my so-called/social networked life

Music: And Also the Trees: Listen for the Rag and Bone Man (2008)

Some months ago I summarily "de-friended" all my colleagues associated with my job from my Facebook account, both graduate students and faculty. To make a complicated story simple, this move was in response to the second time someone at work contacted me about events on my Facebook account in a way that was not social, but professional. Because I am in a promotion year, and because I've been trying to "lay low" (you may have noted a decrease in posts, and less controversial posts at that), I thought severing the awkward social/professional implosion that is Facebook from my life, however temporary, was a shrewd move. Now I'm not so sure. I suspect it's a move that communicates, however unwittingly, I'm not "with it."

Gradually a number of grads contacted me, mostly on phone or in person, to inquire if I was angry with them or if something was terribly amiss. When I explained the situation( "tenure year, sorry, nothing personal"), most seemed understanding but remained, at some level, hurt. Recently I "defriended" a friend for spoiling the end of Battlestar Gallactica on my "status feed" because, after all, my status feed was something like, "Off to watch the final season of BSG; don't spoil it!" "I hate to break it to you," he commented, "they're ______." "Commence defriend sequence now!" I said. And poof, not a "friend" on Facebook. He emailed to apologize and went on, for some paragraphs, how my deeply wounded he felt that I would defriend him so callously. When I responded I was surprised, he reasoned that it was laughable that someone who reads "Derrida and Foucault" wouldn't understand the significance of social networking.

Well, laugh away. I confess I am still sort of surprised at how important Facebook has become to those around me. I now realize I am not as deeply networked as they are.

I consider Facebook a social trifle, a fun way to waste time. Upon occasion I see it as a locus of political mobilization, but ultimately, I think Facebook is a place for the mediated organization of sentiment, and much of this sentiment is intimate in character. I am annoyed by colleagues who message me to conduct business there, and routinely tell them to use my official email address (if you message me on Facebook about business, you run the serious danger of never getting a response). I do not own an iPhone or Crackberry, nor do I suffer from a compulsion to "text" or to update my status with the funny thing someone just said. I don't have, to alter a phrase from Derrida, network fever.

Last week Kayla Rhidenour (a grad here) delivered a thought provoking reading response that used Derrida's Archive Fever to make sense of the compulsions of Facebook. Her argument was that social networking was ironically born by the death drive and a need to archive one's life as if to preserve every moment. Recently, I read an essay by my mentor and friend John Sloop on Facebook that took an alternative, Foucauldian tack: Facebook participates in an apparatus that brings two forms of governance into play: the logic of self-surveillance, whereby one's "friends" function as the imagined voyeurs, and the older logic of (institutional) discipline. If I follow him, the idea is that Facebook encourages the publicity of privates by various reward mechanisms, however, this paradoxically opens one up to institutional discipline. Moreover, as Kayla tacitly suggested, Sloop characterized networking as providing for "the expression of temporary emotions to a public which reads them as permanent, as part of one's identity." What was once a fleetingly human moment of frustration or anger becomes an archived dimension of self that, for others and oneself, persists, exposing one to discipline.

So, for example, let's say I complain on my status, "argh! tenure takes so long! what's wrong with all these committees!" The pleasures of confessional are clear, as immediately "friends" come forth to sympathize, to tell me to "hang in there," and so on. However, the pleasures of this kind of friendly policing come at a certain cost, for tomorrow my chair will email and say he heard I was discussing my tenure case and badmouthing my employer, and so on.

I think both Kayla and John agree that there is a certain sort of compulsion at play. It's this compulsion that interests me, as well as the relationship of this compulsion to feelings of injury and woundedness. How has "social networking" become a locus of identity so quickly and powerfully that people cannot keep themselves from tweeting or texting on the one hand, and from feeling deeply wounded when another person "deletes" him or her on the other? These are not idle or mundane feelings, but operatic affects. These responses are not the same of those watching, say, a film (although the latter can be pretty intense), and perhaps that's because "social networking" is not on the side of the imaginary (where it should be), but for many, real life. Perhaps the fundamental paradox of Facebook is that it is experienced as a window, but it is fundamentally a mirror? This would explain, in part, why those who hurl headlong into pure expressivity are shocked later when they are confronted with some kind of consequence.

I want to say that anything, any technology, that evokes powerful affect is tapping into deep, infantile recesses of the psyche---formative memories and events that none of us remember but which, nevertheless, predispose---as opposed to determine---(re)action. As Larry Rickels argues in his Nazi Psychoanalysis trilogy, communication technologies are deeply articulated to the "Psi-Fi," shorthand for the way in which gadgets trigger fantasies of omnipotence. Much like a two year old imagines herself the center of the world and that the world will bend to her will with magic, gadgets promise to bring the world to us, Jesus Jones style: "right here/right now."

The magic---that is to say, the trick---of social networking is the fact that it is not truly social. Rather, it is an interface for projection: one crafts a persona and attempts to maintain it, much like a character in a video game. Your "friends" on this interface are really just other characters in the fantasy of your "network." You add and delete friends much like you would manipulate people in a Sims world. Yet, the interface encourages users to forget it is a simulation of the social and, consequently, me-ness grows, unchecked, without a "no." Disagreements on Facebook are intensified because one is not only dealing with a disagreement, but an intensification of affect because one's crafted persona is in play---its my best me, and that me is not good enough.