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Emotional placebo
Facebook as the ultimate symptom of a youth that can only direct its interests to its own self; and the selves it wished it had
By Diego Costa
A youth so devoid of real friends, real responsibilities, real passions, real love, that it needs to fabricate a sense of fulfillment for itself in the imaginary world of faces and screen names.
I was a Facebook virgin until a couple weeks ago, when a co-worker introduced it to me.
I had always overheard about the Web site here and there — “Are you on Facebook?” “So I was on Facebook last night and, like …” or “Oh, you should Facebook him!” Apparently, Facebook had even become a verb. So I gave in and joined it myself.
But not before scrutinizing the site and being completely dumfounded by the degree in which it represents what it feels like to be young and lost and American in the 21st century. Facebook, a space where the very private becomes very public, is a blatant symptom of a youth so needy of the gaze and affection the real world doesn’t so readily offer, and worse, so delusional that its needs are being satisfied virtually.
On Facebook you can build your identity from scratch, choosing what images of yourself you want people to see and what interests you’d like people to think you have. It also lets you create the illusion that you live this amazing, nonstop-party life, filled with friends from all campuses in the United States and that you are involved in all these incredible communities.
That you have a life. And that people should envy you and your coolness.
Except that on Facebook, all it takes to make a friend is the click of a button, and all it takes to be involved in a community is the click of another one.
The site represents the very state of effortless, inert conformism of today’s youth in America. A youth that expects to live out its dreams from the air-conditioned comfort of its ergonomic computer chairs. A youth whose idea of struggling for a job is surfing Monster.com. A youth whose idea of reading news is the Hotmail homepage. A youth whose idea of dialogue is late-night, homework postponing instant messaging. A youth so pragmatically inclined, so intellectually null it can only direct its interests to its own self; and the selves it wished it had. A youth who expects to solve all of its personal and civic duties behind computer screens, as it sips on Diet Cokes and posts pictures of pipes and bongs and a masculinity-enhancing beer fascination. A youth in constant need to prove that it is something, and that it is like its neighbor. And that it doesn’t suffer and has no weaknesses.
A youth so devoid of real friends, real responsibilities, real passions, real love, that it needs to fabricate a sense of fulfillment for itself in the imaginary world of faces and screen names — which could never really satiate human need for physical bonding. Here, the interaction is as ersatz as the satisfaction it pretends to achieve.
We take advantage of all of the things modern technology enables, meeting people from all over the world (i.e. U.S. campuses), and we make sure nothing goes anywhere. We fear anything that goes any deeper than its aesthetic surface. So it looks like, it feels like we know a wide gamut of individuals who, in reality, we will never physically meet and whom we could never count on.
Facebook trivializes the human experience, makes true friendship banal and belittles physical contact: it takes the spontaneity of the real world for granted because it manufactures its so-called identities and coldly calculates the relationships between its “inhabitants.”
The ultimate exercise in self-centeredness, Facebook allows us to paint a picture of what we would like to be perceived as and gives us the impression that other people will believe this invented self. And that they will actually care.
In a country where 65 percent of people are considered obese (that is not counting the merely chubby) and therefore socially undesired, and many, if not most, nourish a very weak affective relationship with their parents (children who haven’t been loved enough), it seems natural that we would resort to this premeditated, insincere kind of love — this fake sense of self-directed gaze.
A generation so pressured to get out of the house at age 18, be financially independent, emotionally self-sufficient and make a million dollars, it ends up projecting its need for affection somewhere else, a place that can’t really handle the veracity real emotions demand.
And it also ends up being happy with very little of it, with the mere replica of things. So any gaze becomes a good gaze. And the visual representation of all the things we need (parental love, erotic love, friendship) but are too emotionally impotent to ever get replaces the need for the real thing.
If we can formulate images that convey the kinds of social beings that we want to be, and there is the illusion of an audience out there who is willing to believe us, that lets us off the hook. Why even bother with the solid, hard-to-deal-with, tangible realities of things if we can get away with their simulation, their effigy, their double?
But how to resist the easy? Facebook is popular for a reason, and it can get seriously addicting. It gives you the phony sense that you have access to people’s private albums and diaries, that you are close to them. That you can get to know them without even having to actually know them.
It sterilizes human relations, effacing all the possibilities for awkwardness and discomfort that constitute the process of approaching and truly discovering someone in the first place. And, unfortunately, that can be incredibly alluring.
So I “Global search” some celebrities that I think may, who knows, be on Facebook. Like, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Ritchie, Shiah LaBeouf, Elijah Wood. I “poke” them. Elijah Wood “pokes” me back! So I send him a message saying that I am not sure if he is really Elijah Wood, but that if he is, we should be friends (and he should ask me to direct his next film and take me clubbing at the Ivy).
I try to sound really smart and original so that he wants to make friends with whomever it is that my profile makes him think I am. He messages me back (quite quickly, for a supposedly busy movie star) and says: “Actually,” I cringe, “I’m not real and I’m a girl,” he says. “But I’m willing to talk.”
No, thanks, the magic is broken; I guess I’ll just Google myself instead.
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