performance evaluation

For awhile now I've been feeling some quiet discomfort toward facebook. I say 'quiet discomfort' for want of a better expression; although it's been nagging away at me for some time I haven't managed to organise my thoughts into a coherent statement that sums up how I feel. I've been slowly cutting back my fb activity over the past few years - partly as a form of self censorship to avoid those disapproving comments from family members, and partly because I find most of what others post is mundane or cliche and I like to think I'm not so self centred as to think one hundred percent of my activities will be interesting to anyone else.

Then today I caught myself doing something I do quite often, scrolling down my own profile page and imagining how it looks to the casual observer - be that the last friend request I accepted or the guy who was always too cool for me in high school - and I realised that our facebook pages are used to evaluate us as people. I was evaluating myself as I imagine others do, in the same way that I evaluate my facebook friends. And therein lies my discomfort.

I'm dissatisfied with the person facebook makes me out to be. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with what's on there - a gig I went to, some links to blogs and opinion pieces, an information tab that was last updated circa 2008. It's just that, all in all, it doesn't add up to much; certainly it doesn't add up to the way I'd like people to see me, despite my efforts to make it do so. Every post on there has been considered and screened; they are monitored more heavily even than the things I say and do in real life. Facebook is an extension of the performance we partake in every day. It's a refined and cultivated expression of ourselves, by which I mean that it is an expression we actively refine and cultivate, not that it can necessarily be described as 'refined' or 'cultivated' in any way.

I think maybe this discomfort lies at the bottom of the initial backlash against facebook's introduction of the timeline layout. The timeline idea takes this notion that facebook sums us up as individuals and creates an historical archive of online activity, and it's pretty grim to see ourselves laid bare that way. Luckily for facebook, or perhaps it was by design, I think the fun of updating the cover picture has successfully suppressed most people's initial suspicion that facebook was trying to condense and reproduce our lives. Not that I can speak from experience. I'm probably the last person on facebook not to upgrade, which is less of a virtual protest than an expression of laziness. But that's a statement in itself, the same way that suspending your facebook account was a statement when it was in vogue a year or so ago. I never did that either, mainly because I felt it was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are reasons I like facebook, and there are things I hate about it. But I still use it.

This isn't a particularly strong note to end on, but they can't all be winners. It's been a long time since I posted anything on this blog, or on my other one for that matter, so I think it's better to chuck some words out there, regardless of how poignant they may or may not be, than to lay in wait for the perfect combination of inspiration and eloquence to strike. I'm probably going to link this on my facebook page. Oh, the irony.