By Kyle Lees

Is facebook a “toxic mimic” of community?

Ian Kaufman

Features Editor

When people’s actions seem bewildering - which is, increasingly, most of the time - I often refer back to Kurt Vonnegut’s “First Law of Life”. Back in 1971, when the internet was still a twinkle in the U.S. military’s eye, Kurt Vonnegut delivered an address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It’s fitting that he chose such a mundane event to expound on the meaning of life.

“We are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time,” he told the gathering. “Older persons form clubs and corporations and the like. Those who form them pretend to be interested in this or that narrow aspect of life. Members of the Lions Club pretend to be interested in the cure and prevention of diseases of the eye. They are in fact lonesome Neanderthalers, obeying the First Law of Life, which is this: ‘Human beings become increasingly contented as they approach the simpleminded, brotherly conditions of a folk society.’ ”

Back when it first started gathering popularity, nothing seemed more bewildering to me than facebook. Raised in a home where newfangled gadgets like microwaves and washing machines, cable TV and dial-up internet were tolerated reluctantly, if at all, I was appropriately disdainful of this strange development. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew something wasn’t quite right.

I think I can remember the precise moment when these amorphous misgivings about facebook came to a head: When I was informed of the birth of my friend’s daughter by an invitation to be her “friend” on facebook. The thought that her entire life would play out on facebook made me a little queasy. My mind flashed to the image of a couple updating their relationship status during their wedding ceremony (this actually happens) – was this going to be the norm for her generation?

It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of misgivings, particularly since warning that a new generation’s habits will leave society in tatters isn’t exactly anything new. Often these concerns are pretty silly, and very much overblown. Nobody knows this better than the boomers. This sometimes absurd tendency was skewered in Doonesbury, the comic strip emblematic of that generation, back in the ‘60s, when one of the young character’s dads got into a tizzy over faded jeans:

“Why do you take a perfectly decent pair of trousers and ruin them before you put them on? I just don’t understand it! What is this destructive impulse that people your age have? You know, you kids do the same thing to your blue jeans that you’ve done to the whole fabric of our national life!”

At the risk of seeming as hopelessly outdated as he did, I think it’s fair to say that we kids do the same thing to facebook that we’re doing to the real world. That is, remove anything that isn’t human, unless it exists to serve our interests. It’s this aspect that’s most disturbing about the “parallel universe” online: it’s the ultimate playground for the first generation in history to live mostly in cities. For kids raised in an urban landscape where we’re surrounded almost completely by artefacts of our own making, facebook just seems like a logical extension of the real world.

The interesting thing is that, surprisingly, young people today seem to share my reservations. When asked how much they use facebook, for example, their answers are almost invariable apologetic, their estimates couched in excuses. Most volunteer the acknowledgement that they know they should use it less, but [fill in excuse here].

Our generation supposedly are like “fish in water” when it comes to technology – we don’t even think about it, we’re so used to it. We’re often portrayed as brats spoiled by technology, blithely texting and tweeting on our BlackBerries and iPhones on the commute to work (in our hybrids, no doubt), tragically unaware of the fragile social bonds cracking under the weight of our accumulating techno-gadgets. But talk to a young adult today and they’re usually the first to admit doubts – and sometimes even shame - about their use of msn, facebook and twitter, among other things. So here’s the kicker: why does a generation defined to a large extent by their use of social networking sites have such a guilty conscience about it?

I think this is where Vonnegut’s simple insight comes in: Most apparently baffling social phenomena are explained by our submerged longing for the conditions of what he calls “folk society” – societies where everyone knows everyone else, and these bonds last for life. At the end of his address, he says that “the National Institute of Arts and Letters don’t really give a damn for arts and letters, in my opinion. They, too, are chemically-induced efforts to form a superstitious, affectionate clan or village.”

If you asked Kurt Vonnegut, he may well have surmised that facebook was a shiny new car driving towards that most ancient destination, the folk society. And he would certainly have told you that it would never make it. If you buy into the idea that facebook is one more tool we’re using to try to sidle up to those primordial inarticulated communal needs, the site becomes even more interesting, but it also looks sorely lacking.

Behind all of the cutting-edge techno-wizardry lie the most ancient and simplistic human desires – for community, communication, exploration and self-discovery. But services like facebook can too often be a toxic mimic of those things – “friends” lists in place of community, witticisms in place of communication, voyeurism in place of exploration, narcissism in place of self-discovery.

The early precursors to so-called social networking sites in the1990s, before the internet exploded in popularity, were online journals, where people would often share more with strangers half-way around the world than they did with their friends and family. Since going public, the internet had served as that kind of social refuge, housing alternative communities based on mutual interests – or just mutual disinterest in the people around you in real life. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed an amount of control over your identity that is impossible in real social interaction.

The internet looks less and less like that alternate universe today. As someone who’s been online since the mid-1990s put it, “now that these people’s moms are online, they’re not as interested anymore.” Facebook, in a way, is the ultimate rejection of the early ethic of the web, used more to keep in touch with people we already know than to connect with strangers. It’s led to a blending of people’s real and online lives that was unthinkable back then – something that’s been hard for many long-time users to adapt themselves to.

The site also turns the early ethic of the web on its head in another way: facebook is a marketing executive’s wet dream. Not just in the obvious sense, that it compiles detailed demographic information, consumption habits, and interests into an incredibly comprehensive consumer information database. We’re well aware of this, and most of us aren’t terribly concerned. But on a more visceral level, the success of facebook seems like final proof that the masses have bought into marketers’ version of the world, not just financially but mentally and spiritually.

What facebook has succeeded in doing is providing a platform for people to essentially market themselves to the world. When someone elects to spend an hour grooming her “personal profile”, deleting photos that make her look bad, posting witticisms on other people’s “walls”, carefully considering her “status” and which bands and movies to list as her favourites instead of walking around and talking to real people, it represents the triumph of the glossy image over imperfect reality. This is the way advertising has been trying to convince us to think for decades.

I know, I know – but facebook is such a great way to keep in touch with old friends and organize your social life. It helps get people out to political rallies and book clubs, organize communities around issues that affect them, and, yes, has even been known to play a role in political decision-making (see Dalton Mcguinty’s withdrawal of restrictions on young drivers after a facebook “protest”).

That’s all great. But let’s be honest: the vast majority of the network’s use isn’t about these things. It’s about creating what former Lakehead philosophy student Stephen Trochimchuk calls “a positive or idealized representation of one’s self”. In his paper The Emergence of “Web 2.0” and the Death of the Author, Trochimchuk refers to this online identity as “a highly personalized product [whose purpose is] to represent or ‘sell’ the self to other Facebook members.” And while there is an undeniable – if often morbid – appeal to that, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing. In fact, I suspect it’s a very corrosive thing.

Of course, all this philosophizing is all well and good, but most of us are far more pragmatic in our decision-making. While we might mistrust facebook and even rue its effects on society, that’s usually not enough to get us to leave. As part of my “research” for this article, I asked my friends their opinions of facebook.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” one told me. “For the longest time I didn’t really use it, and I wondered why all these parties were happening and I wasn’t ever invited. One day I logged on and I had over 100 event invitations for these parties. So now I use it.”