The Politics of Facebook

Here's something you may not know about me.  I will either over-analyze or under-analyze everything.  I'm not one who's good at what some people call this mysterious "middle ground."  Depending on my mood and whether it hits me just right I will either obsess and over-analyze something or it will immediately get lost in the depths of my mind and I won't even remember it happened.  This drives my wife crazy, and for good reason, as apparently the things I tend to forget are the things she specifically expects me to remember (like not to throw out papers and receipts we need for taxes) but I'll over-analyze something like "what movie reference was that on Family Guy" or "what to post on Facebook."  I'm fully aware that I'm over-analyzing, but I don't think it's without reason.  Let's take the Facebook post issue.

Everything on Facebook is judged.  It's judged by mostly a jury of your peers, but there's still a segment of people out there who, to steal a phrase from Alfred Pennyworth, "just want to watch the world burn."  These are the people trolling to rain on someone's parade.  They feel the urge to comment on everyone's pictures of food with "Millions of people are going without food in the world tonight and you're bragging about your lemon pepper salmon."

With everything digitized these days nothing is ever really deleted so just because a status doesn't show up in your feed or timeline anymore, it's there somewhere.  You know it is.  And it turns us all into politicians.  Most of us joined Facebook to keep up with friends and their lives, but who these people are is not who their profile is - it's who they want to be on the internet.  We can't really say the things we want to say to people because once it's out there, it's there forever so we sanitize it.  Like politicians.  Politicians want to make everyone happy so they skew it this one for one group and skew it that way for another group and they hope that no one ever finds out how they really feel because it will alienate someone.  This is destroying the political system of the U.S., but when this idea creeps into something that is as prevalent in today's culture as Facebook it will have a more sinister repercussion.  We will see more and more individuals developing identity and personality disorders as Facebook integrates itself more and more into our lives.

It's not healthy to have more than one "you."  I know because I did it, and I had a nervous breakdown because of it and that was before Facebook!  Think of all the people keeping at least two personalities separate - real life and Facebook.  Think of all the people sanitizing their feeds with who they want to world to think they are.  Status updates of "OMG I love my life" and "I have the best husband ever" may be true but we need to have a venue where we can also say the negative things in life without feeling like we will be judged.  For more and more people who use this website as their sole source of communication with the outside world, I'm not sure they have that venue and it's concerning.

Again, maybe everybody else in the world doesn't take what they post on Facebook as seriously as I do (I over-analyze the bejeesus of everything I post) and so then I'm also over-analyzing the ramifications of what this may cause.  Hell, to even prove how much I over-analyze (if I even needed to), the reason I started a blog was specifically to post this idea because I didn't think that posting it to Facebook was a suitable venue.

I think on a personal level, maybe I just needed a safer place to post some of these thoughts than the wide open world of Facebook.  I don't want to delete friends because I like seeing what people are up to, but I guess I'm just not comfortable enough with me to throw all my laundry out there for the world to see.  So I hope this will be better.  Yes I'll post a link to this on Facebook (and I understand the irony here), but I think the only people who will click that link and read this post are those who would support me regardless, and those are the people I need to have closer to me in my life, not the ones trolling my happy or sad status updates.

So if you read this, thank you.  Feel free to make fun of me in the comments just to remind me that there's no way to create a safe harbor on the internet.  At least I'll know you're making fun of me for all the right reasons.