Dopo qualche mese su Facebook
After a Few Months on Facebook
May 15th, 2009 by Ivo Quartiroli | 
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After a series of resistances to Facebook I experimented with the social network in the last few months. The first resistance was about presenting a “self” of mine, the same for all people in my friends’ list. This created some perplexity for me. I like the variety of human beings and have always mixed with people of the most variety: adventurers, hippies, artists, travelers, therapists, entrepreneurs, scholars, rich, poor and creative mixes of those natures. My self, being composed of a mix of different personalities, tends to show different facets of my nature where these can find correspondence. Inevitably, this creates more intimate and personalized relationships but at the same time they are limited by a subset of our personality.
With Facebook and the public profile which widely embraces our personality, I was afraid of not being recognized “for what I am” by some individuals. It reminded me of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the latest novel and a masterpiece of Luigi Pirandello. Basically we are “One,” but for the majority of people we are not “No One,” while in front of the multitude of people who know us, we are “One Hundred Thousand.” We are a different person in the eyes of each person. Without going to the spiritual level where we can say that actually all of us are “nobody” and “everything” at the same time, remaining on the levels of the personality construction and object relationships, Facebook is an interesting experiment.
On the Net we are often anonymous in many spheres: in our Web surfing, in social networks and in forums, we mostly use identities which do not identify us precisely. Facebook is an attempt to reunify the various personalities and to give a center of consciousness to the fragmentation of the online personality. It is an attempt to overcome – even though limited to the digital area – the various object relationships. Facebook can represent an evolution of the adolescent search of one’s own personality, a stage when there are attempts to give ourselves an identity through experimenting with life and people and often hiding behind anonymity.
So, here I am with my “real me” on Facebook, the same in front of everybody, unifying the pieces of my history and therefore the pieces of my psyche. What will it be like, this public “me”? As a lowest common multiple where my relationships and human qualities can be creatively expanded through sharing with friends, or will it be as a highest common factor where only the common qualites will be kept, the ones which most people can accept? It seemed to me sometimes the former at other times the latter.
When in the offline community human relationships are evermore distant and formalized, where almost the whole territory has been turned into a cement jungle, where non-commercial places for meeting are becoming rare, where the time for real meetings itself becomes absorbed more and more by technological gadgets, Facebook has arrived to the rescue for helping us to find again the sense of belonging and to keep in touch in contact with people.
The first thing which struck me was that Facebook proposed to me to update my status writing in the third person: “Ivo…,” which I could have completed with “has gone to the beach,” “has had lunch with friends,” “is writing an article,” etc. We write this way in the perspective of others, to be seen and read. The third person has a double function. From the one hand to present oneself in the third person supports the inner observation. The very fact of presenting oneself from the point of view of others helps the awareness of ourselves. On the other hand, speaking in the third person can feed the ego even further, maybe for the very fact that in speaking of ourselves we are feeding an attention which is not that of inner observation, but that of the ravenous ego to be seen and recognized.
After a couple of months the initial proposal became, “What’s on your mind?” Facebook is giving more importance to the “Twitter-like” functions, stimulating the flow of daily messages almost in real time. The way of meditation is to let the thoughts pass by, not becoming attached to them. After years of working on myself, one of the few things I have learnt is that the mind excretes thoughts continuously, that the vast majority of them are not interesting and most of them do not even belong to us. Most thoughts present themselves in the form of conditionings and repeating others’ words and thoughts, with few variations on the theme. Now that I start to attach less to my thoughts, letting them flow with a certain indifference, here comes Facebook which elevates them to the “news of the day” ranking. Well…
Anyway, I played around a bit with Facebook, wrote some notes, gave links and uploaded photos of my travels. Once I was on a tropical island, taking pictures and thinking of how I would have presented them on Facebook. Instead of living the situation totally, I was thinking of how to picture it and how to present it inside a media, moving away from the direct experience on many levels. Even the mind which interferes is a part of the totality of experience and I accept it with great pleasure, but when it exaggerates, I put it aside in a corner.
I remember when I was a child and when something interesting was happening, sometimes the adults would tell me, “Oh…think of when you’ll tell this to your friends (or at home).” It used to make me mad because it got me out of the flow, whether I was playing or watching a show. For many years I did not take pictures of my trips and in some way if I have started doing it since the last few years, it is also due to the pressure of sharing them through the Internet.
Every time I connect to Facebook I browse the flow of my friends’ updates. There are those who write several notes in a day, those who seldom write, there are funny or serious appeals, a female friend of mine writes, “Something is dying inside….”If she writes it in a public way it is a desire for sharing, but it is strange to see this message running with dozens of other signals mostly ordinary and often banal. I know something about this friend’s life; it wouldn’t be appropriate to reply in public for asking further details but at the same time I would not want to use Facebook as a platform email for sending a personal message. In this manner we enter Facebook for continuing a talk which can happen much more easily through ordinary email. I choose not to send any comment or message in Facebook, reserving myself for communication with her in other ways (by Internet, through IM or email because we live in different nations). I also ask myself if I am avoiding deeper contact, being in my turn taken over by the avalanche of superficiality.
Using Facebook I tend to decrease individual contact. More than communicating I found that I was broadcasting, transmitting to an audience. Almost every day the audience increases, the number of friends expands. The effect is seductive and gratifying for the ego, but it is a different thing to communicate to a public rather than to a single person. With each of them there is a unique story and a unique relationship. Of course, it is possible to send personalized messages by Facebook too but for this purpose a mailer program is better, while the structure of Facebook gives more emphasis to broadcasting. As a mailer I use Eudora, an old software, but still functional and “ecological,” which works even with a slow Internet connection or through a mobile phone connection. Differently, it is almost impossible to open Facebook pages with a connection which is not ADSL to send just a private message.
I have noticed that after about 50 “friends” the flow of messages becomes such that it leads to loss of sense and value. I tend to scroll the messages with the mouse as if they were newspaper items. As when in some countries everybody is hooting on the road, the meaning of the signal gets lost, hearing gets anesthetized and it becomes only a background. McLuhan had noticed how technologies and the media become as much an extension as an amputation of the body/mind’s faculties.
The nature of the mind is such that after some time it erases any interest; through the repetition of the stimulus less attention is given to the same type of input. The mind chases novelties. The same happens to me with the feed of the blog I read. As soon as a blog has been discovered I follow its articles with interest, then tend to look through them quickly. I would not want to “evaporate” my friends’ messages in the same way.
Giving news regarding myself on Facebook makes me become lazier and having an excuse for not contacting people personally. And what about those who aren’t on Facebook? Most of my friends are not on Facebook and sometimes they do not even use the Internet. Since there is a limit to the time which one can dedicate to communications, those inevitably get penalized.
The really important news of my friends, including those who are on Facebook, anyway did not come through Facebook: they reached me by direct contact, on the phone or by email. In any case I’ll play the game of Facebook more, but I could decide to stop at any moment by sending a note to my contacts. Apart from the above-mentioned reason, it would be enough for me not to be connected to a fast Internet line for some time to make me lose the will to wait for minutes for looking through mostly banalities, with all the respect I have for my friends.
Facebook undoubtedly is the best engineered social network site, nevertheless I foresee the fall of its popularity as it has happened with other very popular sites such as Second Life or MySpace. Facebook will be more persistent than the others because it is linked to people we know in real life. But as the mind has constructed the game of Facebook, the mind will dismantle it. The mind loses interest about everything, especially if something remains only on the mental plane. Facebook’s strength consists in being a bridge between the purely mental world and the world of real relationships. In this reciprocal exchange between the virtual and the real on one hand some virtual meetings can be “real-ized” but on the other hand real people can be “virtualized,” reducing them in our psyche to a small icon and a flow of bytes which scroll on the screen. Similarly, various appeals and different causes risk counting in the real world as much as a discussion between prisoners during the air hour.
All of what I have written was without considering the problems connected to privacy – which would be an alarming separate chapter.
facebook is part of the power of social net working is the ability to form communicates with like minded individuals
Mi sento molto in sintonia con quanto scritto da Ivo a proposito di Facebook. Ho trovato voce a delle impressioni personali su questo mezzo che ormai si è insediato nelle nostre vite e con il quale, volente o nolente, ci troviamo a fare i conti.
Personalmente lo uso molto di rado, mi sono scoperta più che altro una “voyeuse”, m’incuriosisce andare a vedere le proposte che altri fanno, ma ho capito che m’intimidisce parecchio avere a che fare con tutta questa platea, non mi dà il tempo e lo spazio di farmi conoscere in profondità, di sicuro sono particolarmente lenta rispetto ai frequentatori/trici di F. che invece pare abbiano assunto delle attitudini simili a quelle dei pennuti che becchettano velocemente qualsiasi tipo di cibo trovandolo in ogni dove, riuscendosi a spostare con molta rapidità. Mi fa molta paura la superficialità e ho la sensazione che quello sia un perfetto luogo dove il narcisismo possa trovare il suo plancton ideale.
I had some similar and different insights/perceptions which I also blogged (in four parts) after I quit facebook:
http://wp.me/pn83X-ad
Hi Ivo,
Very interesting piece, thank you.
Would have been cool if you had emphasised on the dangers to the mental (and quiet possibly the physical health) dangers involved when we are all connected online.
It is becoming increasingly clear how corrupt the business world is. Washington is bought by the OLIGARCHY, i.e. Wall Street, Big CO2 Inc., Pharma etc, etc.
Do you want to give away free information about yourself to such organisations? You gotta be yoking!
1984
http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/orwell.html
Brave New World
http://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html
Brave New World Revisited
http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html
Some quotes from Chapter V. Propaganda Under a Dictatorship, Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley;
‘In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable, technology had advanced far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler’s day; consequently the recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi counterparts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite. Moreover, they had been genetically standardized and postnatally conditioned to perform their subordinate functions, and could therefore be depended upon to behave almost as predictably as machines.’
‘Since Hitler’s day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera and the rotary press, the contemporary propagandist can make use of television to broadcast the image as well as the voice of his client, and can record both image and voice on spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.’
‘Let us see what Hitler thought of the masses he moved and how he did the moving. The first principle from which he started was a value judgment: the masses are utterly contemptible. They are incapable of abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their immediate experience. Their behavior is determined, not by knowledge and reason, but by feelings and unconscious drives. It is in these drives and feelings that “the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted.” To be successful a propagandist must learn how to manipulate these instincts and emotions. “The driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into action. Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open the door of their hearts.” . . . In post-Freudian jargon, of their unconscious.’
‘Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority. Among the masses “instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith. . . . While the healthy common folk instinctively close their ranks to form a community of the people” (under a Leader, it goes without saying) “intellectuals run this way and that, like hens in a poultry yard. With them one cannot make history; they cannot be used as elements composing a community.” Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations which are the propagandist’s stock in trade. “All effective propaganda,” Hitler wrote, “must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas.” These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for “only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.” Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgment or to feel doubt.’
‘Such, then, was Hitler’s opinion of humanity in the mass. It was a very low opinion. Was it also an incorrect opinion? The tree is known by its fruits, and a theory of human nature which inspired the kind of techniques that proved so horribly effective must contain at least an element of truth. Virtue and intelligence belong to human beings as individuals freely associating with other individuals in small groups. So do sin and stupidity. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his victims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.’
Thank you for expressing so beautifully and clearly my own reluctance of ever joining Facebook: “… have always mixed with people of the most variety: adventurers, hippies, artists, travelers, therapists, entrepreneurs, scholars, rich, poor and creative mixes of those natures. My self, being composed of a mix of different personalities, tends to show different facets of my nature….”
I am French-Syrian, born in Dimasq, grew up in the rarified, constricting environment of the diplomatic corps, lived and travelled in scores of countries, attended a dozen schools, learned a handful of languages, and until I was in my twenties, was witness and subject to beauty, horror, violence, and political events beyond anything all but soldiers might experience firsthand.
I now live a simple, “ordinary” life where I am happy and practice a profession that, while it benefits by my life experiences, is as far removed from politics and the terrors of the past as is possible. Only a very small, intimate circle of friends know something of my history; my features, coloring, and accent are “exotic” here where I live, so people may guess or assume things about me, but ultimately, I am “a different person in the eyes of each person”.
Interestingly, most of my intimes are the product of similar backgrounds — the children of parents in the military, missions, petroleum, refugees, and many are of mixed parentage. If you ask any one of us the seemingly simple question, “Where are you from?”, be prepared for an equivocation, a rote but evasive answer, or a long story. “Who are you?” isn’t easily answered by anyone with an ounce of self-awareness; for us it is confounding and occasionally, dangerous.
hi Neontango, maybe you had both the blessings and the difficulties of not having a definite identity. Having a liquid identity brings us more awareness of the solid inner root which has to keep our “identities”.
Anyway… “Who are you?” is not easy answered even by people who experienced a solid identity, which in most of the cases is a bunch of hard conditionings.
Rene, I don’t believe in organized conspiracies but those sentences for sure give space for some considerations.
Myrrh I checked your blog, welcome to the club of people reflecting on the impact of technology on our soul.
Neither do I believe in conspiracies Ivo, I follow certain opinion leaders. You haven’t been reading Paul Krugman in the NYT? What about Simon Johnson’s blog; Baseline Scenario?
Who Nationalized Whom?
http://baselinescenario.com/2009/07/17/who-nationalized-whom/
The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice
The level of corruption is staggering. Being aware of what is going on is the least you can do. This is also the reason I send you the websites of Zero Hedge and Max Keiser. I think you are not into economics (= politics). The economy is the superstructure in which we all operate.
http://www.chomsky.info
Ivo, I can understand that from the lines above (4), someone could draw the conclusion that I believe in conspiracy theories. Fact is that I have not and will not believe willd accusations and fantasy stories. The each and everyone in the world, please read ‘The Quiet Coup’ by Simon Johnson. Welcome to the reality based community.
What I have copy and pasted (5) is history. An analysis by Aldous Huxley on technological progress and society. And the very real dangers involved. In relation too the Obama administration and its plan for universal health-care coverage for every American citizen, you might have picked up on the fact that ‘Republicans’ (and quiet possibly insurance/pharma organisations^) are broadcasting messages such as, ‘the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave.’*
Please wake up everyone. This is very serious. I wonder how come most of us don’t really seem to know, care or wonder? How is that possible? A bit of Conspiracy perhaps?
^http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html
*http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/opinion/14krugman.html
…”These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for “only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.”
Hi Rene, understanding each other my the Net is often difficult. I meant in the sense that I don’t believe in such theories but those links are not. In italian such a sentence would be more clear probably. By the way, right, I’m not that much into economy.
One technical note: Wordpress sends every comment with 2 or more links to the antispam so just avoid sending them since I am in a remote place and not always online to check that and de-spam messages.