The Cult of Facebook

It seemed like a good idea at the time. (But then again, I’m sure I said the same thing when I was sunk all that money into my fancy Betamax tape system.) After several months as a member of the Cult of Facebook, I started to have some concerns about the level of personal information I was putting out there for public consumption.

I fully appreciate the sense of community Facebook brings, bringing people together to care and share and generally just hang out, like the world’s biggest company picnic. And in this new post-divorce life, where it’s essential to put yourself out there and not come across as the Unabomber’s surlier cousin, Facebook does provide a great social tool. Still, there’s something about it that feels so public (as in even my parents, former in-laws and ex-girlfriends are there) that I wanted to pull back just a bit. Specifically, I’d just as soon not have the world know my relationship status. If for no other reason that there isn’t one. So, I decided to pull back a bit, and I stopped listing myself as single.

Unfortunately, despite my effort to keep my personal life personal, Facebook had different plans. It accepted my change in relationship status, then posted a note for all the world to see, proclaiming that “Craig is no longer listed as single.” Literally within the hour, I started getting congratulatory emails from friends, telling me how happy they were that after nearly three years of luckless dating, I’d found someone. Who knew that getting into a relationship was as easy as hitting a delete key?

I spent the next week fielding messages from people trying to find out whom it was I was getting serious about, and responding to them with the lame explanation that I continued to be the King of All Failed First Dinner Dates. It was both scary and impressive to realize not just how closely my friends were watching Facebook but also how eager they were to see me matched up with someone.

Which is why Facebook seems like the perfect solution for everyone trying to put their mid-life back together again. First of all, it’s like nearly anything else involving the internet. Using it just makes you feel younger. Plus, we all need as large a social circle as we can get, and this new technology expands it to the size of the Arctic Circle. Without ever leaving the comfort of your computer, you can locate and converse with any grade school friend, college roommate or fellow fan of obscure French cheeses.

Or, you can let them locate you. In my year on Facebook, I’ve been Friend-ed by people I never expected to hear from again. There was my high school newspaper editor, who I hadn’t even thought of in 30 years. There were both my college and grad school girlfriends, whom I was convinced had spent the past couple decades cursing my name. There was everyone from my Italian ex-in-laws to a few former bosses to parents of kids that my kids used to go to school with. Looking at my home page was like having my life pass before my eyes, only without the fear of imminent death.

It reminded of those early days of my first answering machine, when it was a rush to come home to the flashing red light. This little beacon of hope lured me in with the promise that people wanted to be in touch with me. I couldn’t wait to play every message back. Until, with no warning, the thrill was gone. Nobody was saying anything interesting and with increasing frequency, the messages were from people I barely knew, like telemarketers offering me great deals on carpet cleaning and chimney sweeping (despite my apartment’s lack of carpet and chimney.)

To be fair, the fun of Facebook has lasted longer. It’s kind of like high school in reverse. Instead of there being a few cool cliques that made it clear they had no interest in you, now it’s all about creating as big a group as possible. Often with the very people rejected by that clique three decades earlier. I can finally be invited to eat lunch at the cheerleader’s table (if only Kelli R or Sandy P would accept my Friend request….c’mon already! I lost the braces and crewcut ages ago). Funny how in that sense, Facebook is now sort of like an online dating service. Although with this one, you’d actually know when somebody is trying to pass off a high schol graduation picture as recent because you actually went to high school with that person.

Despite all the potential benefits, however, Facebook poses the same burnout factor I ran into with the answering machine. Once the high school editor told me all about coaching girls high school basketball teams, and I told him I was a divorced father of two, we were pretty much done. We’ll likely never email again. Maybe I’ll meet up with the ex-girlfriends face(book) to face(book) again, but our brief mail exchanges have already pretty much reminded us of why we haven’t talked in 20 years.

As personal as Facebook seems, giving you instant up-close-and-personal access to anyone who has been in your life, it’s also an incredibly impersonal way to communicate. The goal is having conversations in bursts of 75 words or less with hundreds of people at once, and confine the topics to such topics as funny things your cat just did or your review of Adam Lambert’s latest Amerian Idol performance. You feel like you’re connecting with people but in the end, there’s infinite cyberspace between you and everyone on your Friends list. Which is precisely the opposite of what should be happening at this later stage of our lives.

It’s so easy to get sucked in to all this. I’m not proud of this, but I actually carried on an entire Facebook relationship with someone. A friend of mine introduced me to a friend of hers on the site. That friend and I began to message each other, escalating slowly from minor chit-chat into longer meanderings about our personal histories. It was pretty much like going on a date, only I didn’t have to change into a shirt that buttoned or debate whether I should spring for the second glass of wine.

We got along so well in this Facebook fantasy world, in fact, I should have left it at that. But a month or so into all this, our schedules finally collided and we met for dinner. And that was that. Whatever magic we’d cultivated via the website disappeared when we had to actually sit down and have a real conversation. It had been so much simpler to just communicate in one-paragraph bursts with emoticons. We’ve never seen each other again.

Ultimately, Facebook is kind of like cologne. Use it sparingly, and it’s a good thing. Use it too much, and you’ll send people from the room very quickly. I realize it’s all the rage and, especially during those early, lonely months of separation and divorce, it’s comforting to have instant company at your fingertips. Still, in the struggle to get back out into the world, it’s important to keep the technology in perspective as an occasional substitute for actual human contact. I’m so serious about this, I can hardly wait to go Twitter about it.

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Read to all of the articles in this series.