I have three thousand seven hundred connections, subtract from that about 10 family members, 20 close friends high school, another 20 close friends, 20 close work friends, and another 20 local friends. This group of about 90 people are the people I love pretty much unconditionally. I hold my nose and look away when they post something really silly. “Silly” can be anything from conspiracy theories to rightwing and religious nuttery to humble bragging, outright bragging, excessive thirst-trapping, and family photos.
Then, there are about 40 people whom I’ve mostly never met IRL who I follow because I respect them and they post informative or interesting content. They tend to be intellectuals, philosophers, researchers, artists & curators, novelists, and grad students.
So, what about the remaining 3,500 “friends”? I’ll start from the beginning, 2007. I had flown over with a friend from Italy to attend Glade Festival in the UK. We had an amazing time, and it was mostly down to having met and rapidly befriended a group of people met there. A few of them suggested connecting on Facebook, and it proved a great platform for keeping in touch with friends from around the world and saving the memories of those shared experiences.
I have grown up travelling, spending a few years in one place, making friends, and then moving elsewhere. You very much experience a sense of loss when relocating, especially when an international move is involved. The prospect of saying goodbye to a place, a culture, and friends, possibly forever, is something I’d be reluctant to do again and did far too much for most of my formative years and then some.
Facebook provided the sense that you could still somehow stay connected with a place and its people in a casual, breezy, but still a meaningful manner. It was also was a paste book for memories, which did help reduce that sense of loss.
Between 2007 and 2014, Facebook served its purpose well, mostly. I moved from Italy, then Ireland, and finally Sydney, making connections and dutifully adding them to Facebook. About 200-300 connections are people I met once at a party, someone shared a room with at a hostel, or a past flatmate. There were a few Facebook family dramas that exemplify some of the downsides of total global connectivity. My maternal grandfather died at a venerable age, the much-loved grumpy patriarch of a large southern German Catholic family. One of my aunts married an American and has been living in the US for decades. She and my American cousins took to Facebook enthusiastically, and thought nothing of posting pictures of my grandfather and the funeral to Facebook, to honour her beloved father.
My German aunts, who in classical privacy-conscious German fashion had joined Facebook but viewed it suspiciously, took outrage to this post of a personal family event. Some even thought it insulted and disrespected the memory of my grandfather. Many dramatic phone calls ensued, and most of my German aunts would end up leaving the platform for good.
I personally would have done such a post myself, nothing would have been more appropriate than to commit such an event to the digital memory of Facebook, but my German aunts’ different perspective is valid too. And this is only one such an example of many such examples of acrimonious intercultural miscommunications on Facebook.
In 2014 to 2016 I took passionately to philosophy and critical theory. Many interesting debates were being held on the platform as Facebook & Twitter took over from the golden age of blogging. I started friending many, many “suggested friends”. I wanted to be part of the conversations. I’m not a contrarian for its own sake, but I’ve had an open mind and could never quite swallow any party line or specific school of thought. I got into some vicious debates and was the target of some mean and uncalled for attacks, including by people in those circles who I knew personally and considered close friends.
Maybe I got older and more conflict-averse, or simply more cognisant of how detrimental to one’s well-being internet arguments could become. Regardless life happened and I wasn’t as passionate about philosophy any more, but I now had thousands of, mostly American, Facebook friends. Many of whom I’d never engaged with beyond the casual newsfeed comment.
In 2017 to the present, my feed was becoming more and more uniform and alien. Single issue, mostly American, outrage storms would hold the day. I also began using Facebook more and more as a platform to air outrage and grievances. I alienated many people as I forgot the broad audience I was now venting to. I’ve had family members think that I’m constantly angry, when in reality it seemed that Facebook was less and less a paste book for memories and connections, and more and more an outrage vent.
Facebook continuously nudged me to add more friends I didn’t know, by design, it was easy to mistake a friend request for a friend suggestion. I went on many a friend drive to attempt to make my feed less outrage focused. As my friends list grew into the thousands I struggled to keep track of who people were and lost connection to many a soul or interesting-person-met-at-party who might have made a great friend IRL.
Facebook’s features for managing and categorising friends got worse and worse, I’ve always felt this is a deliberate design decision. Friend list still exist, but they are manual and clunky. There was no longer any way to view feeds or sort friends automatically by location.
The connection alienation also got worse. Facebook seemed to decide when I needed to stop bumping into someone on my feed, and that person would silently drift out of my life. My addiction to the newsfeed grew, and I would spend hours mindlessly scrolling, and getting annoyed with dumb things people would say or post.
I always wished Facebook would offer a paid, power user option (they do but for enterprises). The Social Dilemma finally made me make a conscious effort to not simply curtail my use, but to better understand it as well. Like an addict, I’m in the stage where I’m admitting I have a problem.
Facebook Airport lounge
The sense of community that Facebook’s newsfeed fosters I would say is akin to a permanent airport lounge: brief, transient interactions with random strangers. That’s how it feels beyond a certain number of Facebook “friends”. People drift in and out of your feed after a few exchanges of pleasantries (or an acrimonious difference of opinion). The sense of community it fosters – and this could be solely my feed (thank you opaque and inscrutable algo gods of the newsfeed) – isn’t designed for permanence. Perhaps Facebook engineers realised that endless novelty is more addictive than consistency.
We are cyborgs who outsource our memory to digital platforms. And when those platforms are deliberately designed to encourage the impulsivity of endless novelty over memory, we experience a sense of loss. I’ve been experiencing this constantly. It’s a very familiar feeling for me, that loss of the memory of people, places, and experiences that seasoned expats feel. It’s like living at Changi airport for years.
The simulation of connection
Why mingle personal experiences with the conceptual? Isn’t that the cardinal sin of philosophical argumentation, of an attempt at a critical conceptualisation and evaluation of a platform that would merit volumes of investigation? Firstly, we’re dealing with a complex system that includes me the individual, a global technology platform, and millions of other individuals, over a timespan approaching 15 years. I haven’t quite figured out the causality here, the feedback loops, and I don’t think I personally ever will. How have my evolving & emergent behaviours and affect been influenced by the platform, and how much of that is simply down to my own unfixed and changing self over the the years?
As a technologist and a mild but critical techno-optimist, I immersed myself enthusiastically into the platform, always ridiculing the age-old pessimisms against the new technology of the day. “X will ruin society”, be it writing, or printing, or nuclear energy. However, were I to go back in time and be given the choice of never signing up to the platform, I would seriously consider the option.
The analogy of Facebook to drugs is a useful one. Moralistic viewpoints aside, neither Facebook nor drugs are simple phenomena. There are thousands of kinds of drugs, thousands of therapeutic and recreational uses, and thousands of usage patterns. The same goes for Facebook. Both can lead to extremely positive or negative outcomes. The key comparative point when looking at my use of Facebook like that of a mind-altering substance, is that both directly stimulate the brain’s pleasure receptors associated with the lived experience, and excessive use of either causes one to prefer this direct pleasurable stimulation over seeking out more varied life experiences. All former addicts lament how much they missed out on life beyond their substance use.
What’s worse with Facebook is that it’s more insidious to drugs: Facebook provides the perception of connection to others, which is not nearly as satisfying or salubrious as in-person connections to local friendships. Note that I’m avoiding terms like “real vs fake” or “real world vs online”. There isn’t something inherently unreal about the online world. It’s Facebook I have an issue with, not the internet in general. Facebook for years has been my substitute for fostering friendships and a sense of community.
So what to do about it? Deleting my account seems far too extreme. It would be the equivalent of cutting off an arm. Perhaps I could prune my friends? I can barely remember the names of all those I care about. Perhaps avoid the outrage trap? Absolutely, but that doesn’t fix the painful sense of loss of losing track of and forgetting the names of those special people I wish to stay connected to.
I have to grudgingly admit that Plato’s critique of writing applies to this infernal platform. I’ve outsourced the memory of my friendships and connections to a platform that wasn’t a worthy steward of this precious information. And now I can’t remember all those beautiful, unique human jewels that I’ve encountered along the way.
Fuck you Facebook.
