A Farewell to Facebook, Reason #2: Interaction

In a previous post, I described the confusion of the term “friend” as a primary reason I left Facebook. Another reason I left was confusion over the term “interact.”

It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is real conversation with someone, where you learn about what’s going on in their lives, in their head. More importantly, interaction is where you learn what’s going on in your own head.

It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s becoming. It’s not talking about your cat and having someone else comment on it.

But that’s what I kept feeling. I felt as though we’d all sit with our Facebook comments and think that we’d really interacted with someone because we read about them being sick, or read about them mowing the lawn. I’d see people that I hadn’t seen for some time, and they’d start talking about things that happened a couple weeks ago that they’d read about on my Facebook page. Most of the time, this would not be comfortable- not because I was uncomfortable with them knowing details of my life, but because they didn’t know details about my life.

When someone reads a quick Facebook post about something anecdotal that happened in someone’s life, all they have is an anecdote about what happened. They don’t have the story, they have a soundbite. They just have a meaningless quip, because they haven’t actually interacted with the person, with the information.

This is especially true for me and my information. Since I felt that way about Facebook– that it’s not real interaction– I would liberally sprinkle my anecdotes with comedy, or spice them up to make them much more funny than they’d otherwise be.

Rate these two possible Facebook posts for comic value:

I didn’t feel too hot this morning, but after I ate breakfast, I felt a little better.
While sickness sucks in general, throwing up immediately after breakfast is a surprisingly effective weight loss strategy

See? Number one is boring. I generally shy away from boring– or at least things that make me feel like I’m being boring. So I’d… embellish a bit… and add some comedy… because really, it’s Facebook, no-one’s going to actually take it seriously, right?

Wrong. I’d see someone and they’d start talking about what’s going on in my life as if they know about it, and I would often think “Eh, yeah. Uh, so, that’s not even really close to what’s going on. You take Facebook seriously, don’t you?”

After enough of these interaction, I start thinking that either a) I need to start taking Facebook seriously too, or b) this is not the best place for my type of semi-realistic humor.
The joy of rumor

So, one day, my wife, Jessica, get’s a call from her sister saying that shit has hit the fan and she really needs to call her mom.

So she calls her mother, who starts immediately bitching at Jessica for keeping her in the dark and not telling her what’s going on and why does she have to learn about me getting fired by having Jessica’s aunt call to gloat about how maybe her son-in-law is not so great after all and maybe she’ll know what it’s like to have kids who are unemployed and maybe when one of us gets unemployed Jessica could think to call her mother and tell her her mother instead of giving her aunt a reason to call and gloat!

Now, I’m a contractor. I have a small business– me– that provides services to other companies that they cannot provide for themselves– software development. Most of the time, those services eventually, well, end. Not in a bad way, mind you, because hopefully I’ve actually done my job, which is to do something, afterwhich, since there’s nothing else to do, I leave. So, you could say that I am a complete failure unless I leave a job, because if I don’t leave, it’s probably because I never actually finish what I’m supposed to do.

But sometimes– most of the time really– I really like the people I work with, and grow to think of them as friends, and miss them when I’m gone. Also, quite often, I’m not sure about how my work is going to live in the context of the company. Usually, I build something near completion and then the company has to take it and finish it and/or use it. So, because I care about what I make, I worry that it’s good enough, that it lasts, that it solves the problem I wanted to solve.

So, one day, thinking about all of this, I posted something on Facebook:

“Last day on the job. Always a bittersweet experience. Gonna really miss it here and the people, and worried about what’s going to happen next”

This post is read by my wife’s cousin, who apparently tells his mom that I’m leaving my job. His mom, apparently assuming that I’m only leaving because I’ve been fired– which is good because she’s constantly in competition with her sister– i.e. my wife’s mother– so she calls her sister to gloat. This makes Jessica’s mom freak out because her daughter’s husband has been fired, so she naturally calls Jessica’s sisterto freak out and complain about how she’s been left in the dark about me being fired because her daughter doesn’t care to tell her anything.

Jessica’s response to learning all of this was “Huh, what?”
You could just ask, people

Now, admittedly, this isn’t Facebook’s fault. The family political firestorm that swept through Jessica’s family was entirely fed by the dry tinder that is “Jessica’s family members relationships with Jessica’s other family.” Which is to say that it’s basically the norm if not exactly normal. Facebook was, at worst, a match carelessly thrown from a car into a pile of dry grass.

Still, the family is flammable, and so we need to be exceptionally careful with sparks. We, I, need to be ever conscious of my matches. And it’s not just hers. My own family has mis-read sometime comic, sometimes off-color, posts on my Facebook wall and assumed the worst. The thing about all this is that, if it were honestly interaction, then there would be… well… interaction. Think of the two ways the situation above could have been handled:

Freak out and immediately assume the worst. Call all the other members of your family to ensure the firestorm is as big and as violent as possible. Start preparing your daughter’s spare room for her post-divorce life, and prep yourself for your unemployed son-in-law to start borrowing large sums of money and never paying them back
Actually talk to your daughter and find out that they are celebrating over a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir.

One of these really stupid and childish, the other is thoughtful and involves interaction. The thing about Facebook is that it encourages us all to take the stupid and childish path. Facebook does this because it tells us that it is providing interaction- and we all, me included, are dumb enough to believe it.

You see, true interaction would be “call your daughter and find out that everything is fine.” That would be interaction. But Facebook has already provided “interaction.” So we assume that the actual interaction has already taken place, so the next logical step is to freak the fuck out, right?
Another twist

Of course it’s an exaggeration. Just as with Facebook, I’m going for comedy as much as anything. Still, the point remaint, and the point is that if Facebook, as a system, honestly was interaction, freakouts probably wouldn’t occur at all. And if Facebook honestly encouraged interaction, then the freakout would be avoided because we would all… well… interact!

Rather, Facebook encourages us to assume we have the whole story. It encourages us to assume that the soundbite is all the information that we need. This is bad enough, but it’s worse when someone like me doesn’t take it seriously at all, and further obscures reality with comedy and embellishment.

But there’s another twist. Similar to the first. This wasn’t the reason I had for leaving. It wasn’t other people freaking out that caused me to have second thoughts, it was my own change.

I found that I had to be really conscious of what I posted. “Can I post this? Will her family freak out?” “If I post this, can I make it comedic without fallout?” It was becoming troublesome to make sure that what I posted was… safe.

And so I actually swung the other way, purposely posting stuff that was unsafe just because I shouldn’t have to worry about it being safe. I’d post about Jessica walking around wearing nothing but cellophane, not because it has (or ever actually would) happen, but because “dammit, if I have to worry about posting something that might upset her mother, that pisses me off, so I’m going to post something that will surely upset her mother.”

So I went from posting whatever I wanted, to posting only what I thought was safe, to posting what I hoped was unsafe. Which means I went from being angry at other people being stupid to actually being more stupid.

No. Stop. Time to leave.

That’s the real reason. Because, apparently, I don’t have the wisdom and self-control to fight stupidity with integrity. Maybe one day I’ll learn, but until then, I just thought it best for me to go away.

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