To Facebook or Not To Facebook

We have a kind of a mix-up going on in our marriage:  my husband, the introvert, is encouraging me, the extrovert, to follow his lead and get a Facebook account.   I’m on the Facebook Fence.

Talk about turning the tables.   For as long as we’ve been together, I’ve been the one planning most of our get-togethers with friends in the here and now and emphasizing the importance of keeping in touch with people from way back.  It’s true that he has a whole congregation to keep up with, especially on Sundays, but it’s also true that he very much needs quiet non-social time.  I like a certain amount of solitude also, but I have always enjoyed being a community person and am accustomed to sending (maybe more like frittering away, sometimes) my energy out in the world at large.

And here I am, a blogger who could definitely benefit from creating a Facebook page with a link to this site.  I saw a distinct bump in readership last week when my husband posted the blog on his page.   It was kind of like the effect of one of those handmade signs, on a main road, saying, “Fresh Corn – ¼ mile this way!”  It doesn’t seem too far to go, once you are almost there.

I don’t want to sound “holier than thou” (a phrase my non-religious mother liked) about Facebook; far be it from me to judge its worth.  In the marketplace, as the company makes its first public offering this week, I understand it could be valued at maybe $86 billion.  In fact, I brought an article all about this into my classes yesterday.  The eight year old phenomenon has been hugely successful because it’s evidently a very convenient way for people to get connected, stay connected, re-connect.  And advertisers appreciate that they can target their ads in a way that heightens their effectiveness.  Both of our teenagers seem to use it with no ill effects (well, except for the distraction from homework factor, for the high school one) and I enjoy seeing them light up when they find something especially amusing on the screen.

What makes me hesitate to get on this particular highway is that I fear I might lose track of what my travel goals are, that I might get so swept up in the whoosh of it all– paying too much attention to how I and fellow travellers look along the way, with hair flying -that I’d miss the certain pleasures of sustained contact with a limited number of people who matter most to me.

The May issue of The Atlantic has a cover story entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”  The writer, Stephen Marche, reports on recent research into how the site affects the actual social lives of people.  It’s not surprising, really, to learn that it doesn’t generally change how lonely or not lonely we are; that we can choose to use Facebook either to help maintain a rich and active life (say, to post news of an upcoming touch football game) or to fall deeper into an isolated life (following other people’s news in cyberspace and not having real conversations).    The part of the article that got to me most was its depiction of our culture’s overall acceptance of so much self-presentation.  The article concludes with this:  “Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”

OK, I really can’t speak from experience here, being perched on the Facebook Fence as I am, but I really find the idea of forgetting about oneself for a while appealing.

This all makes me think about the Emily Dickinson gem that might win the award for “Poem Most Antithetical to Facebook”:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog –
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Right now, with the lovely evening sounds of the peepers outside, it’s hard to find anything at all wrong with frogs.  And – don’t get me wrong – I know that social networking is not really the same as blowing one’s horn and listening to others blow theirs.  What the heck, I may soon jump off that fence yet and join my husband and kids (oh, and about 900 million other people) on the other side.  It’s not a very important decision, really, but I sure am taking my time about making it.