What If I Had a Facebook Party?

This summer, because of diagnoses, accurate and inaccurate, of a body gone bad, I ended up couch-bound for several months. I didn't really want to see people; mostly, I didn't want to people to see me. So even though my friends have a great couchside manner, I didn't tell too many people what I was going through. My family was busy getting the things done I could not do, like moving us out of our house and across the country. So, I had plenty of alone time.

Except for Facebook. I was only an occasional Facebook user before this happened. It was fun, in an unnecessary way. But my change of circumstance made sitting on a couch, looking at a screen, the best possible way to spend my time. Certainly, it would be great if a book beat a screen when it came to distractions from considerable and disturbing pain, but it doesn't. Facebook worked better.

I'm OK now, after much scary, ugly stuff. So I feel about Facebook the way Jack Nicholson felt about sex in The Departed: "I don't really need it any more, but I still like it." Why do I still go to my Wall almost every day? Because of the people I find there, people I mostly wouldn't know otherwise.

Many people, I know, use Facebook to keep in touch with their close friends and family. I don't really have any close family left that doesn't live with me, except my son, who I already probably call and text too much. Any he's mostly a Myspace person anyway. Most of my close friends think that Facebook is a conspiracy and wouldn't deign go near it, or they ask me, "why would I want to have more social contact?" My friends are kinda ornery loners, as -- kinda -- am I. And these are people I can talk to. I call them my "in the flesh" friends. They're good, interesting, funny people, much like my Facebook people but they are, in fact, my friends and that is just a different category. While I do have a few friends on Facebook, mostly people who lurk to see what's up with me, what I have on Facebook is a group of people I really don't know very well. They really aren't friends -- I wouldn't call them if I were dying. I didn't tell them I was sick. I didn't want sympathy, or warm lovingkindness. I wanted something else from my Facebook people, a particular kind of gift: pure, undiluted distraction from what was going on around, and in, me.

Some people are just good at that. Or, they are good at giving me the kinds of distractions that do the trick. Many of these are in the "used to know you slightly, looked you up" category. (And while some might expect many of these people to be old boyfriends, in fact, the few old boyfriends I have "friended" don't provide much distraction.) I have people who have friended me for other purposes, like to sell their books, but I find the "hide" button very useful for these folks. To stay on my page, you have to either be funny, post good music or art, or indulge me with political conversation (disagreement preferred). Lurkers I ignore, and some day I may just unfriend anyone who does not comment or post. I expect a certain amount of civility from my people, but some amount of tolerance for me, since my comments sometimes are teasingly obnoxious (I usually delete and often call to apologize when I go over the top.)

Good Facebook people aren't easy to find. They understand their posts on Facebooks as gifts, and they understand their gifts as acts of agression, much like Marcel Mauss described in his classic The Gift, many years ago. Mauss said that good gifts were aggressive because they called for a gift in return. A good Facebook post brings you in and makes you give something of yourself as well, either as a comment or as a new post in response. Facebook has recently created an app which some call "stalkers lists": you can get Facebook to figure out who has commented most on your wall, which you then publish, to the embarrassment of those who find themselves at the top. This is counterproductive -- people who comment a lot should be encouraged, not embarrassed. They have given you something for the gift you have given them.

My Facebook people also tend to be personalities in their own right, with strong opinions, not always my own. I live most of my life in what's called "The Leftmost City" where every conversation is preaching to the interminable -- and sometimes lovingly insufferable -- Left choir. My page provides me with smart people who don't always hold this point of view. It's sometimes rocky at first, but if we keep it up over several posts and comments, we sometimes come to a kind of understanding about what we agree, and disagree, about. For example, I am married to an articulate advocate of government regulation, and I tend to agree with his views. Yet, many people on my page find government to be a real problem. They tell me why, and I can respect them for what they say, but that respect happened only after we got into it on Facebook.

Yet, the variety on my page can be frightening. Today, I imagined what would happen if I invited all my Facebook people to a party and they all came. What would the tattoo artist say to the corporate attorney? What would the person who hailed the opening of the Northeast Passage say to the environmental activist? Would the 2nd wave feminists be willing to hang out with the third wavers who post risque stuff on my wall? What if the subject of anti-gang activist on trial for gang activity Alex Sanchez came up? Would some automatically assume he was innocent and others automatically assume he was guilty, or could they talk about it in some other way?

Fortunately, I make heavy use of filters; very few people can see my wall the way I do. I mostly do that to protect my grad students, who have been kind enough to let me into their world and who I want to be free to say what they want without worrying about what future employers might think. And I keep my mostly professional folks away from the personal stuff. The folks whom I let into all my filters don't know how lucky they are. And, very few people look at other people's walls, anyway. But I love my wall -- it is crazy, contradictory, resplendent with human folly: these people I don't know very well but whom I am in touch with every day.