Maybe it's just my circle of friends, cause I see some pretty harsh stuff on my network of Facebook hip hip contacts, but much of what I experience on my personal Facebook account has led me to feel that Facebook's semipublic nature has caused a lot of folks to default to Sunday School behavior, as if the conversations I have with those people in real life don't exist.
Since I don't fit in real well at Sunday School, it's kind of weird to have to see old friends in a context in which they act like their parents are watching all the time. Of course, sometimes they are!
But what's also weird is the soundbite aspect, especially with people who I don't see very often or who won't communicate much through other means. I'm not one of those people who talks like I'm at a superficial cocktail party. "Hello, how ya doin" just ain't me on a daily basis. But if I say more than three lines on most people's accounts, you can tell it's too much.
Last night I posted what was probably ten sentences all together in an exchange that would have taken less than two minutes in real life and I got ribbed a bit about the length. The dynamic was a bit more complex than that, even in so short an exchange, but it reminded me that I need to mostly focus on Facebook as a Rolodex and take the real where I can find it.
But that's the thing. Most people can only be real in private. 4 or 5 years ago, I thought you could be real in hip hop media but then I realized that all the harsh-edged talk and boisterous exchanges were also pretty superficial and simply followed the rules of a different setting than I had experienced as an isolated hip hop fan.
For example, Russell Simmons talks about speaking truth to power but when you speak truth to his power, he and his people cut you off. I guess lying liars are like that!
On my personal Facebook account I don't associate with people who are two-faced like that but I have to keep watching myself. The illusion of free and open dialogue is just that for the most part.
And then you get some f*ckhead like Zuckerberg saying that folks who have more than one identity don't have integrity when what we're actually dealing with, in the case of Facebook, is a communication context in which many forms of integrity are not allowed.
Our forms of communication are some of the few things that differentiate humans from the mammals we enjoy eating. So you can take your Sunday School Soundbites and continue to inch closer to the level of a well-dressed cannibal with great table manners and a single, sad identity. I'd rather communicate like a real human being and celebrate the multitudes within that Walt Whitman spoke of in Song of Myself.
Update: I'm realizing that as more people arrive on Facebook, as it becomes more like the local mall where everybody shops, the more opportunities for alternatives will emerge, rather than less. But only if they're well-targeted to niches and specific sectors of the population. Luckily for Facebook, everybody in social networking is either trying to be all things to all people or make claims about their niche that just don't hold true. Regarding the latter, I've seen way too many social music networks launch claiming to be able to build audiences for bands when they don't even have an audience yet.
I'm not original in this kind of thinking but I am a recent Facebook user so having the experiences I've been hearing about has gotten me thinking about FB in a more grounded way as have indicators that some teens are losing interest in Facebook, though what that means given Facebook's amazing growth remains to be seen.
