Friday, April 30, 2010

Shunned

I joined facebook in order to track down a slippery cousin who isn't returning my calls.

First, that is some weird ass shit.

I feel like the Boar God in Princess Mononoke, when his madness finally overtakes him and he mistakes soldiers dressed in boar skins for his own people, and they huddle and nose and stab him on to his evil destiny.

But that's mostly my own hang-up and will be rectified by the fact that I will never be on that damn site.

What's worse is this: so that's where all you fuckers are. When I'm not being emailed back, when no one calls, when I'm left wondering who the hell my friends are, you are all on the facebook 'liking' random bullshit from people you haven't seen face to face in years. Which makes sense-- you too can get all the attention you ever wanted for virtually free, without the price of actual friendship, and all its hardships, and faces hang like trophies on your page for all the world to see.

And if facebook is your agora, your marketplace, your church, those on the outside are unintentionally but effectively shunned, not only because of their absence, but because facebook, like any community, creates its own mode of discourse by which its community members are known to each other.

I'm making the case more forcefully than I need to, and I'm not blaming my recent sense of loneliness on a stupid website-- I moved to a new town, I'm about to move to another state and I apparently find myself drawn almost exclusively to highly intelligent and highly ethical but emotionally withholding people, but dammit if there isn't some truth to it.

So there. I've become a citizen. 'Like' me.

3 comments:

Hale True said...

I'd welcome you, but I'm only one ring closer to being 'in' than you are, only one ring closer to not cursing every click I make in that chirpy blue hell.

I searched, and there are 164 results on William Emery, but none of them looks that much like you.

Wordwrestler said...

I get your ire. Facebook has been my main point of contact this year for those I left behind. And I could, and sometimes do, resent that almost no one misses me enough to contact me by other means. But that is mostly *my* own hang-up.

But it's also led to talking to more geographically distant friends a lot more often. And it makes it easier to get into a decent conversation since the day-to-day-how-ya-been-small-talk trivia is already known.

This is my fence. I built it myself, and here I sit.

Whim said...

Reminds me, I owe you an email WordWrestler...

I certainly get the thrill of it, how it hits our dopamine centers and gives gives gives with ever click click click, but that is exactly what makes me sad-- I've gotten more attention in the last 24 hours in some ways than I have in months.

But it ain't real is it? Or not quite real anyway.

It just makes it easy for us emotional cripples to get along until death. That's the opposite of life I sometimes think-- but then maybe I'm prejudiced against easy because I don't know what it is.