That Facebook Thing...

I swear I keep wanting to put down my thoughts about the virtues of Facebook, but keep holding back because really, what else is there to add? It’s all been written, whether by Time Magazine or the Times of Mumbai.

Plus, we are reminded on a daily basis that only losers and pedophiles and the psychologically damaged actually have relationships that thrive in the eerie glow of a screen. So why would I want to extol the virtues of some website when I am not a member of the aforementioned group of outcasts? (A piece of website that has racked up a bazillion users, mind you, but that’s a business school article that I’d enjoy writing about as much as I’d enjoy waterboarding...)

I am a Diva after all, and a damn good mom, wife and cook yet I feel it is up to me to defend the reputation of the social and cultural paradox that is Facebook–after all, it’s neither a face nor a book…Talk amongst yourselves…


The psychological ramifications alone are enormous. Imagine how much lonelier (yes, you read correctly, l-o-n-e-l-i-e-r) we all were before this. Our lives were rich, certainly, but today’s ability to communicate with people from our past (and their freinds and family) is mind-blowing. Another wrinkle in time and we would, for all intents and purposes, be dead to each other.

There is a layer of richness that Facebook adds to our existence. Let me just digress for a second to add that it’s a richness only if you have a Facebook profile and are an habitual user. If you’re an employer, you are screwed because you’re barely hanging on to a workforce that has created an online presence and is glued to its fucking wall, furiously checking every few seconds to see how important it is to the outside world, and if anyone has responded to its most recent, meticulously crafted status update.

It sounds so scary to say out loud, “Facebook adding richness to our lives,” but it’s so true. I wonder how many truly and utterly lonely people have jump-started their lives just by reconnecting with their relatives, friends and childhood tormentors… I used to sit and think about my checkered past (not checkered as in I used to be a whoreslut/Octomom/outlaw, but checkered as in a nomadic, sometimes scary and often incredible past) and it used to seem like a lifetime away. Especially the childhood part. I would sometimes think that that life of mine, having left my country the middle of the night, was a figment of my imagination.

When I found my childhood friends on Facebook, it was like my heart somersaulted to my mouth, then tumbled and slammed to the floor. My temples were pounding, my hands sweating, and my toes curled and stayed that way for a good long while, and all because there they were, right in front of me, waiting to Friend me. With Facebook, lives and pasts seems so much more present and less dreamlike. Does that make sense? It’s a wicked bizzah feeling, isn’t it, and you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Shit, I feel another fork in the blog coming on…here it is… bear with me…This kind of reminds me of digital cameras. These days, the minutiae of our lives are captured daily in digital form, ready to be blasted out to our friends, relatives and co-workers through email, Twitter, blogs, iPhones, and yes, Facebook. I can go back 7 years now and have a detailed account of every month of my life.

People, I kid you not when I say I remember every fucking week from the last seven years. But before that? Uh, not so much. It could have been all the pot I smoked back then but seriously, do YOU remember every week of your life?

There’s no WAY I could have that kind of detail and memory if we were still capturing moments as we did back in the stone age when we had to bring rolls of film to CVS and Wal-Mart. We took far fewer pictures in the Jurassic period for a variety of reasons: expense, storage, the crap shoot factor where you don’t know if your photo shoot was all crap…And even though many of us have photos stashed somewhere in a shoebox, under the stairs or in attic bins, we rarely look at them and never want to go near them. For Christ’s sake some of us still have boxes of undeveloped FILM.

Remember film?!? And before the advent of the cute little drop-in film packs–you remember how when those came on the scene we all breathed a sigh of relief–we had those heinous rolls for which, in order to load properly, we had to match film notch with the teeth of the camera’s film well… SHIT! How in the hell did ANYONE manage to take pictures, much less have an accurate historical record of his or her life?

So where was I before I drifted off into a discussion about the virtues of Kodak, Polaroid and Ilford film and paper…Oh yeah, Facebook. The point is, perhaps the popularity of Facebook is a little scary for some but in reality, it has likely saved lives. YES, LIVES! Never underestimate the human psyche’s propensity for loneliness and the crazies that can dovetail from said loneliness; I’m talking from depression, suicide, and wanking in front of the computer to other far worse and aberrant behaviors; you get the picture.

We now have a connection to our past, to our friends, to our present, to our lives. We love to support each other through child birth, chemo, hip replacement surgery (this one’s for you, Gray), death of a parent or child, divorce…

And are you kidding me? We have a captive audience waiting to help us lick our wounds and prop us up when we are blue. THAT is the miracle of Facebook. THAT is why it has racked up a bazillion worldwide users. We are humans and we want to feel a connection. And when we do finally connect with you, you poor hapless soul from our past, from our genealogy, from work…we are gonna take that shitload of digital pictures and ram it down your throat. Just so you can tell us how fabulous we are.

Psychologists, move over; the Doctor is IN and she wants to know what’s on your mind.