Beware of any phrase that uses “social” as an
adjective. Social network, like social justice or social change, is
code for something pernicious.
Facebook’s stock has lost more than 25 percent of
its value since its May 18 initial public offering. It’s hard not
to see the company’s Wall Street woes as a metaphor for the product
it pushes.
Facebook the site, like FB the stock, thrives more
on hype than substance. FB’s price-to-earnings ratio hovers near
60, about four times greater than for the average S&P 500
stock. Facebook’s user-to-spammer ratio is nearly equal, with the
anti-spam company Impermium (consider the source) estimating that
spammers start as many as 40 percent of Facebook
accounts.
Isn’t it all spam?
The stock is a waste of money. The site is a waste
of time.
But an
everybody-else-is-doing-it-so-why-shouldn’t-we attitude prevails on
the stock and the site.
“Facebook friend” is another way of saying
“stranger.” We allow people into our personal affairs who we may
not even know personally. The site displays America’s shameful
aversion to the greatest word in the English language: no. We are
afraid to reject entreaties of online attachment, so we put our
lives on display to people we wouldn’t let within fifty feet of our
medicine cabinets. And to the extent that we do reject
social-network solicitors, we do so in the passive-aggressive
manner of ignoring, rather than refusing, their friend
requests.
Computers have that dehumanizing effect on humans.
They encourage people to treat the person at the other end of the
computer like a computer.
If nothing else, the social network provides
affirmation for why you don’t actually socialize with your
reconnected friend from fifth grade. Whoever said “leave the past
in the past” never said it to Mark
Zuckerberg.
For the people who have yet to land their own
reality television program, there is Facebook. There,
exhibitionists can overshare and voyeurs can peep. But peoples’
lives grow boring to the people not leading them. So while the
exhibitionist impulse of Facebook may never wane, the voyeuristic
side of it eventually does.
In pre-Facebook days, an awkward encounter with a
long lost acquaintance might result in a painfully-long
three-minute tutorial on the stories behind all of the pictures
trapped in a wallet. Now, people willingly embrace this treatment
— at least for a time.
This is the Facebook phase. Like cramming a crowd
into a phone booth or talking to truckers on a CB radio, this fad
fades.
But Facebook, with its ubiquitous presence online
and on television, refuses to let America defriend it. The site’s
creators, as the events of the last two weeks suggest, have too
much to lose.
The smartest people dedicate their lives to making
the rest of us dumber. The creation of Facebook might be seen as a
manifestation of the insecurity complexes of geeks. It’s not enough
that they are so smart. They dedicate their lives to creating
devices — Twitter, iPhones, Nintendos — aimed at lowering the
collective IQ. The geek’s apartness from the bell curve’s
ever-leftward-shifting peak becomes even more
pronounced.
Smart people have strangely created a world in which
to be smart is to be strange.
Mark Zuckerberg’s life conflicts with his creation.
He fenced. He studied the classics, apparently quoting The
Illiad at will. He learned four foreign languages before
matriculating at Harvard. One wonders if he could have achieved all
that in the distracting age of Facebook. Or, if the next Mark
Zuckerberg will be too busy wasting in front of a screen to create
something for the world’s offline inhabitants.
Facebook doesn’t equal faces in books — or faces
outside for that matter. The glare of the screen indicating the
computer is on also tells us that the person is off. Perhaps the
greatest influence of Facebook, and other digital diversions, is
the proliferation of fatsos and fools. Our brains and bodies
regress as technology advances.
The decline is bad for the bank accounts of Facebook
investors — both in terms of money and time — but good
for their lives. When the curiosity wears off about how much an old
flame now weighs, the user — fitting that the internet and drugs
employ the same lingo — might take a walk or read a Roald Dahl
story. FB’s declining investor interest, one hopes, represents
Facebook’s declining user interest.
FB’s stock doing its best Greg Louganis impression
doesn’t mean that it is the next Pets.com. It just means that
Facebook is overrated and life isn’t.
