the first time i “used the internet” was an aol chat room that a family friend’s son showed me. if i remember correctly, his screenname was romeo666; clearly he had evolved an attitude i was only beginning to taste in my pre-teen years. thinking about it now, that first encounter was incredibly lackluster by today’s standards – almost no GUI, text was hardly even formatted – but i was blown away by the “/roll” command whereby you could ‘roll’ a virtual die of ANY size and it would generate a random number. imagine the possibilities.
somewhere along the line the attitude of our place on the internet completely changed. in those days, the idea was that there was this other world to experience and you could present yourself in it however you saw fit. i doubt very much that this family friend was much of a romeo in those days, and i don’t think he was into devil-worship (at least beyond a casual flirtation), but he was given this freedom to play with his identity. i think nearly anyone who grew up with the internet in some way has gone through several of these identities and screen names by virtue of this flexibility and impermanence.
today, we go by our real names online. it changed so slowly that i’d be hard-pressed to say when exactly this shift happened, but i think it’d be difficult to argue that social networking sites were the central element in robbing us of our disposable personae. perhaps ‘rob’ is a strong word, and i’m definitely not ready to make a judgment call on whether this is a positive or negative turn, but i think this combining of the distant and personal is something we simply aren’t capable of managing that well at this point. the internet gives us some amount of padding with our interactions in it, which makes much more sense when we’re projecting a portrait of ourselves instead of an extension of our ‘real’ self. with this separation, people get more aggressive, more flirtatious, more callous than they might be face-to-face. it isn’t about the origin of these tendencies (a screenname vs a real one), but rather that there is this ‘moat’ separating our internet selves from our real selves and we are spending a lot of energy trying to exist in both simultaneously – reconciling interaction that was once anonymous with how we act when we’re standing next to someone.
there certainly isn’t an answer as to whether or not we’re better off being anonymous, especially considering the opportunity for malice, but i would argue that this aggregation of our internet identities is something that people haven’t fully considered yet.
for me, the move towards social networking actually reduced the amount i interacted in a communal way online. before facebook came about, i spent a fair bit of time with livejournal. yes, the output was angsty and full of bad poetry, but i used to actually write things that were longer than a soundbite and i cared about what i said. there was a crossfade from livejournal to facebook as the amount of people i knew grew in the latter. i slowly stopped writing altogether, stopped checking in on the communities i belonged to, and i didn’t even really notice. certainly this could just be part of ‘growing up’, but to me now, it seems a terrible loss. i can say pretty safely that in the times since my last, sporadic entries, i’ve had significant experiences and emotions; these are now saved only as little photo albums and a few comments from friends. undoubtedly there’s a social element to that, but i can say assuredly that if it wasn’t for facebook, i would have put a lot more thought and time into that sharing.
so that is why i’m giving it up. the reasons listed on quitfacebookday.com are important, but privacy is not my primary concern at all – my data is out there, there’s not much to change that. i’m stopping it because everything i contribute to it is in a controlled, limited way. there’s no real archive of experience there, just blurbs and compressed photos presented in a painful interface. do i really need to have my internet presence restricted by facebook’s api? there’s so many great services out there that do what facebook does and more. the ubiquity may not be there, but the little bit of effort goes to something so much more personal and cohesive. i’m getting off of facebook because decentralizing my internet persona gives me the chance to be creative with it again.
i’m not suggesting that this is an option for everyone, and i doubt that there’s going to be a return to the ‘wild west’ days of internet anonymity, but since we’re going to be representing ourselves, why do it in a homogenized format? i can certainly understand how it’s ‘easier’, but we never seem to take that route in reality.
we’re at an odd time where we still aren’t quite sure what role the internet plays in our lives. we see facebook as a distraction, but there’s certainly potential ramifications (both good and bad) that we garner by spending time with it. we may not see it to be as real as it is. the internet isn’t going away any time soon, and people are beginning to understand that it will be a significant part of their life. perhaps in a few years, people will stop saying that they’re ‘killing time’ when using facebook and see it as something that actually has bearing on their lives. and perhaps when that point has been reached, people will decide that social networking isn’t and shouldn’t be the only vein for expressing that aspect of themselves.
see you on the other side, friends 1-554.
love,
-z
