I want you to notice when I’m not around.
You’re so fucking special.
I wish I was special.
But I’m a creep.
- Radiohead, Creep
In October, the David Fincher directed, Aaron Sorkin written The Social Network will be released, which tells the story of the group of Harvard shitheads who invented Facebook. I’m sure it will be good, because David Fincher doesn’t make bad movies. I don’t really know much about Mark Zuckerberg, or even if he and his friends were indeed shitheads, but at the moment, he’s the world’s youngest billionaire (lawsuit pending), and as well he should be — he helped invent the closest thing to an actual time machine the world has ever seen.
The popularity of Facebook is mostly unextraordinary. By now, we all know its strengths (keeping up with the family, checking in to see how ugly/fat your formerly attractive classmates are) and its weaknesses (endless baby pictures, stories of the mundane, having former classmates see how ugly/fat you now are). Facebook can help you promote your business or your blog; it can, of course, help you reconnect with old friends. But I believe its massive popularity is due to its ability to hit into a deeper, psychological desire that we all have: to go back in time.
And I’m not just talking about simply reconnecting with old friends; I’m talking about traveling through time and space to a moment in your past and trying to alter the course of your future. Because Farmville and Mafia Wars and “Liking” an interesting article or video your coworker posted are all just side dishes to the truth of why Facebook is so successful. We are five hundred million Marty McFlys all looking for that past relationship that will lead to a future that is better than what we have now. The future we were supposed to have.
In most people’s lives, there is this feeling that something went wrong. It doesn’t have to be as monumental as choosing the wrong partner or career path. It can be something as simple as ending a friendship too soon or failing to strengthen one at the right time. It’s not just about infidelity and hooking up, although that’s part of it too — The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that Facebook is mentioned in one out of five divorce filings — but certainly there are people in relatively happy relationships that feel the need to do a little time traveling too.
The kind of time travel involved is actually closer to what Desmond Hume did on Lost than it is to Doc Brown’s Delorian. In Lost, Desmond’s mind travels to the past. His body stays in the future, but his consciousness is able to go back to various points in his history. You may have heard the term, “creeping on Facebook,” and that’s exactly what this is. Being a creep: eyes locked on the screen as you browse through layers of friends and friends’ friends, time falls away, your consciousness drifts to your former selves, and when you witness that web of lost connections, the past becomes clearer than it has ever been. How did I become this person I am now? How can I make sense of the present if not by digging through my past and righting every former wrong?
The trailer for The Social Network understands this. In a stroke of genius, it uses a choir version of Radiohead’s Creep, evoking all of these feelings by playing the song over Facebook’s familiar icons, button clicks, and pictures. And the song speaks truth. We all feel like creeps sometimes — like we are on the outside looking in, unable to penetrate the group of people that would surely understand us, keep us company, and comfort us when we’re sad. In the case of Facebook, that group is largely made up of people from our past. We stand outside their window, invisible, peering into their lives like a total fucking creep. And they do it to us too. We have agreed to be creeps to each other.
The only wrinkle in all of this is that the people we are looking for no longer exist. They are adults now — fatter, married, fathers, mothers, employees — fully functional members of society who bear little resemblance to the idealized version we have projected onto them. They don’t have the answers. They don’t have the key to unlocking the mystery of our own self-realization. They are not supporting characters in our own quirky indie movie, where the disheveled hero comes of age through a series of strange encounters with his past as The Shins play in the background. They’re just people — which makes them just as fucked up and boring as us.
On Lost, Desmond found that it was impossible to change the course of the future — “What happened, happened.” Unlike Marty McFly, who came back to a future that (in very Regan 80’s fashion) involved a better car, a better house, and a father with a better job and more money, Desmond couldn’t save his friend Charlie from death even though he knew it was going to happen. Facebook provides the same dilemma, obviously, since we are not actually traveling through time. However, even when past relationships are re-established, it would seem almost impossible for them to measure up to the standard we have created for them. How does a person from the past fit into the present? It’s almost as unwieldy as Bill and Ted bringing Napoleon to San Dimas. Reconnecting over a lunch or two is one thing; forming a new, meaningful relationship with a new version of an old friend is another. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it is unusual.
It’s endlessly fascinating to see what people put on their Facebook pages — how they choose to suit up for their trip in the time machine. I realize most people don’t think too hard about what they post, but it is, of course, a projection of what we want people to think of us, even if it is only subconsciously. After resisting Facebook for a long time, I can now murder hours on it. I try not to, but the allure of time travel is often too much to resist. Nothing makes me feel like I am actually back in a certain period of my life like creeping on Facebook. It provides certain elements that simply looking at old photographs cannot.
The interactivity is slightly dangerous and invigorating. Even though I will never send messages to most of these old friends, the knowledge that I can through one swift click of a button is enough to get my heart pounding, especially if it’s late at night and I’m a few drinks deep. It’s like walking a social tightrope with no net. It’s so easy to say things that should have been said long ago, but the consequences of time travel paradox loom in my head as my fingers hover over keyboard buttons. If I press this button, what will it mean for my present? For my future? Marty McFly interfered with the past and almost erased himself from existence. It’s fun to look at the past on Facebook, but the danger of touching it is both part of the thrill and only a very occasional line that should be crossed with a few old friends who can handle the full force of 1.21 gigawatts. You don’t want to fade from the Polaroid.
And so I keep coming back to that Radiohead song, and I can’t get over how perfectly it’s used in The Social Network trailer. Those four lines at the top of this page capture every emotion that fuels the popularity of Facebook. They are the flux capacitor. I want you to notice when I’m not around. Such a simple statement, so sublime in its universality — for good friends who are now lost to us, or casual acquaintances with which we share the present, or the close, intimate relationships that make up our day-to-day — we just want to be remembered. We don’t need to be cherished and adored by everybody, but we do have a basic need to be acknowledged. Even though we’re not friends anymore, and maybe we were never that close in the first place, do you think about me as much as I think about you?
You’re so fucking special. Some people read this line in the song as sarcastic, but I think they’re only partially right. Thom York is somehow being painfully earnest and sarcastic at the same time. We elevate people in our past to these mythical beings that are somehow living better lives than us. They are somehow happier or more talented or smarter or less lonely. And maybe they are. Some of them undoubtedly are. While York absolutely thinks the people he is looking in on are above him, he also understands that they are not. Just because you are aware of a delusion does not mean the delusion doesn’t exist — it doesn’t mean the delusion doesn’t have power. I wish I was special. All of us yearn to stand apart in some way. All of us want to have our voices heard above the crowd if only for a moment. Thom York started a band, I’m writing a blog post, and you might post a picture of your kids. More people might hear Thom York’s song than read this post or see your picture, but does that make it more valuable than what we’ve produced? Probably. But we all do what we can.
But I’m a creep. Because let’s face it, most people don’t notice when I’m not around, and they certainly don’t notice when I’m poking around their Facebook page. And just because I’ve been invited doesn’t make it much better. People are amused by the cast of Jersey Shore and the ease at which they use the term “creeping” to describe the act of going out, socializing with strangers, and trying to pick them up. But in our Facebook-time travel-voyeuristic times, should we be so surprised at how easily it rolls of the tongue? Aren’t we, in fact, creeping on the cast of Jersey Shore at the same time we laugh at them for using the term? We can hide behind the shield of irony all we want, but that is exactly what we are doing. I’m a creep and so are you.
And there’s nothing special about it.
Some links:
The Social Network trailer (if you haven’t been to the movies in the last month)
I think Facebook’s popularity definitely has much to do with our desire to go back in time, but I think it has more to do with simply wanting to compare ourselves with others in our generation so that we can try to find a way to measure how successful we currently are in life. I have also heard this topic deemed the “quarter life crisis”, where people between about 21 and 35 are past their school-aged years (where our success / social status was measured mostly by our grades), and are looking for purpose in life now that that those years of school life from about age 5 to 21 are now over.
Most people over 40 or so don’t use the Internet anywhere near as often as people under 40, so it’s difficult to compare older adults reasons for using Facebook with people our age. However, I am certain that those older adults also use it to look at pictures of old friends to see what they now look like, what they are up to, etc….generally to reminisce about the past. It’s just that I think that people in our age range, like I stated earlier, are looking for a new tool to measure their life success, since we are now too old to be considered in our “student years.” We look at friends who are now married, have babies, and have successful careers, and we look at other friends who might smoke dope as a hobby and can barely spell. I think we do this to try to find things about other people that we can compare to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.
I know that I personally take pride in my education and the fact that I am a decent speller / writer, and whenever I see an old friend that simply can’t spell or write anything the last bit engaging or interesting, I immediately feel better about myself. I can also say that when I see friends with hundreds and hundreds of friends on their friend list, I feel a bit worse about myself (jealous) for a while, so then I tell myself that those hundreds of friends of theirs aren’t “real” friends they still talk to, but just people they have met once or twice, kind of like “Internet friends.” Doing this allows me to feel better about myself, so that my self esteem can stay strong.
Maybe this is just my personal reason for being interested in Facebook, and not anyone else’s, but I just feel this innate desire to know how others my age are doing in life, and I feel that Facebook helps give me a rubric to assess my own life success at this stage of my life.