Confessions of a Facebook Junkie & Why Returns Really Do Diminish
“I don’t get it. It’s like a slot machine. You put in a quarter, pull the lever, get a result and do it again. “
I stared at my clearly insane non-Facebook friend as we sat awkwardly over coffee IRL. Unfollow. She clearly doesn’t get it, I thought. Facebook is more than that, it’s a valuable way to connect with people from all over the world! It’s a way to stay in touch with old friends, keep up to date on each other’s lives and to discuss events of the day! It’s a never ending conversation, a dialogue, about things and life and stuff!
Let me be clear. I love Facebook. Through Facebook, I have learned my personality type, how I rate as a speller and mathematician, which celebrity I most resemble, what my horoscope is and god knows I consider myself a connoisseur of cute baby sloths, donkeys and hilarious Obama/Biden memes.
If curiosity killed the cat, I clearly have a thousand lives because on Facebook, I can ask people questions about their views, their habits and what they had for dinner and what they make of the latest thing in the news cycle. I am fascinated by the replies. I fancy myself, in many ways, a kind of Facebook-ologist, if you will, a student of what we talk about when we talk on Facebook.
I don’t live in America, I should hasten to add here, so as an expat American, Facebook is where I can connect with old friends and see what’s going on in America. Sure, I have new friends where I live but for most of them, English is a second language and between that and the fact that I suck at their language and that we have totally different cultural signifiers, Facebook provides me with a connection that I am lacking in my day-to-day life.
IRL, I am a writer and a story editor, which is to say that I edit books and make them more better. My only boss is me. I am in charge of how I spend my time, and I am in charge of managing the sometimes harrowing nerves of being, as they say, “freelance”. This, as you can imagine, is not a great combination for a Facebook junkie. Facebook is nothing if not time consuming. Especially in the age of Trump.
In the time of mass distraction via social media, constant news updates and cute videos of bunnies, Trump has provided me with the mother of all excuses because clearly, we are all gonna die soon and if you don’t think so and subsequently post something on Facebook to that effect, you’re normalizing the abhorrent, don’t you see that, you short-sighted keyboard monkey?!
The only way, I felt, to stay ahead of becoming a pathetic, normalizing blob of jelly is to read the news, post it on my Facebook feed (with some quick note of something on a scale from derision to sheer panic) and wait as my Facebook friends all agreed with me that yes, this is, indeed, horrible, or offered up some other, incontrovertible example that is qualitatively worse. I replied to the comments, the conversation continued, and another notification shows up and —I’m pulling the damn lever over and over again in a feedback loop not of an echo chamber,necessarily — although that too — but in a clusterfuck of panic, outrage and the queasy sense of having swum out too far from the dock.
It was when I noticed a Facebook meme, complete with phone numbers, that instructed us to troll Trump hotels and businesses with hilarious requests to speak to the president, etc., and I subsequently followed this directive to #resist and made some of those calls that I realized the amount of angst I had cultivated internally via the Facebook lever-pull, needed to be acknowledged. I mean, let me tell you, those were some pretty hilarious conversations but what had I done, other than harassing some poor Trump hotel employee?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, I said to myself — what am I gaining from this? I can say with great confidence that there is no “take” or “analysis” that I could make of the latest article on the BBC about Trump that I can put a more intelligent spin on than, say, the journalist who wrote the article. My Facebook posting about Trump, etc. amounts to something like: This! No, this! My god!
Instead of being an informed consumer of current events, I was simply rebroadcasting what anybody can read anywhere with my snarky, Captain Obvious take on same. What good does it do me, or anybody else? I had willingly cast myself into a state of constant immersion in what is, yes, objectively pretty terrifying stuff. But to what end?
I have a lot of Facebook friends who are really warriors on the topic of Trump. I salute them. I really do. It took me some months but I have realized, quite plainly, that I personally do not have the bandwidth to willingly and knowingly engage with what is for me, clearly, a 100% addictive behavior of the Facebook lever pull and for contributing, quite frankly, to others doing the same thing.
Look, I made a ton of pink hats and sent them to DC, I watch CSPAN, I downloaded Countable, I’m emailing my representatives. I get it. I got it. This is not normal. But I do have some control over how I feel about it, what I can do about it and how much information and engagement is actually healthy. Until I can get a handle on that, I need to stop pulling the damn lever on Facebook.
Although — brb — I should make an announcement to that affect and see what my Facebook friends have to say about it.
