I want to be able to sketch out all the ideas to explain everything, but there is never space and one always gets lost somewhere in the details, even as the image seems complete and comprehensive as I can see it in my head.
modern life > endless narcissism, consumption, as parts of the amazingly successful system of 21st century capitalism >> facebook and "what white people like" etc. show us how much like we are like everyone else ESPECIALLY in the inanities we post on facebook, how we're all just a lump of consumers thinking we are individuals >> self conscious attempts to shore up our individuality defined in contrast to all the other inanities the people we know are posting on facebook. . Characters in stories and movies aren't usually self counsicous. That's what makes them interesting. >> Facebook etc. makes us (or maybe just me, or just some of us) more self concious. >> You were not on facebook. Interactions with you were not meticulously recorded in the way you took note of here. >> I felt more like an interesting person in my interactions with you. Like a character. >> But we really are all part of this big capitalist society and you miss out on more from (self-consciously) standing apart from it than you gain . . even in a supposedly isolated south american country I am thinking and commenting at length about this >> we are relatively powerless to resist the age and place and society into which we are born, and might as well make the best of it. >> Drink beer and play bocce and walk in the woods.
I should garden but I don't have any cow shit.
—
Ian's response to
"Reflections on 9 days of having a facebook"
posted on my blog, not facebook
"Human pyramids speak to our sense of community and belonging,"
—
Jonny Opinion,
On my 16th day of having a facebook I went to a BBQ picnic at Oak Newton Park between Oak and Newton in New Monterey. This was the second-to-last day off I have had as the job I share with 2 people is composed of roughly 9 shifts, usually giving me 3, of late giving me 5. One is Sarah and the other, on my 17th day of having a facebook, went to Norway and won't return until what will be my 40th day of having a facebook. My plans for the day were simply to go to a picnic. It was a Monday and I can imagine this relative freedom would make some other people jealous, but also that these other people probably had the weekend free for BBQs, picnics, etc. I arrived with a bike-basketful of picnic supplies to find half a dozen friendly faces and I dismounted thinking and perhaps even saying "I can't imagine a better thing to be doing right now."
We ate and chatted and people I did not know as well—but knew peripherally around town, had friends who were friends, went to high school with, etc.—started to come. Eventually people were not all in the same conversation, socializing occurred in different factions. Nearby picnic benches were annexed. I gathered around the ukulele that was being passed around. My friend Keith wished we had a football, mentioned that he had a frisbee. He went to his car to get the frisbee. Frisbee-tossing was initiated. It got stuck in a tree. Someone I was not introduced to climbed the Coast Live Oak and a helpful neighbor who noticed our situation appeared and handed him a wooden pole with which he knocked out the disc. More frisbee-tossing. And then: a call for a human pyramid, designation of roles (3 on bottom, 2 in the middle, one of whom was me, 1 on top, 1 taking picture), the construction of a human pyramid, the photographic documentation of the pyramid, the literal collapse of the pyramid, and documentation of the collapse.
In the spring of 2007 I went to Seattle to visit my brother (who lived there) and father (who was also visiting) during my Spring Break from college, and 4 of my friends surprise visited (from Portland) our mutual friend who lived in Seattle and me. The romping that ensued epitomized fun/spring break/youth/spontaneity/etc. and became a symbol of itself when, after strolling through Pike's Place Market and stopping on the lawn at the nearby park,
we decided to form and photograph a human pyramid.
The top of the pyramid was a young man we asked to head the pyramid balanced on his back while playing guitar. I was on the bottom (3rd from left from photographer's perspective). You may note that this configuration has 4 on the bottom, 3 in the middle, which makes less sense in retrospect but seemed perfectly inevitable at the time. I had a disposable camera during the trip and someone used it to take the picture, and I think someone else took a picture by some digital means. I don't think this photo ended up on facebook; if it did I would not know. However, I am confident that anyone not involved in the photographing of the pyramid was not having as much fun as us in that moment. Moments like these exist for us to convince ourselves that we are having the most fun possible; that we are happy, fun, spontaneous people. And photographs of these moments exist as proof that we are happy, fun, spontaneous people, though this calculated proving seems to contradict the spontaneity—unless
1) You are on vacation and as a natural matter of course you are taking a picture.
2) You are filming a Hard Day's Night or anything else hip or music-related from the Beatles to the Real World.
3) You are old friends re-uniting and preserving it out of love for one another.
4) You are partly living in an electronic avatar version of yourself.
5) This is not a deeply thought-out list that is closed from other perspectives but rather an unjournalistic piece of creative writing.
Both 1 and 3 apply to this first pyramid, and, in my head, we were basically filming a Hard Day's Night 2: Seattle. Several of us were actually in a band together, and we knew and loved each other so much that our communal decision-making and action had an element of art to it. Moments of spontaneous performance art are not, therefore, absurd notions. There was a certain assurance that we all meant and understood roughly the same thing when we did something together. Artfully climbing on top of one another and documenting it seems almost an inevitable representation and celebration of this creative union. Whether everyone feels this way about the people they hung out with in their early twenties, I cannot say.
I don't care to imply that this latter friend-stacking experience is further from the primary platonic pyramid. I felt like a happy, fun, spontaneous person while participating in this secondary endeavor; however, I felt more aware that I was participating in such a feeling, which would seem to put a distance between my overt self-consciousness in the moment and my supposed liberation from self-consciousness. Can you really enjoy an experience as much when you are thinking of when you had the experience before with other people, and also thinking that it was, the previous time, a more organic expression of pure joy/friendship/spring break/etc.? It makes a certain sense to think of a human pyramid as a socially acceptable, public orgy. Self-consciousness would theoretically destroy what should be a very visceral, unintellectual experience. But you are still naked and having sex with people and cannot be entirely stuck in your head, I imagine. I have never been in an orgy so I can't really compare.
When I inevitably saw the pictures on facebook (one straight on by a non-pyramid-participant [unless you consider the principle photographer as inherently a part of and participant in the pyramid] and another from the ground in front of the pyramid taken on the iphone of the bottom left [from front] keystone) I found it strange
1) to see myself publicly as such great friends with these people I had just met that I formed a human pyramid with them and
2) to read a comment from my good friend Kevin (with whom I did not interact in reality until the 27th day I had a facebook [before I had a facebook I would see him usually at least once a week]) asking simply
What is Andrew doing there?
At first my question was What am I doing here on facebook? But now I suddenly realized what I was doing in reality, how I was interacting with my friends, was beyond my control. "What was I doing?" could be answered by 900 million people who could check-in with me somewhere, tag me doing something, etc. I felt somewhat as though I was cheating on Kevin with new friends, and I was busted. This is, of course, ridiculous. Ours is not a relationship that has grown stale, that we refuse to end out of habit, as evidenced by our frequent interaction on facebook. What we "like" about each other is greater than what I "like" about most of my facebook friends, if not more. And vice versa. So this reality of me not-in-a-human-pyramid-with-Kevin, but with acquaintances, one of whom he works with, is out of line with my own experiences. It is a construction, both physical but also conceptual, like a facebook page, or a facebook group, or a series of comments on a post. It is not a naturally-formed expression of community; it is a staged photo opportunity for a community that—while real for a few moments—does not exist.
I understood why Sarah's friend decided to close her portal into this world of calculated expressions of friendship and happiness. The world is always more beautiful and interesting when you weren't there and the moment has been processed through the instagram application.
* * *
During this week I had been communicating through facebook for the first time since I got a facebook with my friend Chad. Over my second weekend of having a facebook I began to (what could be considered) bait arguments with my friends about the worth of having a facebook, though really I was just describing a natural correspondence between what I was reading (Chuck Klosterman) with what I was thinking about (facebook).
First, a discussion about the impulse to be interviewed:
We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed, or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. as though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state—and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any any all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance." Chris Heath, interviewed by Chuck Klosterman, in "Something instead of Nothing," from _Eating the Dinosaur_.
My friend Jaymee liked it and no comments were made. The second one, at the end of the book, a few days later, inspired three comments and no likes, and was accompanied by an image of Ted Kaczynski's smiling face:
It is uncanny to have read this book during my first adventures in facebook: "I suspect that if you went to his supermax prison cell in Colorado and asked Kaczynski who most represents the problems he outlines in his manifesto, he would say something along the lines of “People who know the truth, yet still refuse to accept what they know to be true.” That’s who I am (and—if you’re reading this—you probably are, too). Even though he deserves to die in jail, Kaczynski’s thesis is correct: Technology is bad for civilization. We are living in a manner that is unnatural. We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson’s televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now." Chuck Klosterman on Ted Kaczynski in _Eating the Dinosaur_.
TK's connection between needing and being enslaved to technology is fairly abstract and a little ridiculous but it echoed the comments I have heard about facebook for over half a decade: people don't want to want it, regret spending hours on it, describe it as superficial, but they let it be a major part of their life. My friend Kimberly respected the connection I saw but had some harsh words for CK:
I can't help feeling a tad insulted when Chuck Klosterman informs me that I am not human enough. Why don't you read "Invisible Man," Chuck Klosterman! People who are enslaved do not have to worry about how human they are, remember that? Strange parallel!
And Chad began an exchange that ended on 19th day I had a facebook account, when I wrote the first reflections:
dude, we've been "living in a manner that is unnatural" for the last ten thousand years. and i'm pretty sure not one of those years passed without somebody claiming the end to be nigh. that piece of technology that you are reading and quoting from was originally thought to spell the end of civilization, too. all technology, from fire to facebook, can be both good and bad for people, but it's never the threat that Klosterman, and all the others like him, claims. when people start seriously believing that stuff is when they start putting the real dangerous technology into mailboxes.
I certainly have to respect his point; and anyone who sides with TK will always be wrong. It is interesting to note one of my best friends (one of my few not-facebook friends) has the initials TK and, on principle, will never have a facebook account. He will also never resort to violence.
When I left my facebook open the next day on the computer of a café for whom I host an open mic some smart ass posted, as me, that
there's only one thing i want in life. to live amongst the wood nymphs and rule as their fairy queen. *sigh* one can dream
and Chad responded that "there's an app for that" and that I should read a Slate rebuttal to the Atlantic's cover story: "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" I was unaware that the Atlantic had devoted its cover to the same thing to which I was devoting my extra-curricular studies, but in an abstract way I was flattered to learn.
I read both, finally, the day after the human pyramid, my 17th day having a facebook account, and left a post on Chad's timeline with a link to the Atlantic story :
Chad! The slate.com article was boring. The most interesting, thought-provoking sentence was a quote from the article it was refuting: "The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude." It doesn't matter if it makes people statistically more lonely; it matters how this thing is changing the way we think and interact with reality and each other. And it does!
Chad's response:
andrew! please don't ad hominem attack my magazine articles. it's very damaging to their self-esteem and they already have enough issues. baddaboom! did you read the atlantic article? the whole thing is cherry-picked statistics and contradictory claims. but my basic point is one the author also makes: "Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine." i think it's interesting that both of the authors you've used to make your point about the damaging social effects of technology seem like people who don't care much for interacting with other people in real life. marche makes that clear in the atlantic article and klosterman says, "... i don't enjoy talking to most people more than once or twice in my lifetime" on pg. 2 of eating the dinosaur. how convenient for them that to have a technology boogieman on which to blame their anti-social tendencies! to me, it seems like a sort of provincialism: minus tech=real, meaningful, the way it was and should always be-- plus tech=different and thus suspect and likely dangerous. how exactly do you think it changes the way we interact with reality and each other? what negative changes have you seen or experienced?
I did not get a chance to respond until Thursday, and my computer was being especially fickle, forcing me to post a picture (of Ira Glass at a desk in a desert) with my text (partly asking if he wanted to see the live broadcast of the staged This American Life episode) for it to work at all:
Chad! I may have mentioned that, because of my limited technology, I cannot reply to comments and I can only post if I do so with a link or a photo, and I am actually rewriting this after I posted it without text. Anyhow, regarding the picture, do you wanna go to the mall tonight to see This American Life kind of live? In regards to our ongoing discourse on facebook and society, I just want to clarify that I don't think that facebook is negatively changing human discourse—I personally have a vague feeling that having a facebook does not correspond with how I want to live my life, and, by having a facebook, I am trying to define why this is true, if it even is. In regards to distrusting new technology as tv-is-corrupting-our-youth provincialism, I don't think our generation's grown-ups waking up to videos of cats instead of the New York Times is my ideal of cosmopolitanism.
I ended up going with him and his friend to the mall an hour early to get drinks at the restaurant across from the movie theater where we met several more of his friends. I chatted with him about our facebook interactions, the Atlantic story, which I conceded was more art than journalism (something that means something positive to me, and actually caused me some beef with Ira Glass about the Mike Daisey incident earlier this year), and eventually our conversation was opened up to the larger group and I talked about the human pyramid, and ascertained that 4 of the 6 present had been in human pyramids, and one woman had been in 4. It became clear that I was not to be facebook friends with any of these new friends I had met and with whom I was to watch the TAL event. Essentially the only thing I talked about (besides TAL, linguistics, and my father, their applied linguistics professor) was facebook. The logic there is unclear, but it is nearly two weeks later and I have received no friend requests.
We transitioned over to the mall movie theater eventually and all misunderstanding I had with Ira about his self-righteousness re: Mike Daisey disappeared. I was in my community, one with hundreds not really interacting, but together, with our eyes on the communal screen not just "liking" it, but loving it. The whole thing brought a sunshine flood of perspective on what had of late become a conflicted and complex relationship with Ira Glass and his radio program.
At the beginning of May, my 10th day having a facebook, I learned I did not get an internship with This American Life. I did not post this on facebook. I didn't really react. It was always a long shot, the kind of fantasy that doesn't happen in real life. Though less than 2 weeks later I felt accepted by the ethos of the program. I realized that no contributer to the show would ever successfully come out on top of a competitive application process. David Sedaris walked out on stage in full clown make-up (though just a regular suit below the neck) and told a story of despising the people in front of him in line for coffee. I am of an anti-social, hyper-moral class of neurotic people, and though I could not see them in the dark, I could hear and feel them behind me; and though I was not physically with the people on screen and the feed was delayed 3 hours, I could hear and see the writers, dancers, musicians and storytellers on screen. I saw the host of the rival open mic standing outside by himself. And I am sure most of them listened this weekend to the rebroadcast of the show for radio, or, if they were like me, they listened to it twice. And even though there's no way to show all of my friends on facebook that I am participating in something simultaneously with other people even though I am alone, consuming media in my house, I am convinced I am part of pledging community just by the shared tuning of our dial.
I got a ride home from the mall and edited what I had written and published it on my blog; and just as I am about to do right now, I posted a link to facebook.
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