Facebook: social utility or idenity thief?

Jono Cowgill - cowgiljm@plu.edu Mast Op-ED Columnist

I find there are two ways in which we can deny our quintessential being: We can become something we are not, or we can constrict the things we are into glib boxes that deny our complexity.

The all-holy social networking device Facebook does a very good job of assisting us proletariat college folk to achieve the latter. To have a Facebook is to practice what Mr. Burgess refers to as “self-image actualization.” By publishing, so to speak, our identity on the Web, we have made real an image of ourselves that we want others to see.

Facebook also constricts our identities into trite boxes. Our identities are literally packaged into columns with headings like “Interests” and “Favorite Books.”

To be sure, we all have our ways of being “original” with the layout we are given. But no matter how we try to articulate our beings, every word and every omission is there to be judged. Online we become a caricature of ourselves.

So we are bred, as it were, to promote ourselves to our online community. We post pictures and tag ourselves amongst friends. We write that we are easy to get along with, or that we like catching snowflakes on our tongues. Sometimes we are esoteric and mysterious with what we leave on our profile.

But no matter how verbose or mum, overloaded or sparse, we have turned ourselves all into small-time social politicians.

We’re worse than politicians though, because we aren’t held to any cogency in our identities. We can change our profile picture with a couple of clicks. We can effectively change the whole of our being, the one we expound online, in moments. So we are able to wear masks, shroud ourselves and never really be ourselves.

If someone writes on our walls, we do not have to respond. This person is not standing in front of us. We do not see the beauty mark upon his or her upper lip, only the well-chosen profile picture.

The humanity of our communication is laminated.

In short, our intercourse is destroyed to a detestable function: to stay on top of a broken social scene of identities going through perpetual metamorphoses.

Why does this matter? I think here it is best to examine the great Tolstoyian question “How am I to live in this world?”

Recently, a small amount of Facebook’s stock was bought by Microsoft for a $250 million. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, is the only single person to have stake (20 percent) in the company. So, more or less, Facebook is a corporate engine owned by corporate giants.

The whole company was recently valued at $15 billion. It is given this clout based upon how many users there are and how much membership is expected to grow.

So all of us Facebook users have made this site the incorporated powerhouse it is today. Every one of our published identities on this site is, in effect, a commodity. Is this how we want our identities to be used? Not only have we allowed our beings to be compressed, we have allowed them to be owned by a company. If we delete our accounts, we can always log in again and our profiles will be just as we left them. We are social whores, and the pimp isn’t giving us a cut of the profits.

I have the impression that our generation is a complacent one, more prone to create a group online ranting about injustice than to live the change we need. Facebook has banked on that and the good notice that most people have an acute social insecurity complex.

I am a noble hypocrite in this issue. My piousness isn’t lived, only preached.

I can only hope in the future I spend fewer hours perusing the white-screened corridors of Facebook.