The Terrace Was Crowded
There’s an article in the latest New York Review of Books by Charles Petersen, called “In the World of Facebook,” that you should read. (In fact, you should subscribe to the NYRB if you don’t already—it’s the most literate and politically aware periodical in English, in my humble opinion.) The format, for those of you’ve who’ve somehow avoided the NYRB till now, is that the author of the articles takes a book or two as a starting point for addressing an important issue. In this article, Petersen jumps off from a book about the founding of Facebook, and one about the struggle for control of My Space.
My colleagues and I talk a lot about social networking sites. Writers and teachers spend a lot of time on their computers. I guess every professional in the modern world has to deal with emails, and we have students, and their parents, to answer, not to mention professional associations, administrators, editors, and each other. We spend a lot of time on the net too—researching, reading articles, posting on various blogspots and forums. And of course, we’re writing. I dimly remember the days of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, corrasable bond and trying to figure out how much space to leave for the footnotes, but no one in her “write” mind would wax nostalgic for them, let alone court hand-cramp. In those moments of reflection, when I used to hunt for matches and draw poison into my lungs, I now attend to the merry pinging of my inbox, type a quick twitter, or let my Facebook friends know what’s on my mind. Amusing, addictive perhaps, but not likely to cause cancer.
There’s another reason to engage in social networking, a more hard-headed and practical one. As the founder and principal of a tiny, innovative school, with a budget to match, I am aware that if I’m to get the word out there, it needs to be through more creative means than taking out a full page colour ad in the Globe. Those of my friends who are on the cutting edge, who know how to be hip and out there, tell me the old forms of raising your profile are as quaint as the set dressing on “Madmen”. So, to the amusement of my son, and with his help, I found myself creating a personal Web page, trolling for people I know who have done the same, and inviting them into what Petersen cleverly suggests originated as a kind of virtual dorm room, my profile.
Like everyone else in the world, I’m keen to express myself. This impulse to make things, which most high school and university educations, not to mention most workplaces, sternly quash, is liberated and delighted by the blank wall of a profile page. You can give frivolous answers to the kind of questions that enliven high school year books and jump-start friendships between room-mates. What are your political views, your favourite music, books, movies, quotations. What are you looking for? “Interested” in? (Men, women, both?) What’s your relationship status? You can put up the twenty-first century equivalent of that poster I used to have of Marlon Brandon in leather on a motorbike, my corkboard covered with a collage of art-book images, snapshots, and inspirational lines from William Blake or Muriel Rukeyser. You can laugh out loud when your friends are clever or indiscreet, and be tempted to be indiscreet yourself. “Facebook appeared as a natural extension of the atmosphere of college, “ Petersen says, “where everlasting friendship often seems as simple as making another late-night dorm-room acquaintance.”
That of course is one of the issues. It’s oddly like traveling with a stranger on a train. In the snug apparent privacy, lulled by the clackety-clack of the wheels or the keyboard, you find yourself confiding, confessing, maybe even making things up. A click of the enter button, and then they’re out there, forever, in the imperishable ether. Turns out, it’s not so private after all. Everyone knows a story about someone haunted and even harmed by a virtual indiscretion. I can barely get onto my homepage, but there are those practitioners of the dark arts who can easily get onto it in spite of me. Or even those we’ve admitted in a careless moment, and forgotten, can get us into trouble. Our indiscretions can travel far and wide. I have friends who don’t admit their students as “friends” (Petersen is very funny on the way social networking has “changed the word ‘friend’ from a noun, something defined by duration, to a verb—‘I friended him,’ a one-off event”.) I have friends who have weeded their “friend group” of supervisors and clients. Or weeded their profile, transforming Facebook pages, as Petersen points out, from college dorms to suburban front lawns.
But the allure remains. There they are, my kids, my real-life friends (the people I invite to dinner or go to the Opera with), my colleagues and students, revealing little bits of themselves, commenting on my thoughts, passing me the virtual equivalent of those notes we used to slide under our desks to each other when the teacher’s back was turned. What it is for me is a seat at a sidewalk café in Paris, a constant parade, where I catch glimpses of people I know and people who intrigue me, moments of gossip and jokes and chance encounters. And like any ringside seat at the human parade, an opportunity to eavesdrop, the writer’s favourite pastime.
Tags: Facebook, New York Review of Books, privacy, social networking