Facebook and Anonymity
Fashion on FacebookSo Newsweek finally caught up to everyone else and did something about Facebook. I had avoided social networking sites until just a few months ago. For me it started in the same way it does for most people: my best friend insisted that I must see a photo that he put on his myspace page. So I made up a Myspace page for myself in order to get access to his page. Eventually my page included a song by Whiskeytown. I started getting "friended" by all sorts of characters from my high school. But I hated how disorganized everything seemed to be. So, after discovering that nearly everyone that friended me on myspace also used Facebook, I switched over.
Here are some quick notes and observations. College-aged kids join in order to build their social network and have fun. College graduates do a little of that but also have immediate professional concerns. On my recent vacation, my ladyfriend's little brother's girlfriend (soon to enter college) took a couple of pictures in which I look like I spent the afternoon playing in the dryer before spending the evening playing with whiskey. Fun, yet not exactly the kind of thing I want all my peers and potential employers to see. No emergency, but I'm now determined to buy a fantastic digital camera so that I can accumulate enough photos to push hers way way down.
As for the Groups options - there are plenty. I'm a member of a group of people who expect that my girlfriend's little brother will die unnaturally and soon. I saw today that one of my friends no longer wishes to express his support for General Franco publicly. I started a group based on shared astonishment at Daniel Larison and his blog.
Besides my admiration for Eunomia - people can learn that I root for the New York Mets, the New Jersey Devils and the Sydney Swans; that I'm interested in wine and tariffs; that I'm currently reading Scoop by Evelyn Waugh; that I really like Ryan Adams' latest album "Easy Tiger" and that I am willing to affiliate myself with people who claim they would "wear John Stockton shorts if it were socially acceptable."
There is an under-appreciated side to Facebook and its mass following. It is re-introducing some social stigmas and reversing the former web trend of anonymity. New York magazine long ago noted that young people were making a spectacle of themselves online. It's all so new and scary, they said. But in a way, there is something quaint about it.
For instance: Your status on Facebook can function as a big public promise ring. Don't flirt with that girl at the bar, she may check on your status and send a message to your mate. Where once a man could hide his wedding band, now his marriage may be as public to the entire net as it would have been in a small 19th century village.
This is a stunning reversal in many ways. Back when I sported a bizzare screen name on Prodigy, the internet was a landscape shaped by anonymity. We discovered that anonymity allows people to be cruder than they normally would be - more argumentative, more raunchy, more like a jackanapes. In some ways, chat rooms and online forums retain that character. But Facebook, Myspace and to a lesser degree blogs are making us all much (perhaps much too much) familiar. I wonder if it will make us more tame - and not just in matters of fidelity. After all, I want those pictures pushed down or crowded out and they aren't all that bad. It's just that they aren't part of what I would show someone at first - a first date or a first interview. Facebook, in many ways, makes your first impression for you. It also gives your first impression a kind of permanence and sterility by always being available and always being static. You can change your profile, for sure. But people don't experience those changes in the same way as they experience discovering something new in your personality. Online etiquette guides suggest you treat your Facebook page like a resume. The big difference is that your personal life is now as much a part of that resume as your previous jobs and education. The meritocratic urge to do all the right things that could appear on a resume certainly changed the behavior of a generation that is just getting out of the Ivy League schools it sought. Now that the drunken kissing photos, the allusions to marijuana, and other "interests" are part of our permanent record, I'm willing to bet a certain type of person will take as much care with their personal credentials as they have with their academic and professional career.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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Reader Comments (2)
"I wonder if it will make us more tame - and not just in matters of fidelity."
I wonder if it will make us more bland, though.
Oh man, I'm there. I only got on Facebook for the picture-sending reason too but now it has a true purpose.