The Social Network is old news now by the insane, virally fast standards of the Interwebs, but this review by Zadie Smith entitled Generation Why? is very relevant. Ms. Smith is a teacher as well as a novelist. She encapsulates my disenchantment with Facebook perfectly:
Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.
From that moment in the article, I realized that Ms. Smith had struck the deeply buried vein of discomfort I feel about technology in education (over which Facebook looms as it looms over the entire world, it seems.) Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is making us stupider and shallower. That argument seems almost too blunt, even if it is in some sense true or accurate. Ms. Smith points to subtler sources: her own experience caught between Generation X and Y, and a little book called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
I can relate to her generational nomadism. I am closer in age to many of the students that I teach than I am to many of my colleagues. I am predisposed to enjoy tinkering with gadgetry and software, and I admit to appreciating typographical nuance and the literary merits of comic book heroes. I’m pretty much a nerd, ergo I’m supposed to like Facebook.
But I don’t like Facebook – I haven’t logged in in months*, as Facebook urgently reminds me (“You have 74 unanswered requests!”). I haven’t gotten around to ditching it altogether^; I think I’m afraid, a little. It’s like being a vegan. Pure vegans are inherently hostile to the meat-eating, leather-wearing, egg-scrambling world at large. They go around saying (and I used to date a vegan, so I have actual experience) things like “I’m OK if you eat meat, it’s no big deal, I just choose not to.” But of course, their choice is based on a moral platform that describes our ethical responsibilities toward all animal life, and so all carnivores are implicitly murderers, etc. So the denial is as much an attack as if they went around saying “You are a horrible human being for killing an innocent animal simply to feed your fat face!” Once I quit Facebook altogether I will be seen as hostile to the 500 million Facebook users in the world. I will be planting a flag that says “You are a horrible human being for spending even a second on Facebook when you could be holding someone’s hand or inviting a real friend out for a beer or calling your mother!”
And that’s not how I feel, honestly. Spend time on Facebook, I don’t care. But that’s not how it would be perceived, and so I’ve hesitated.
I am part of a group that exists in between, which, as Ms. Smith points out, is disconcerting. Unlike me, however, she is clever enough to understand the source of the problem and articulate it well.
Irony of ironies – I just purchased You Are Not A Gadget from my iPad on the Kindle Store. But, like, whatever. Ironies aside, the last sentence of the book’s preface struck me down:
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
I worry that my students aren’t becoming someone through Facebook – they are just becoming part of the gelatinous mass of Facebook’s version of humanity.
If you’ve never taken the word of a blogger before, if you’ve never read an article because someone told you it was worth reading, if you haven’t read anything else on the internet for months, please read Zadie Smith’s review of The Social Network. If you read it carefully, and if you finish it (both statistically unlikely, not because you, dear reader, are not a good and decent human being, but simply because of how people tend to interact with the Internet – but, if you’re this far in my blog post, perhaps you will do both, after all) you will begin to remember that you are not your profile, that people are mysteries to be explored (not “poked”), and that we all, vegans and carnivores alike, have a real life to make of what we will.
* except to announce these posts on a “Wandering Academic” branded Facebook page, which is very odd, since I already have a website on which you can find all the posts. I always do my Facebook post furtively. Perhaps I won’t do it for this post. And yet I want people to see it and read it. Oh, the conundrum!
^ I just deactivated my primary account. I feel a little like I’ve abandoned someone. I’m just not exactly sure who I’ve abandoned – is it a small fragment of my self? What a strange world I live in.
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