Life Outside of a Template - Is “Facebook Living” Truly Living?
I’m 25 and I’m an existentialist. Or maybe I am terrified of existentialism.
Regardless, as I begin to finally face the reality that yes, I am an adult, and more so, I’m not going to live forever (yet to be proven), I have come to the conclusion that life is a non-stop journey in answering one question:
Who am I?
Simple enough, right? Absolutely not.
Think about it. From the very beginning of one’s existence, we are thrown into a gauntlet of situations that constantly work with one another to help define who we are. Was my decision to take my first steps earlier than my peers influential down the road influential in building an overall independent attitude - I’d argue to some degree yes. I’m sure there are countless psychological studies to help back this theory up (feel free to weigh in and comment), but to be honest, I’m not even sure if I crawled until I was 2. Ask my mom.
The point is simple. In life, we make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis that collectively define our character and identity. Each decision is a building block of a foundation that only completes construction when you die (yet to be proven as well).
So with this basic understanding and rudimentary definition of life, I pose the following question: why are we comfortable with streamlining our lives on Facebook?
What do I mean by streamlining life? Facebook’s interface alone encourages users to depict their lives through Facebook’s version of life (i.e. basic info, wall posts, photos, comments, connections). Do not get me wrong, Facebook has done an incredible job in creating a template for sharing our lives - my praise cannot be high enough for Zuckerberg and co. in this respect. However, one of Facebook’s greatest appeals in terms of easy-to-use user interface (UI to some of you in the in) is also in my opinion its Achilles heel (besides privacy concerns, its other Achilles heel - we have two heels, after all). Life wasn’t meant to be dictated by a template.
It’s so easy to create our own online personas on Facebook. We choose what to post, what to “like”, who to “friend”, what to make visible on our wall - you get the point. We live in a world now where upon meeting someone, it is very common to “friend” him/her on Facebook and we are instantly fed with a sense of who someone is based on the way they depict themselves on Facebook. To borrow from the wise words of Sir Charles Barkley, that my friends, is “turrible.” With Facebook such a critical part of the way one represents oneself to the public world, I’d argue many are making decisions in life based on how it will look on their Timeline. We live vicariously through our profiles.
But is Facebook to blame? No, not entirely. Facebook has simply (well, not so simply but for the sake of this post’s length, simply) built an incredible platform to show off who we are and share our experiences with others. We’ve taken that platform and turned it into a system where “showing off” reigns supreme - and it’s way too easy to do so. And in this process of building our Facebook profile (now Facebook Timeline to us early adopters), we have in a sense, lost our own personality as we have bought into the Facebook way of telling life’s story and sharing our identities.
I’m not quitting Facebook any time soon. In truth, that would probably be social suicide, as I find out about many of my invitations to events though Facebook. But I am decreasing my time spent on the network, and more importantly, my time interacting on Facebook.
Somewhat ironically, part of this been ushered on by an increase in use of other social networks that are a) more private with less clutter and noise and b) more focused on a specific theme, such as location check-ins with foursquare. Sure, one may argue that foursquare is just as much, if not more, about bragging about one’s “social status” by checking into certain locations over others and building a “location profile” to show off. To a degree, this is true, but I find the location discovery aspect of it to be my own driving motivation and the overall appeal of using the network.
Most of my decision to cut down on Facebook time has been inspired by a desire to find more open ended ways to show off my personality, viewpoints, inner thoughts, etc. such as Tumblr. (This is sooooo meta right now.) Tumblr is an intellectual social network that while certainly easy-to-use, challenges me to post different forms of content (blog posts, photos, videos, etc.) that broadcasts not to audience not made up of those who I have friended, but instead, the world. I could pretty much put up anything on here, from self-labeled “deep posts” on streamlining life through Facebook to clips from my favorite movie, Jerry Maguire.
At the moment, Tumblr is like an unexplored jungle, one in which I find myself posting photos I’ve taken which I consider to be art. Such posts would probably be lost on Facebook in its current state, but have a home here on Tumblr. Even as I post gifs of “Bananas in Pajamas”, I am much more thoughtful of what I post to Tumblr. Over time, I expect Tumblr to more accurately depict who I am than my Facebook profile.
I’m not trying to start a fight here with Facebook, nor completely provide an explanation as to why I think Tumblr is the future in self-discovery. And hey, I could be completely wrong here.
To quote Neitzsche:
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
As I continue to ask myself who I am, I expect platforms like Tumblr to have a huge impact of answering that question over time - both to the outside world, and more importantly, to myself.
