It was a Friday evening after a long day at the office. For some reason, I had a little time on my hands. I was too tired to read. Too tired to write. I don’t have television except to watch DVDs but I had no DVDs. I didn’t feel like going out. I figured I’d go online for a while and call it an early night. And then it happened, almost before I knew what I was doing. I joined Facebook.
I’d been meaning to join for the past few months. I felt I was missing out on something. This normally doesn’t bother me. But this did. Launched at Harvard in 2004, Facebook now calls itself the most trafficked social media site in the world. It has more than 250 million active users. That’s just about 50 million shy of the entire population of the United States. I’m a social guy (for the most part) and I am easily impressed by big numbers. When 250 million people are doing one thing, I get curious. And, if it’s something good, I check it out. I checked it out.
Signing on was easier than I feared. Too easy. After I created my “wall”—that’s what your page is called, although there’s nothing solid about it—I did what everyone else does when they first join. I looked up the years I graduated high school and college to see who I might know who was also on Facebook. I saw a few vaguely familiar faces, older now. I even thought about asking them to be “my friend.” That’s how it works; Facebook will send friend requests for you to other members. It can also comb through everyone on your e-mail address book, and if they are Facebook members, you can click on them and Facebook sends them an invite. These people then need to accept your invitation on their Facebook page. Or not.
But I didn’t ask any of my old classmates to be my friend. I hardly really knew these particular people, hardly called them my friend back then. So why would I ask them to be my friend now? Truth is, I hated high school. Why do I want to relive that particular miserable episode in my life? Once was enough. College was better, but not much—what I can remember of it. In those days I drank way too much tequila and beer and, as if caught in a strange dream from which I could not wake up—one of those dreams in which you are running but can’t get anywhere—I was in love with the same girl for the entire four years even though I knew she had a boyfriend out of state and would never return my affection for her. I’m not going back there, even in cyberspace.
By the time I was done inviting all the people I knew and liked to be my Facebook friend, the sun had gone down and the moon had come up. I’d begun at about 7:00 p.m. and now it was after midnight. I was shocked by how the hours had fled by. I didn’t feel like I’d wasted time, though. I’d done something I’d wanted to do, and felt good about the accomplishment. I went to bed tired but content.
Come morning, something happened. What happened is that now I was a member of Facebook.
Normally, I stumble out of bed, get some water boiling for tea, shuffle to my desk, and, as I rub the sleep from my eyes, check my e-mail. I cannot recall when I began his routine. Probably a long time ago because I can’t remember. I open e-mails from family members or friends and then open the Writer’s Almanac newsletter to read its poem and short sketches about the birthdays of writers and other illustrious people and celebrated events down through the ages. While I sip on my tea I sometimes answer e-mails if I am thinking clearly enough. After that, and before I get ready for the day, I read a few pages in whatever book I was reading in bed the night before. Sometimes, if I am working on a specific project, I write.
Now, there was something else I felt I needed to squeeze in between checking and answering e-mails and the book I wanted to get back to reading: check my Facebook page. That morning, I joined all the others around the world whom, according to one statistic provided by Facebook, spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook each day. When I saw that figure I grabbed a calculator to figure how many years that is. If I did my math correctly—and I double checked it with some colleagues—it comes to 9,506 years.
For the next hour, I read posts from my Facebook friends from all over the place telling me what they are having for breakfast, where there are going, where they’ve been, what sort of shape they were in upon waking (numb, hungover, perky), random thoughts that shoot randomly through the mind, and the results of these strange tests you can do online to find out, say, which Harry Potter character you are most like or which Batman villain you are. Then there are comments from others on these posts. So, for example, if I say I am in Starbucks sipping on a grande coffee mocha with the morning sun streaming through the window and warming my face, someone else might say, “Sounds heavenly!” Or “Wish I was there. I’m just home from the dentist and can’t drink anything hot and I need some caffeine really bad!”
If I wanted to, I, too, could comment. But what would I say? Or more to the point, why say anything? Or even more to the point, why are people writing this and why am I reading it? I’ve suddenly traded in my morning dose of Kierkegaard for a coffee klatch. I used to have this sort of centering prayer of waking, reading, and writing. Now I’ve become a spectator of a very bizarre parade. I started wondering what else we could all be doing for those 9,506 years we spend on Facebook every day. Clean up the litter in our neighborhoods? Feed the poor? Help the homeless?
I have to admit, however, that I am enjoying Facebook. I’ve been using it to contact current friends I hardly see and to make new friends of people I know in my professional circle. I quickly gloss over the things people write about what they are doing or how they are feeling, but it does not mean I’m totally uninterested. As I was writing this column and in the midst of the rant above, a friend and colleague of mine, who happens to be a heavy user of Facebook, came into my office. I explained my rant to her. She defended what I was attacking. “It’s like a huge party,” she said. “Yeah, some of it is lame, just like at a party, but some of it is really fun. You just sort of hang out with people, and you can make some really cool connections.” I agreed. I’d actually been having the same experience she was describing.
My father used to tell me that the best way to get a job done well is to use the right tool. You don’t use a regular screwdriver on a Phillips-head screw. All technology is a tool. We need to be careful not to be used by the tool that is supposed to be used by us. We are all familiar with dystopian science fiction stories that point to the horrors of man being ruled by the machines we created. One of my favorite stories of this sort is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. In that story—Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel while Stanley Kubrick created the film—a mission to Jupiter is thwarted by the computer (nicknamed HAL) that’s operating the ship. HAL gets wind of the crew’s plan to disconnect it after they realize HAL might be malfunctioning. Unknown to the astronauts, HAL reads their lips and discovers their plot and then sets out to destroy the very men it is suppose to serve.
My guess is that most of us are not aware of how subtly and insidiously this kind of technology is actually taking over our lives. Key in the wrong password at your computer or an ATM and what happens? When this happens to me I always hear in the back of my mind the calming yet assertive voice of HAL when one of the scientists, Dave Bowman, after making some repairs on the hull of the spaceship, asks HAL to open the door to be let in. HAL does not want to let Dave in because Dave is in the process of disconnecting HAL. The exchange goes like this for several rounds.
DAVE: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.
Eventually, Dave finds his way back into the spaceship, but the expedition is doomed after HAL is finally disabled and the ship speeds off faster than the speed of light into other, dreamlike dimensions in both time and space.
Another early memory I have about technology and the future is Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read this book during college (it was one of the few things I liked about those days) one summer I was working for the county road crew where my family lived at the time. During lunch breaks, I’d pull the book from my brown bag and read. Leafing through its brittle, yellowing pages now, I can see that much of what Toffler wrote before the personal computer and e-mail and Facebook presages much of what is happening now, and it was not good news for us.
There’s one more recent and more optimistic prediction than Toffler’s about the effects of technology on our lives. Over lunch another friend recommended to me a 2006 book by Ray Kurzweil, called The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil describes his idea of the “singularity” thus: “It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.” Like Toffler nearly four decades ago, Kurzweil writes: “Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory.”
Facebook is one manifestation of this sort of change. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. And it is up to us to use it to our benefit—to not be taken over by it, become addicted to it, or somehow find ourselves unable to live without it in order to be engaged in the world, to develop our inner lives, and to be happy.
There’s an old and a somewhat shocking adage in the teachings of Buddhism that suggest if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. The idea is that the Buddha you see is an idol, a projection of your own image of who or what the Buddha is, which is not the real Buddha. The real Buddha is behind that Buddha, and even behind the other Buddha behind that Buddha. And so on.
At the moment, I’m feeling much the same way about Facebook. It’s a projection of what we think it is. In some way, it is just a party, as my friend said. We can drop in anytime. And if we don’t like it, we can leave.