn't high school end 20 years ago?